Just Me Being Me is literally just me being me, living my life outside my comfort zone when it happens as it happens. Since I’m a dedicated introvert, this doesn’t happen much, which makes it doubly interesting when it does.
A few weeks ago, my husband and I had a not-argument—as I like to call conversations where one or both of us raise the volume of our voice, but we don’t want to turn the situation into a fight—because he felt like he was interrupting my alone time by being in the kitchen. I often sit on a chair nearby while he’s in the kitchen and while he’s eating, spending time with him even when he doesn’t ask me to do so. We eventually reached a point where we both understood each other, and the raised voices lowered back to proper inside-voice levels.
That whole thing got me thinking about why I spend time with him when he’s in the kitchen. It’s because that’s one of the ways I was shown love, care, and effort when I was a child—and it happened a lot more than I was told outright, “I love you.” I was the youngest in the family. Until I was old enough to be left alone, I needed to sit in the kitchen while older people cooked or cleaned. Then, I started to learn how to cook and clean—so they would sit in the kitchen talking to me while I did my chores. So when I sit in the kitchen, I am actually saying “I love you” in the language my family spoke to me.
I think of it as my mom’s kitchen now, but growing up, I don’t think I associated the kitchen with her. I was always in there with my lola, Ate Josie, and Mary. Only sometimes with her, even though I knew she was a good cook. I always saw her cleaning up, though. It was almost always Ate Josie and Mary who cooked, and I could tell with one bite which one cooked which dish. Most of what I know about cooking, I learned from both of them.
But baking—that was something I did with my lola. I only saw her make it once, but everyone said her brazo de mercedes was amazing. What I remember most are her orange chiffon cakes, so delicate and fancy. I sat with her as she baked, listening to her as she warned me not to use room-temperature eggs, not to overmix the batter, not to do anything other than the way she did things. My lola said “I love you” to me a lot, but I remember these moments like they were yesterday.
While the kitchen in my childhood home was usually full of people (and dogs), it quieted down at night. But I have many good memories of my mom’s kitchen’s after-hours shift. My kuya and sometimes my dad would cook midnight snacks and make coffee (my dad was addicted to caffeine) while I stayed up to spend time with them. I think making midnight snacks was my first foray into actually cooking by myself. Slowly, they shifted the midnight cooking duties to me—especially on weekends.
As I grew older, I started eating dinner with the family less and less, because I often spent nights out socializing. My mom always made sure there were dinner leftovers in the oven toaster (As an aside, do you say “oven toaster” or “toaster oven”? More on this later!) for me to eat when I got home. My dad always waited for me to arrive before turning in for the night. He’d sit and talk to me as I reheated my leftovers. Sometimes, he’d stay until I’d finished my late dinner.
It’s worth noting here that from my mom’s kitchen, I shifted to my mother-in-law’s kitchen, then my own kitchen in Mandaluyong—before my best friend’s kitchen in Vegas. But my mother-in-law’s kitchen always seemed foreign to me, like I wouldn’t ever feel at home in it, ever. I remember cooking there only once, making yema for my then-boyfriend-now-husband and his sister. And my very first own kitchen was so small that cooking or baking anything in it was a chore.
M—my best friend—and R, her husband, had graciously agreed to host us in Vegas as we got used to living in the U.S., found jobs, and looked for an apartment. Their kitchen was bigger than my previous kitchen and living room combined! And they had a dishwasher that didn’t only function as a container for drying dishes. It was truly a different lifestyle.
Cooking for them, I experienced peace, self-love, and contentment in a kitchen for the first time. Plus, cooking with M was the first time I experienced doing so with someone who wasn’t always trying to teach me how to do things correctly or their way. Yes, I missed having my own kitchen in Mandaluyong… but not really. It wasn’t until I sat in M’s kitchen that I realized how a kitchen could be more than a place where I could feel love. It could be love itself.
COVID-19 happened right as my husband and I were moving out of M and R’s home and looking for an apartment to call home. At the beginning of the temporary shutdown that turned into a long quarantine period, we were moving our things from our Airbnb to an apartment we’d found in less than a week of looking.
