Here’s a silly sounding but really valuable cooking tip: When you’re roasting nuts in the oven, keep one nut out on your cutting board, and you’ll never burn them; while you’re doing all your other work, you will continually want to wipe that nut off your board, only to remember why it’s there. That’s one way your valuable sense of sight helps you out; if you smell your roasting nuts, it’s probably because they’ve gone too far.

We cook with our senses, and we have six of them, all of them critical, the sixth most of all.

For the cook, one might think that taste is the most important sense. It is indeed a common mantra among chefs: “Always be tasting.” But it’s not just tasting to taste, but rather to evaluate what you’re tasting. Is there enough salt so that it tastes not salty but rather seasoned? Is there enough acidity? Enough richness, enough depth? If not, then think: How should I adjust this?

But often overlooked as a fundamental cooking sense is hearing. When I cook bacon, for instance, I start it in water. The gentle heat of water begins to render the fat and the bacon will never go above browning temperature; it’s cooking, but it can’t burn. But once I hear that pan crackling, I know that the water is almost gone; rendered fat can get very hot, and so I must attend to the pan.

But more important is imagined sight. What you expect to see should be a part of the cooking process.

Smell, likewise, is important, not just as an indicator of deliciousness (or the reverse) but of where you are in the cooking. If I am finishing up the components to go along with the prime rib I’m roasting in the oven, and I don’t smell that delicious roasting meat, I’d better check the oven because it’s probably not cooking properly, and not nearly done. If I smell it too early, perhaps the oven is too hot.

Touch is essential, a sense to call attention to because Americans, terrified of germs and bacteria, seem increasingly afraid of touching food. We touch a bread dough to evaluate if it has risen sufficiently. We press down on steak to intuit how done it is on the inside. We touch the top of a crème brûlée to ensure that it is smooth and brittle, not soft and sticky. Touch your food.

Sight is important, obviously — you can see that you’ve overcooked your pine nuts, or how delicious that roasted chicken is because you’ve put an aggressive coating of salt on it and roasted it in a very hot oven. You can see the oil ripple and swirl when it hits the sauté pan telling you the pan is good and hot.

But more important is imagined sight. What you expect to see should be a part of the cooking process.

When you are reducing a sauce, for instance, you should have in your mind the image of how thick that sauce should be when it is properly reduced. You should see it in your mind. Then, as the sauce reduces and you keep looking at it, stirring it, it should be continuously approaching the image in your mind. You should imagine how brown your fried chicken will be before it reaches your ideal, how much broth relative to garnish in a soup, how much fat you will render from the bacon.

But sight, both actual and imagined, can be a detriment if you are not careful, because what we see can also get in the way of our cooking. When I was in cooking school and working the grill station at the school’s busy restaurant, a student named Chen worked sauté beside me, and found himself deep in the weeds one midday service, behind in his orders, his station a mix of scraps of food, burned pieces of paper towel used to relight burners that were going out, sauce and salt and pepper spilled everywhere.

Dan Turgeon, the rugged chef instructor, seeing that Chen was a mess, stopped to chat, knowing Chen didn’t have the time, but Chen needed a lesson.

One year ago I started cooking. I began earnestly after returning from the Cannes Film Festival, inspired by discussions with friends, and now a year later I go to the market every other day, cooking fresh almost every night. This may not seem like much of an achievement, since most people cook and everyone eats, but for me this is a huge change. Just five years ago when I was living in Los Angeles, I was ordering Papa John’s pizzas by the double almost every other night, complimented by Taco Bell, Subway, P.F. Chang’s, Baja Fresh, Chili’s and anything else nearby I could find that I enjoyed. It made me happy at the time, as tasty food does, but of course it was not healthy. I was seriously overweight. Eventually I realized I needed a drastic change and as much as I wanted to cook, I never got the courage to do so until I finally had a nice place (a good kitchen) to cook in, and inspiration to make dishes that appealed to me, and made me happy, and healthy. It all started once I moved into a new apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, and fell in love with the Greenmarket Farmer’s Markets located around the city.

