**WARNING: Plenty of food pictures at the bottom of the page. Don’t look unless you want to get hungry.**
I was roughly 8 years old when I finally made my dad teach me how to cook. Before then, I spent a lot of time in our kitchen watching him as he prepared our meals. In fact, most of the time, I stood right by him beside our gas powered stove as he mixed the pot or the pan full of ingredients. The whole process was incredible. He took these things called vegetables that were largely grown from the Earth’s nutritious soil and from the free energy of the Sun. He took some piece of meat that was raised by the people at the province and butchered by some butcher at the butcher shop. He would combine them in a pot or in a pan (depending on what dish he was making) with some spices and other natural flavorings. He would put them over the hot stove, mix them every once in a while, taste them so that the flavoring could be corrected, and after an hour or so of tending them the result was always this delicious home cooked meal for our family to enjoy. It was magic.