Something That Actually Required a Pot

There's a point where cereal for dinner stops being a quirky choice and starts being a life pattern. I hit that point sometime last week. Not a dramatic realization, just a quiet Tuesday where I looked at the box and thought, this is embarrassing, and I am twenty years old.

So today I made something. An actual thing with actual ingredients that required the stove to be on for more than three minutes. I'm not going to say what it was because honestly it doesn't matter, what matters is that I had a recipe written on notebook paper, I followed most of it, and at no point did the smoke detector go off. That expression on my face is me trying to decide if the color looks right. It did not look exactly like the picture. I ate it anyway.

the stirring phase. very serious business.

The stirring phase is where I felt the most confident and also the most fraudulent, like I was doing an impression of someone who knows how to cook. I kept the heat lower than the recipe said because I was nervous, which meant it took longer, which meant I had a lot of time standing there thinking about things. The blog. The draft. The comment I finally replied to last week with one sentence and then closed my laptop immediately and went for a walk. Whatever the answer to 'where does any of this come from' turns out to be, I think it starts with small decisions. Learning to run a route. Writing the fourth draft. Turning the stove on.

it looked better on the recipe card but I'm still calling this a win.

It wasn't good in the way that someone else's cooking is good. But it was mine, which is a different thing entirely. I think I'll try again Thursday.