Now cooking is one of my top motivations every day. I know I’m eating healthy (or healthier), I’m in control of the food I put inside of me, and I know all of it is good for me. Plus I get to prepare food the way I like, which has allowed me to expand my taste immensely. I’ve tried more varieties of food in the last year than I have the rest of my life, and realized I’m a fan of that thing I’ve never had before. I’ve even found a great deal of peace and joy in the process of cooking. It’s a meditative experience, as many others will attest, even if repetitive. Focusing on preparation as a process, and the act of starting something from scratch and completing it to satisfaction in one evening, is hugely rewarding. It doesn’t matter if it’s making something for myself or for another person to enjoy, I feel such relief when I complete a meal. I know that I used the best ingredients that I could find, cooked everything fresh using what I wanted and nothing else, and put in the labor to make a dish that makes my tongue happy, too. And while it may take a few hours of work, during that time I can shut out everything else, forget about the worries of the day plaguing my mind, and focus solely on the food.

The other day at the market I bought a small bag of Red Amaranth leaves. I’ve never had them, but they looked appealing, I couldn’t help getting a few of them to toss into a creation. I thought I’d try them out, only $1 for a small bag. The other night I made a terrible dinner that I couldn’t even finish eating it was so bad. I had to throw out most of it and it really hurt. But I learned my lesson, and figured out the big mistake. These little moments of happiness, discovery, plus the chance to learn, to grow, to experience, to figure things out on my own terms, are why I’ve found so much joy in cooking. It’s a combination of the act of sourcing my food (I love going to the Farmer’s Markets around New York City); the act of deciding what and how to cook (I don’t like onions much, so I prefer shallots and always chop them up finely to my taste); the act of creating and completing a minor work of art within a few hours (using the right set of ingredients from scratch to build a satisfying dish in the end is deeply gratifying on an existential level).

I have no training, no background in cooking, no connection to any chefs, or any interest in food beyond the satisfaction it brings me. I learned from watching my parents, my brother, and videos online. I’ve grown to be a “foodie” in the last few years because I’ve really focused on what I’m eating, and focused on appreciating the freshness/complexity of what I’m eating (not just the temporary satisfaction of it). I do things my way, which is refreshing considering how daunting classic culinary practices are (you must know your five mother sauces or else!), and I make food that makes me happy, while keeping me healthy. I’ll twist a favorite dish (fried rice gets turned into fried quinoa) and improve upon it, or alter it to my liking, and the results are usually amazing. It tastes even better than it could at a restaurant, and when you achieve that kind of success in your own kitchen, it’s exhilarating. And it’s kind of addicting (and it spoils your appetite because some restaurants just aren’t up to par on preparation anymore).

This article was originally written by Alex Billington and appeared on Medium on June 3, 2015. You can read the rest of the article on Medium.

On April 27, 2014, I turned 29 years old. Like in years past, I took my birthday as an opportunity to a. freak out about what I’m doing with my life, and b. challenge myself with a goal to complete within the year (in hopes that completing said goal would make me feel better about what I’m doing with my life).

I needed to challenge myself to something significant — I was in the last year of my 20s, after all. So I decided to tackle something I’m no good at, something which most successful adults seem to be capable of: I was going to learn how to cook.

I am decidedly not the chef in our household. My husband Jamie not only enjoys cooking, but he’s really good at it. Me? Not so much. Cooking was the last thing I wanted to do when I got home from work. Simply the thought of making a meal would stress me out.

But that was a 20-something attitude. I figured cooking was something I could teach myself to love. And so, #30mealsbefore30 was born. I challenged myself to cook and document 30 unique homemade meals before my 30th birthday.

I ended the challenge on April 26, 2015 — one day before I became an official Adult — with a nutritionally unbalanced but delicious final meal.

Here’s what I learned along the way:

You can never plan for the future, no matter how much you try.

When I set out to do the 30 meals challenge, I determined I’d have to cook one meal every other week or so to stay on track for the year.

For the first 15 meals, I was right on schedule. I even cooked a Thanksgiving turkey! (Verdict: A very involved and gross process; would probably not do again.)

And then, life changed. On somewhat of a whim, I applied for and — after several rounds of interviews — landed a new job that required moving from Atlanta to St. Petersburg, Florida (more on that here). Between weeks of packing up our Atlanta house, spending more than a month in a hotel room with a tiny kitchenette, and eventually moving into our St. Pete house, the 30 meals project was thrown way off track.

If I’d known that I would leave my job and move to a new state before turning 30, I never would have committed to a year-long cooking project. But alas. Once we moved into our new place, I finally restarted the project, far behind schedule.

This article was originally written by Katie Hawkins-Gaar and appeared on Medium on May 3, 2015. You can read the rest of the article on Medium.