My mother-in-law and her sister (my husband’s aunt) were also with us during this time, as they were visiting Vegas. Most of my memories of moving into this apartment include them and their choices. I think they used my own kitchen in Vegas before I did, although it’s worth noting that they also decked it out. Along with another aunt of my husband’s, we wouldn’t have as well-equipped a kitchen without them. Specifically, my mother-in-law gifted us our Breville air fryer. I call it an oven toaster, because that’s what we called it in Cubao. My husband and the rest of his family call it a toaster oven or an air fryer. (Another thing from my childhood that makes it hard for me and my husband to communicate!) I was especially thankful for this gadget because I’m scared of using big ovens.
Because I was scared of big ovens and just baking without someone instructing me in general, I wasn’t even the first to bake in my own kitchen. My mother-in-law made her famous food for the gods bars during another visit during the holiday season, after the quarantine had passed.
After moving to Vegas in 2019 and going through the pandemic quarantine in 2020, I suffered from a stroke in 2021. I survived and eventually got diagnosed with type 2 diabetes (unrelated to the stroke) in 2023.
With all the uncertainty in life due to the move, the pandemic, and my recent health, I hadn’t really settled into our new home and its kitchen. But getting diagnosed as a diabetic forced me back into the driver’s seat in the kitchen because I needed to know what exactly I was eating. I think I started by baking egg bites that contained cottage cheese and vegetables. I tried a few cookie recipes during this time, too. We also shifted from rice to pasta, then potatoes, to mostly just protein. Then, Vegas experienced an egg shortage in 2025. I experimented and tried making eggless muffins, using olive or avocado oil instead.
This experiment turned into a passion when I got laid off and lost my dog in the same year. I was in the kitchen and sitting with myself, when no one else could—in my solitary version of grieving—as I cooked and baked. I originally made dessert muffins because I wanted to replace the sweet snacks we bought from Costco—double chocolate with walnut, pumpkin spice with white chocolate and pecan, and coffee with butterscotch and walnut. Eventually, I also developed a chicken pot pie muffin that my husband and M loved.
I think my husband noticed how much time I spent in the kitchen—from cooking dishes to be stored in freezer trays to making sweet and savory muffins alike, and even simply cooking and cleaning daily. For Christmas last year, he gifted me a Kitchenaid stand mixer in one of my favorite colors (red). That was an expression of love that was so distinctly more than just sitting with me in the kitchen. But I heard the “I love you” behind it and was grateful for it.
Since I got the stand mixer, I think I’ve made muffins once or twice. Because I could confidently cream butter and sugar properly with it, I now spend most of my baking time making cookies instead of muffins: double chocolate with walnuts, coffee with butterscotch and walnuts, chocolate chip, Black Forest-like (really double chocolate with craisins), lemon and ginger, and a weird savory one inspired by one of my tried-and-tested chicken marinades.
I’m still figuring out the final recipes for these—whether or not to add cornstarch for that bakery-style texture, whether or not to add baking powder and apple cider vinegar for more spread, choosing between 350F and 325F, choosing the proper baking time (anywhere from 12 to 20 minutes), and when to add salt on top of the cookie. But as I’m doing so, I’m aware that I’m finding peace, self-love, and contentment in my own kitchen for the first time.
Now, I’m finding out that I love it when people eat the pastries I bake! There’s a different joy in hearing that they love what I make, but more than that, I like that it’s a physical form of saying “I love you,” and possibly easier to understand than just sitting with them in the kitchen.
This even extends to cooking, currently. Some of my recipe mainstays are only on my list because I know my husband likes them. Many of my pastries started as requests or because I’m aware of the favorite flavors of people I love.
My new perspective on finding peace in the kitchen has also expanded the way I understand my lola, my mom, my Ate Josie, and Mary. Now, I can hear the silent “I love you” in each of their dishes. In each of their attempts to teach me baking, cooking, cleaning. In each time they made sure there were dinner leftovers in the oven toaster. Not just in sitting with me in the kitchen. I wish I could send over my bakes to them back in the Philippines, but I guess that can wait until the next time we visit.
Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash
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