I love to cook. I love homemade breakfasts, perfectly packed brown bag lunches, and deeply flavorful dinners shared with family and friends. I owe that to growing up in a family that also loves to cook. In a kitchen not too far from where I live now, we scrambled eggs, added yeast to flour for homemade pizza dough, and baked cookies for our classmates. In college, I missed having a kitchen so much I talked my way into a series of campus jobs that let me escape the dining hall and find refuge by the stove.

Today, grocery shopping and onion chopping reliably make me smile. My Brooklyn kitchen still isn’t large, but it’s always the place I want to be. I cook pesto pasta, chicken fritz, vegetable soup, and curry for myself and my husband, Alex. Secretly though, I could probably subsist on French fries.