Who taught me how to cook? It wasn't much of a tradition in my little family of immigrants from Belarus. Both of my parents work and have always worked, and we have never spent long hours articulating menus and exploring recipes. But we have always had a respect for food. When I was a kid, we spent the summers in the woods with my grandmother while my parents worked. We spent our days running through the forest collecting buckets of raspberries and foraging for mushrooms. These are the privileged hobbies of foodies here but in 1990s, this was our sustenance. We ate what we found and we found what we ate. Finding our own food instilled in me the value of having, and the value of not having, although that realization came to me much later. My younger brother and I would gather around the table with my grandmother and she would hand us each a bowl of soup full of mushrooms and perhaps a fish my dad caught on the weekend. It was delicious and smelled of the earth. I have a very visceral memory of eating these soups. This memory was always muddled by another thought, why did my grandmother watch us lovingly instead of eating with us? It was not until after we came to America and my grandmother passed that I realized - there was only enough soup for two bowls and she let us eat first to make sure we had enough. This selfless generosity is what taught me how to cook, or at least spurred me to learn. If I couldn't say thank you to her, I would at least live a life that she would be proud of. Bringing people together has always been the incentive, whether it was my little immigrant family for dinner, or a family of friends, I have always longed for community. In high school, I taught myself how to bake cookies and would bring dozens of individualized baggies to hand out to everyone that I passed in the halls. Baking was my first culinary passion, here is something beautiful about how a person's day can be changed with a loaf of bread or a well-timed cupcake. I had learned English by then but was still an awkward kid that needed an aid to communicate. Food was always my aid. Living in New York, I couldn't manage the party scene, so we had cooking parties with a small group of friends. To keep things fresh, I started researching all types of cuisines and logging my recipes in a series of notebooks. These books are stained with butter and ink has bled under unexpected egg white spills, but I cherish these volumes and refer to them often.