When you move to Guatemala and try to figure out how to cook you perceive that:

There is a right way to cook things. There is a wrong way to cook things.

The right way to cook things means: una olla de presión for your beans; a gigantic metal juicer for your citrus.

The wrong way means: less garlic in your salsa (porque PICA); no cumin in your beans; refusing to acknowledge that cilantro and culantro are the same thing, even after you research and discover that while they are in fact different plants you can request una mano de CUlantro at the market and receive cilantro).

Things learned: that you can picar una cebolla by sticking your knife all which ways into just a sliver around the top and then slicing, carefully, gently towards your finger, and that onion shards will drop onto your cutting board like tiny, wet diamonds; that you can get three piñas for 10 Q at el Mayoreo; that limones yield significantly (surprisingly) more juice when the sides are sliced, rendering the spherical, cubic; that a licuadora is life; that for a good chirmol you should char the tomatoes a bit before chopping them; that you cannot apagar the fuego of the parilla before you echar the platanos. You MUST grill platanos (may you always remember in shame the time you threw water on the painstakingly cultivated fire, only to have to return to the table and see the pity, the disappointment on the faces of the Guatemalans still at the table).

Thoughts changed when: you talk to a woman who tells you que piensa que, más que todo, la cocina es para experimentar, para inventar, para no tener miedo, para siempre echar mucho ajo – the affirmation you feel almost defies description. You think it’s no coincidence that her food is some of the best you’ve had since coming here. The do’s and don’ts that in your most unsure, panic-stricken moments seemed so ironclad – these soften, they give way.

And the miscellaneous: you also did not know that you would become adept at making guacamol, or that the idea of a day without eating frijoles now seems unimaginable/impossible, or that you who once scorned bread (fool.) would relish the ritual of café con pan dulce, a meal in its own right with no fixed hour. That you would come to appreciate tortillas bought at exactly the right moment, so as to still be hot when you unwrap them from their cloth-covered stack on the table.