Beef Stew for the Soul

Perfect is the enemy of good. My journey has been plagued with imperfections left and right. I am an engineer by day and a home cook by night. Even though I’ve studied engineering for four years in university, all I’ve learned is that I don’t know much. I’ve grown up and moved out of my parents’ house and can vote and drink; however, all I’ve learned is that there’s so much more to adulting. However, realizing that I know nothing is more enlightening than thinking that I am all-knowing. Life is more enjoyable when exploring the unknown. I’ve discovered that there’s more to explore when you’ve had the epiphany that you don’t know anything. I guess that’s what you call the beginner’s mindset, when you don’t have any expectations about anything and everything feels like an adventure.

I thought I had my life sorted out in childhood. All I had to do was get into a good college, and I’ve made it in life. I adopted this view from my parents, immigrants who come from a culture that values education and securing a good future for their children. They’ve always stressed the values of hard work, getting good grades, and pursuing well-rounded extracurriculars, basically, values that are important for getting accepted into prestigious universities.

Throughout my childhood years, my decisions always kept the end goal in sight: would my actions today help me get into MIT at 18 years old? Life was simple and clear-cut. My parents would shuttle me to school, then to piano lessons, tennis lessons, and on the weekends, soup kitchens for volunteering. What I didn’t know was supporting me through all of this was basically a second job for my parents. They paid for my musical lessons and sports equipment, shuttled me to all my extracurriculars, served up three meals a day and put a roof over my head. I didn’t know that growing up meant taking responsibility for chores that I didn’t think were of any importance. I didn’t know how to cook or clean up after myself. I could probably only fry eggs and microwave leftovers. I was too busy striving for a goal set for me that I didn’t realize that life was way more complicated than getting into college.

Moving out of my parents’ house taught me that there’s more to survival than simply getting good grades and participating in sports. Real life wasn’t about submitting applications and getting approval from random administrators you’ve never met. – Side Note: It’s funny; the irony here is that I’m writing this anecdote to submit to a panel of administrators I’ve never met. – One of the most significant changes in my outlook on life came from the realization that adulting is very complicated; modern life itself is very complicated. There are many aspects of being an independent, bill-paying, tax-paying, well-functioning member of society that I’ve been overwhelmed with. I barely know how to file my own taxes even after working for several years. Choosing an insurance plan is still mental gymnastics. And, I never perfected back-parking until I started driving a car with a rear-view camera.

One day, while burning my tongue on some microwaved hot pockets that tasted like cardboard, I thought to myself, what if I learned how to cook? If day-to-day life consisted of never ending chores repeated week after week, month after month, year after year, what if I learned to enjoy just one aspect of survival starting with preparing my own meals? Sure, cooking will take longer than buying food from a restaurant or reheating frozen meals, but what if I can take back some of my sanity from the never ending slog of survival? Thus, my journey of learning how to enjoy life began at learning how to cook.

I remember at first, I cooked without salt because my parents would tell me that eating salt would lead to high blood pressure. Nothing I cooked tasted good. All my dishes were very bland. I would overcook unseasoned steaks and eat them with similarly unseasoned broccoli. One day, I ate at a Korean restaurant with the best braised beef dish I’d ever tasted, galbijjim: a sweet, savory, spicy stew made with short ribs, soy sauce, mirin, and many vegetables. From that experience, I discovered that I like to try new dishes at restaurants and try to make my own version of the dishes I immensely enjoyed. After many attempts and researching all the recipes of galbijjim I could find, I finally developed a version of the recipe that balanced taste and convenience. I could whip up some galbijjim on a weeknight after a tiring day at work. 

Cooking helped me rediscover my love for experimentation. After my foray into galbijjim, I started making my own braised meat dishes. At first, I would dump a cut of roast and random spices into a crockpot and let it simmer for a few hours. Surprisingly it came out great! I was blown away at the simplicity of cooking. I had thought cooking was about knowing techniques that only Michelin star chefs can execute and having fancy kitchen appliances like a stand mixer and immersion blender. Since then, I’ve been trying new vegetables and aromatics like garlic, onion, ginger, and lemongrass. 

The art of cooking has bled into my life. Not only has it affected my eating habits, but also my willingness to explore and try new things. I have found myself spontaneously walking into used bookstores to browse old cooking books. Grocery shopping evolved from being a tedious chore to a treasure chest of potential flavors and new dishes. Coming from a livelihood filled with thinking about my future self, striving for good grades at, good performance at work, and stressing out about being on top of bills and other responsibilities of being an adult, I’ve learned to enjoy the process of living. Cooking has taught me that there’s enjoyment to be found in the small chores in life that we do everyday.

My first attempt at preparing galbijjim.

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