I started cooking when I was eight years old. My mom decided that it was time that I learn to make dinner for the family. She started me off with a recipe for meatloaf and French green beans. She would make meatloaf with hamburger, diced onion and green bell peppers, egg, salt, pepper, and bread crumbs. Once she would mix the loaf together, she would smother it in ketchup and bake at 350° for around 40 minutes or until the juices from the meat coagulated into a gray mess at the top. This meatloaf was an almost weekly staple. The French green beans came frozen and would get boiled with a quartered onion and a bouillon cube. It was an easy recipe that my mom felt I could manage.

My older sister wouldn’t help me make the meatloaf. She found mixing the raw meat with her hands to be so repulsive that she would almost throw up if she needed to touch it. I loved the feel of the squish of the bright red meat, especially when the two eggs would explode underneath my fingers and mash into the ground meat. The texture of the gritty bread crumbs was sensory play to me decades before kinetic sand existed.

I was very unwilling as a child to expend energy on tasks I didn’t think were important. And when I was eight, the only thing that was worthy of my attention was reading. Wasting my time cooking, especially a meal I didn’t even like, felt like a prison of responsibility when I just wanted to be curled up reading Nancy Drew. In order to get back to more important things as soon as heavenly possible, I wouldn’t dice the onion and bell peppers into minuscule pieces like my mom had taught me. Instead I would roughly chop the onion and bell peppers into much larger chunks of vegetables that turned my mom’s delicately mixed loaf of evenly hewn vegetables into a slapdash loaf of meat and chunks of vegetables cut into AT BEST 16ths.

I also refused to smother the loaf in ketchup because I thought ketchup was disgusting.

The first time I made the meatloaf my dad laughed at how large the vegetables were cut and said he preferred my loaf over my mom’s. She was not so silently offended that her time-consuming and carefully chopped vegetables were not preferred over her eight year old daughter’s vegetable chunks. He also despised the ketchup she would load onto her loaf.

The meatloaf dinners were my responsibility from that moment on.

Growing up on a farm in the 90s meant that the majority of our vegetables came from the garden. We would spend summer days pickling cucumbers, canning tomatoes, and shucking and storing corn in the garage freezer. We made our own jams and jellies, would have dozens of cans of preserved vegetables on our shelves for winter, and weeded in the spring and summer like our lives depended on it. My relationship with cooking was heavily influenced by the depression era and World War II/victory garden days of my Nana’s youth and my mom’s foray into the late 90s/early 2000s diet culture of the South Beach diet. The balance of bland and easily prepped meals from packages, fresh vegetables, and Orleda potato chips that gave you the shits was a delicate and confusing one. I spent a lot of my childhood hungry, as my father would get the majority of the food as the man of the house and my mom and sister and I would need to split the rest. As a latchkey kid I would eat pickles, olives, and even suck on bullion cubes after school to (what I can only assume upon reflection now) regain the salt I was losing from sweating in the Georgia heat.

Nana would enlist me to make various desserts for church gatherings so I became more of a fast “baker” than a cook. Using “baker” in this context is an extremely generous term as it was more “toss things together” than baking. Pineapple upside down cake (with an entire stick of butter sliced onto a box of yellow cake mix) and ambrosia salad were my specialities. Ambrosia with the pistachio jello dust and whipped cream and marshmallows and pineapple felt like the furthest thing from a salad but it was delicious.

Food was always utilitarian to me, especially as I joined the Marine Corps and subsided solely on Oreos, orange Vitamin Water, and MREs. I always knew that as a Southern woman it was expected for me to cook for my husband, and to cook well enough that my casseroles would be the envy of the neighborhood, but I seemed to be missing the cooking gene that you would see in Southern movies. In fact, my mistakes in cooking became so frequent that cooking became a stressor that had me frozen with anxiety and constantly feeling like a failure. It seemed like the women in my life just memorized recipes and expected me to learn them by hearing them. I could never remember ingredient amounts, just more ingredient vibes. When my first husband and I moved into our own apartment in 2008 I wanted to make him a celebratory dinner. You know, our first dinner as a married couple in our own house! As a young wife this was my time to shine! I whipped out the old tuna casserole dish that I had made for my sister for years. It was a classic! But instead of evaporated milk to moisten the entire bag of crushed potato chips, I accidentally added sweetened condensed milk. It was the most horrifyingly disgusting meal I had ever eaten in my entire life of 18 years and I sat sobbing from embarrassment on the floor of that Oceanside apartment while my husband howled with laughter and said he loved it.

