Everything I learned about cooking I learned while traveling. To be more specific, everything I learned about cooking I learned on a farm in the mountains of Northern Spain under the tutelage of a former-chef who would probably kill me if I used his name on the internet. So we’ll just call him P. P was not exactly an encouraging cooking instructor — in fact, he spent more time telling me I was a failure than giving me any concrete advice. But like with all great teachers, there was something about him that inspired me to bend over backwards trying to fulfill his unrealistic and often grandiose orders. Stir that pot faster. Don’t let the potatoes stick. Not enough oil WHAT WERE YOU THINKING SENORITA ARE YOU CRAZY. This tastes like nothing. More salt. AND don’t stop stirring, whatever you do.

Even though I finished every cooking encounter with P ready to crawl into bed and cry myself to sleep, I actually learned quite a bit. (This is even more clear in retrospect.)

For example, we Americans have a lot of unnecessary cooking implements. This was one of the first things P said to me, probably when he intercepted me searching for a cheese grater or a potato peeler or some other bourgeois cooking gadget.

“You Americans have the best equipped kitchens, but none of you know how to cook.”

Ouch. But how do you argue with that? I couldn’t, so I learned to peel potatoes with a knife. Most of the cooking lessons I learned in Spain, and later while living in Argentina, centered around the idea of “things I didn’t really need but thought I did.”

For example, I learned that you don’t really need to know what temperature your oven is. When I first saw the oven in my apartment in Argentina, I was horrified. There was no temperature gauge. And on top of that, you had to light it by sticking your entire arm inside with a match, which presented a serious risk of scorching off your eyebrows. But no temperature gauge, really? Who could cook with that? I ignored it for two months until I got desperate for roasted vegetables. And you know what — it. was. fine. I turned the oven on. I put the vegetables in. They cooked. And then I realized what P was probably trying to tell me four years earlier; cooking was not nearly as complicated as I thought.

Recipes also soon fell to the wayside. P never used recipes, or, if he did, they were all lodged somewhere deep in his head and only came out in the form of vague advice like “equal parts potatoes and onions” and “use your instincts on the salt.” Even if I had never met P, living abroad still would have ended my relationship with recipes. Here’s the thing about cooking abroad as an American — the metric system becomes your mortal enemy. Either you’re using an American recipe and all you have are metric measuring cups or you’re reading a recipe that says something like “34 grams of flour” and you’re like who the HELL weighs their flour whatisthisbloodynonsense. (Sidenote: Kiwis weigh their flour.) In either scenario, you are S-O-L. You’ll never figure it out. So, just follow my advice and give up on recipes. You’ll be okay.

For P, cooking was an art form. In the kitchen, he was expressive and light on his feet. He articulated his lessons with jabs of the ladle or the meat cleaver, whatever happened to be in his hand. He waged war on stray seeds or potato skins. Everything he chopped was even and symmetrical.

P’s main critique of my cooking was that it seemed to lack “cariño,” Spanish for care. Or love. Or, more generally, positive energy. Cariño. This was apparently the mystery ingredient that my dishes failed to present. He hovered over me as I launched my fifth or sixth failed attempt to create a satisfactory Bechemal sauce.

“You have to FEEL it,” he would snarl. “You have to love it.” And then he would tell me, yet again, the story of Tita from Like Water for Chocolate. “She cooked for her sister’s wedding and she was sad, you see, crying in the pie, or maybe it was soup, and then POOF, everybody is sick. This is what you do when you cook without cariño.”

While, on a certain level, this argument lacked logic, I understood what he meant. Although I’d say it this way:

Presentation matters.

Emotion matters. How you feel about your food matters. Whether you set out candles and flowers and a fresh tablecloth or whether you just slap the food onto the table, it MATTERS. It all matters.

Once, I made a salad. It was a good salad. Lots of different vegetables, all chopped as evenly as I was capable of doing (which, let’s be real, was not that evenly). For some reason that salad made P angry. He dragged me out into the garden and stood over me while I picked handfuls of edible flowers. We arranged the flowers around the edge of the salad bowl, and accented them with perfect, paper-thin slices of cucumber. It was beautiful.

“Okay,” he said. “Now, we can eat lunch.”

It was just us for lunch that day. No guests, no party, no visiting relatives, no in-laws to impress. Just us. So it shouldn’t have mattered that our salad was adorned with flowers. But it did.

What has traveling taught you? Please share your thoughts below.