Plants.  Patience.  Plate.

here was a kitchen in Naperville, Illinois, that smelled of cardamom and something always on the verge of burning. My grandmother kept a notebook — not a recipe book exactly, more like a record of what had worked and what hadn't, written in the margins of a spiral-bound steno pad. The measurements were approximate. The instructions were a single line. The assumption was that you already knew.

I didn't inherit that notebook. But I inherited the habit — the compulsion to write things down, to photograph the moment before the plate is disturbed, to believe that what we cook is a form of autobiography.

The dishes below are the ones I made before I had a name for what I was doing. They are also the ones I make now, when I need to remember why I started.

In 2019, a doctor used the phrase "inflammatory load" in a sentence directed at me. I drove home from that appointment and stopped at a farmers market that had been on my route for three years without my ever slowing down.

A woman was selling purple carrots the size of my thumb. Another had a table of dried beans in colors I didn't have names for. I bought things I didn't know how to cook. I went home and started writing.

The recipes that follow are from that period — when I was learning how to cook without the shortcuts I'd relied on, when every dish felt like a small act of translation. They are not health food. They are not apology food. They are just food, made carefully, from plants.