I didn’t know what I was doing with cooking as a young adult. I owned no cookbooks and food bloggers didn’t exist yet. When I would go to the bookstore I would focus on every book BUT a cookbook. I honestly don’t think I knew cookbooks could be purchased at the bookstore, and who would want to read a cookbook when the entire Anne Boleyn series was released?? The Internet wasn’t full of cooking tips and I was 3,000 miles away from my closest relative. So I stumbled through making the most golden brown, crispiest, and rawest fried chicken you would ever attempt to eat.

By the time I was 22, I was entertaining quite often and the entertainment would always have some form of food involved. Luckily, my second husband enjoyed cooking, although he avoided vegetables like the plague. So we stumbled through entertaining as young-ins, with still more mistakes. We made duck one Thanksgiving and the gravy that I made from the duck was so full of fat that you had to continuously stir while pouring before the fat separated. Tears of laughter streamed out of our eyes at trying to pour duck gravy over our friends’ mashed potatoes.

My lack of talent with cooking was starting to bother me. I finally caved and asked my mom for an apple pie recipe. She sent me the recipe for a pie crust as well and when I attempted to cut in the butter with two table knives, the crust refused to mix. Perhaps it was a lack of skills, lack of proper equipment, or patience, but I ended up crying before my second husband ran to the store to grab a pre-made pie crust.

And the pie was DELICIOUS! I was so proud of it. I took it as a dish to a friend’s party, talking it up about it being homemade and how I had carefully sliced each green apple before generously covering with cinnamon and sugar and nutmeg.

But then one of my husband’s friends found out I had used a Pillsbury pre-made crust. He proceeded to publicly shame me for trying to tout this dish as homemade. “How can you call yourself a southern woman if you can’t even make a pie crust?” I was so ashamed. That “joke” was running in the friend group for over a decade, to the point that every pie crust I would eventually make (once I discovered that you should freeze the butter and have the proper tool to cut it into the floor) would be immediately called store-bought.

Things started to shift over the years. When I was living in Japan at 23 I signed up for a service called “The Set Table” that provided recipes and ingredients to dishes I had never heard of, utilizing the local grocery stores of Okinawa. The ingredients were some of the freshest I had ever seen, as Okinawa has some of the best fruits and vegetables grown on the volcanic farmland. The recipes came on colorful index cards with clear directions, and the ingredients were carefully measured out. This let me learn how to conduct the art of simply adding ingredients in the right steps, watch for the cooking time, and work with various items trying dishes I never thought possible. I still have every recipe card I ever receieved from them, collecting in a small binder that my second husband arranged for me.

I continued with Blue Apron once I moved back to California at 26. I started making dinner by myself and changed how I experienced the once stressful act of cooking because it was just me I was cooking for. If I messed up, no one was around to judge. My two year old would eat anything I placed in front of him. He was, and still is, my favorite taste tester.

Then I read Kitchen Confidential and it was like my world shifted once I saw food through Anthony Bourdain’s eyes. How he spoke of ingredients, of cooking, of experiencing the world and its gift of taste made me realize how uneducated I was in the goodness that can be experienced through food. His writing was fun, honest, and drove home certain points like the atrocities of a garlic press and the necessity of using the freshest ingredients. I visited my fishmonger for the first time, threw away my garlic press, and hosted a dinner party of roasted whole fish and Italian strawberries from a recipe that my host had made for me when I was in Paris running a marathon. Cooking for people began to bring such a joy for me that I had a fire kindled for making people happy through their stomachs. The dinner parties that I threw gave me an excuse to try complex and new recipes that 26, 20, 15, and 8 year old me didn’t even know existed.

Mistakes still happen, of course, and I am passing the resiliency of mistakes in cooking down to my son. But the tips and tricks for cooking, the importance of an oven thermometer, of measuring weight instead of volume, of difference flavor combinations makes a world of difference in the final product. I have continued to read cooking adjacent books that provide insight into the people behind cooking: With Love, Julia, and Crying in H Mart have provided cultural flavor to the world of cooking. Even fictional books like Buttery and Lessons in Chemistry has inspired me to change my relationship with cooking. Once I started getting to go to Michelin and Bib Gourmand rated restaurants, I was able to experience yet another facet of meal time: the experience of art in cooking.

Every mealtime is an opportunity to experiment with the five senses and provide a meal that pulls the best of ingredients together so you can provide an experience to the people you love. And I am so grateful to have gotten to hone my skills from chunky gray meatloaf to dishes that are now requested by friends and family. And there is a certain part of me that is healed when I hear a friend say over dinner “Oh, if Savannah is cooking, I am in. She makes the best meals.”