I Made Food Today. Real Food. Allegedly.

The smoke detector went off twice. I want to put that at the top so we're all on the same page before I tell you I'm calling this a success.

I've been running almost every morning now, which apparently does something to your appetite, because I found myself standing in the kitchen at noon absolutely starving and completely unwilling to make toast again. Toast is fine. Toast is a reliable friend. But I've made toast approximately forty-seven times since graduation and I think we both needed a break. So I pulled up a recipe on the computer, just something simple, pasta, how hard could it be, printed it out because staring at a screen while trying to not boil water over is a lot to ask of a person, and I started.

The answer to 'how hard could it be' is: harder than I thought, which is probably the sentence on my tombstone eventually. The water took forever. I put too much salt in, then googled whether you could have too much salt in pasta water and surfaced twenty minutes later with seventeen tabs open about Italian cooking traditions, which is very on brand for me. The smoke detector incident was from garlic bread I forgot about, not the pasta itself, which I think is an important legal distinction. I stood over that pot for a solid five minutes just staring at it like it owed me an explanation.

the face of someone who has no idea what they're doing

But here's the thing: I ate it. I sat on the counter and ate the whole bowl and it was genuinely fine. Not 'fine' in the way I say 'I'm fine' when I'm spiraling. Actually fine. Edible. Maybe even good.

it is edible. technically.

I have been known to be my own harshest critic so 'maybe even good' from me is basically a Michelin star. I texted nobody about this because I didn't want to make it weird, but I'm writing it here because the whole point of this blog, I think, is that I get to count the small things. The lopsided pottery bowl on my dresser is for doing the uncomfortable thing. Maybe I need a second shelf.