How Recipes Become Rituals
The first time I made my Mom’s chicken tinola, I fucked it up completely. Too much salt. Chayote almost became a mash. The chicken chops could’ve doubled as tejo from Columbia. I stood there in our kitchen, staring at this pot of failure, wondering how she made it look so easy.
But I made it again the next week. Because that’s what you do when you’re 16 and stuck with studies and working in McDonalds and the only cure is something that tastes like Friday nights at the family table. This time the chayote had some give. The broth didn’t taste like the Dead Sea. Progress.
When Your Hands Know Better Than Your Head
Somewhere around the fifteenth time, something weird happened. I stopped looking at her recipe card. Not because I’d memorized it, but because my hands had. They knew how the onion should look when it’s ready for the celery. They knew the weight of salt that felt right in my palm. They knew when to turn down the heat just by the sound of the simmer.
This is the thing nobody tells you about cooking. Your body learns it before your brain does. One day you’re measuring vanilla extract with a teaspoon like some kind of amateur. Six months later you’re pouring it straight from the bottle, knowing exactly when to stop because your nose tells you. You’ve crossed over.
Making It Yours (Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Double the Garlic)
Here’s the truth about recipes: they’re suggestions written by people who don’t know your stove, your taste buds, or your salt tolerance. My Mom’s Tinola called for four clove of garlic. Four. I use the entire bulb. She’s stopped nagging at me ever since I left the motherland, so she can’t complain, and honestly? I think she’d approve. She was the one who taught me that recipes are just the beginning of the conversation.
The Crimes We Commit
Every cook has their crimes. Mine include but are not limited to:
- Using butter where oil is called for
- Adding fish sauce to things that have no business containing fish sauce
- Putting black pepper on everything like it’s my job
- Claiming I’ll follow the recipe this time and then immediately not doing that
You know what? My food tastes good. Better than good. Because I stopped treating recipes like holy texts and started treating them like rough sketches.
The Stuff They Don’t Write Down
No recipe tells you about the dance you’ll develop around that one cabinet door that doesn’t close right. Or how you’ll automatically grab a dish towel before opening the oven because you’ve burned yourself on that handle too many times. They don’t mention how you’ll start prepping ingredients in the same order every time, building your own little assembly line of efficiency.
They definitely don’t tell you how making someone else’s recipe over and over becomes a way of keeping them alive. How every time I make that soup, I’m twenty-three again, and she’s still here, tsking at my technique but eating two bowls anyway.
Sunday Sauce and Other Religious Experiences
I know a guy who’s made the same red sauce every Sunday for thirty years. Not because he lacks imagination. Because Sunday means sauce. It means the house smells like garlic and basil. It means his kids know to show up around six. It means something in this insane world stays constant.
He doesn’t measure anything anymore. Hasn’t for decades. The olive oil goes in until it looks right. The tomatoes get crushed by hand because that’s how you do it. The wooden spoon his mother gave him scrapes the bottom of the pot in the same pattern it has for three decades. This isn’t cooking. It’s prayer.
Your Kitchen, Your Church
My cutting board looks like a crime scene. Deep grooves where I’ve broken down a thousand onions. Stains from turmeric and beets that’ll never come out. I could buy a new one. I won’t. This board knows how I work. It’s earned its scars.
The cast iron skillet I inherited from my mother has a perfect circle in the center where twenty years of morning eggs have left their mark. My knife, a beat-up Wüsthof I bought when I was broke but ambitious, fits my hand like it grew there. These aren’t just tools. They’re proof of showing up.
When you cook the same thing week after week, year after year, you’re not being boring. You’re building something. Maybe it’s just Thursday night tacos or Saturday morning pancakes, but it’s yours. It’s the rhythm that tells you where you are in the week, in the season, in your life.
I still make that Tinola. Not every week anymore, but often enough. My hands move without consulting my brain. The smell fills our house and for a minute I’m not alone. The chayote are perfect now. The chicken is so tender. And sometimes, if I’m very quiet, I can hear her telling me I still use too much fish sauce.
That’s the thing about turning recipes into rituals. You’re not just feeding people. You’re keeping time. You’re building a life out of small, repeated acts of care. You’re saying: here, in this kitchen, with these hands, something good will happen. Because I’ll make it happen. Again and again and again.
