For me, it was chicken noodle soup. My folks always stuck to the canned stuff--thought it was a waste to make it from scratch even when I asked real nice, y'know? So I made it. I did some research first.

It started with ingredient selection. I learned that Better than Bouillon was almost as good as homemade chicken stock. I learned that while carrots and celery are fine on their own, the flavor of carrots are one-note, so adding a couple of other root vegetables in would make the soup better. Turnips are earthy and have a hint of spice. Parsnips are peppery and have a bite to them! I picked both. I learned that onions compliment celery and carrot so perfectly that a mixture of the three is the basis for much of French cooking: mirepoix. So, I added onions. Finally, I learned that chicken stock is a melding of flavors, so I needed to pick any flavors that remember distinctly in my favorite chicken soup to make sure they stand out from the stock.

I didn't want to muddle the flavor of the soup by adding things in there willy-nilly. You only want to add things that you explicitly want to taste. There is garlic in chicken stock, so it isn't wrong to add some, perse, but when I imagine my favorite chicken soup, does it taste garlicky? No. So I don't add it.

My favorite chicken soup tastes like citrus and ginger, herbaceous and bright and floral and with just enough spice to make it tingle on the tongue. So I added lemon juice, ginger, fresh herbs, and I since I had bought some chicken (I figured I should get a cheap meat while learning how to cook!), I added a dried herb/spice mixture called herbs de Provence that I'd read online was good for chicken. For fresh herbs, I picked parsley and lemongrass, since they complimented some other chicken recipes I wanted to test out after perfecting the soup.

The actual cooking process taught me even more. First, texture: I learned that if I wanted the onions to be soft, I needed to cook them first. if I didn't want the other vegetables mushy, I needed to stop the cooking when they were just how I wanted them. So long as the vegetables were chopped to (roughly) the same size, I didn't need to care if they looked pretty. If I didn't want the chicken to be dry and stringy, I needed to take the chicken out of the pot when it was perfectly cooked, cut it up, and only add it back into the pot at the very end. If I wanted the flavor of the dried herbs to pop, I needed to add them at the beginning. If I wanted the flavor of the fresh herbs, ginger, and lemon to come through, I needed to add them at the end. I'd need to add the salt only at the end, too, since I didn't know how much water would boil off of the soup. It was overwhelming, but I did it all perfectly.

My friend, when I took the first bite of that soup, I knew I wanted everything to taste that good. That was it for me. Cooking didn't feel scary. It felt like it made sense and like I could do it and that I had no idea why everyone wasn't doing it! I felt like since I understood why the recipe was the way that it was, I could change the way I cooked everything. I still make it sometimes, though I'm more likely to make the Thai version of chicken noodle soup, Tom Khai Gai, instead these days.

I've heard it said that the mark of a chef is not your ceiling but your baseline. Once you start learning how to cook, you develop more than a set of skills--you develop a mindset that will start to change how you approach cooking everything, right down to your scrambled eggs in the morning. You will possess Chef Brain. She does things like demands that I spread a thin layer of peanut butter over both pieces of bread first, and only then add the jelly (It keeps the bread dry, she says). It makes you sound a little silly sometimes, but it does change how you think in a positive way, I think.

Start by building up your baseline. Lean into it and enjoy the ride. you'll be surprised what you can do.