- 08 Nov, 2025 *
she liked to dip strawberries in condensed milk, to balance out the tartness. for my birthday this year, she bought me fancy japanese strawberries and the expensive melon we’d been eyeing at the local shop for a months. we were so focused on letting the melon achieve peak ripeness that it suddenly became overripe. we were a bit sad. still, it was one of the most delicious things I’d ever tasted. we sliced it, sat on our couch, ate most of it, and went out for dinner. when we came back, our cat had eaten the rest and gotten juice everywhere.
she liked carrots a lot. she likes simple food and doesn’t really care for process or intense flavors. one time we wanted to make japanese curry but had only carrots and no potatoes. she wanted to try it with only carrots. …
- 08 Nov, 2025 *
she liked to dip strawberries in condensed milk, to balance out the tartness. for my birthday this year, she bought me fancy japanese strawberries and the expensive melon we’d been eyeing at the local shop for a months. we were so focused on letting the melon achieve peak ripeness that it suddenly became overripe. we were a bit sad. still, it was one of the most delicious things I’d ever tasted. we sliced it, sat on our couch, ate most of it, and went out for dinner. when we came back, our cat had eaten the rest and gotten juice everywhere.
she liked carrots a lot. she likes simple food and doesn’t really care for process or intense flavors. one time we wanted to make japanese curry but had only carrots and no potatoes. she wanted to try it with only carrots. I could barely finish my portion, but she was so happy with it.
her favorite food was taiwanese danbing. when we were just friends, she told me it’s always the first thing she orders when returning home. for my birthday a couple years ago, she bought me a copy of Made in Taiwan, a cookbook celebrating the unique cross-cultural roots of taiwanese cuisine. in it was a danbing recipe. I got really good at making it for her, but it was quite labor intensive, so she was always shy about asking for it. it was never a chore, though. it made me happy to make her happy.
surely she knows that my love for her is so unconditional. she was my family and still is. I mean, we were literally chosen family. it seemed very difficult for her to accept this love from me. I would always tell her she was the love of my life. I’d grab her shoulders and dramatically say, 我的最爱! my greatest love, my favorite. of course, you always say these things when you’re in love. that doesn’t make me mean it any less.
she said she liked everything I cooked. I easily got sick of eating the same food multiple times in a row, but she would always finish the food I didn’t want to. I tried to make her mushroom alfredo once and it sucked, but she finished the whole pot. in the first year or two of our relationship, I was stuck in a depressing job. the upside of that was I had so much free time at home to cook elaborate things for her. I made all sorts of things: finnish salmon stew, japanese croquettes, gochujang pot pie, homemade pasta, lemon possets. she was not a picky eater and always said everything was good. I used to get overwhelmed by my own plans, though. I wanted to be someone that hosted dinner parties and potlucks, but I also got easily stressed and overwhelmed when things inevitably took longer to cook than I thought they would. she knew this about me and would laugh at me, gently urge me to reconsider dramatic plans, or just help me in the kitchen. I eventually got more efficient and better at on-the-fly adjustments. I’d say I’m a pretty great cook now. I eventually left that job and got a better one, but continued to make cooking part of my life and way of love.
as our relationship matured, we started hosting more. in the third year of our relationship, she got me a dutch oven for my birthday, and I wanted to host her friends for dinner. I spent hours making a red wine braised short rib over mashed potatoes, looking up how to select a good cut of meat and learning that you should go to a local butcher instead of a grocery store one. I saved nearby butchers on google maps. I was trying to optimize so much that I began to psych myself out a bit. she ended up getting them on sale from the grocery store near us, and it was a great cut of meat. the day of, I panicked because I originally wanted to follow a recipe and make it dairy free, with olive oil instead of heavy cream, but it wasn’t tasting good. she said, well, I think it just needs milk. I frowned and realized she was right. it tasted a lot better. she always dispelled my anxiety and then said I was silly. it felt like a hug every time. when I think back on it now, we stopped hosting parties after getting evicted by her family, and I cooked a lot less. it started a very quiet, dampening depression that was further underscored by my growing frustration in my professional life.
if I could make the time, I liked to leave her with a good amount of food before I would go out of town, because she didn’t particularly enjoy the act of cooking. if I didn’t have time to do that, I always looked forward to hearing what she made when I wasn’t there. she really liked to make salmon cabbage rice. she would make a huge pot of that and an herbal chicken stew, along with matcha shortbread cookies and banana bread.
she always said she was a bad cook. one time, I had prepped a batch of carrot top pesto but was working a bit extra, so she said she could just boil pasta and add the sauce and bring it to my desk. I had tasted the pesto the night before, and it turned out delicious, but somehow when it got heated with the pasta, it developed a very strange flavor. she said, oh god, I’m such a bad cook that I can’t even make pasta. you made yummy pesto and I ruined it. I laughed and said there was no way she could have actually messed that up. it must have been a strange chemical reaction. we’ll never know.
in the spring of this year, the depression from moving slowly started to lift, and I cooked a bit more again. when her dad got sick, it felt even more necessary to cook and cook and make her feel cared for. recently we’d taken a liking to this recipe for 1-2-3-4-5 tofu, which is a vegan version of a chinese spare rib dish. I made it many times.
I don’t really know where I’m going with all of this. I guess I wanted to write a bit about the things I did contribute to the relationship, to reassure myself.
I lost five pounds since we broke up. no appetite. nobody to cook for. I tried making a bell pepper tofu stir fry but the tofu was expired and the bell peppers irritated my stomach. I tried making 1-2-3-4-5 tofu but fucked it up and burned the sugar and it tasted like shit. when it’s just me, I don’t care as much about making it taste good. I need it to be for her.
now that I’m visiting home, I’m pretty sure I’ve gained all the weight back. I’m so grateful I have a place where I can be coddled the way I was trying to coddle her. my mom made me handmade noodles with egg and tomato, kabocha squash curry, danbing, tofu mushroom soup, and bok choy fried rice. I’ve only been home for two days, too. today we baked a japanese sweet potato pie. it’s finishing up in the oven as I write this.