I grew up with an ardent love for food. My parents both are passionate about and wonderful at cooking. They each have their specialty dishes that my sister and I reveled in throughout our childhood: my dad with his signature and messy spaghetti and meatballs and his enormously rich Thanksgiving feasts, and my mom, with her bright Mexican dishes and buttery French toast.

When I was little, I marveled at my father, whisking eggs so vigorously they bloomed into fluffy and succulent scrambled clouds; I adored how, on Saturday mornings, with "The Three Stooges" blaring from the miniature TV in our kitchen, he would whip egg whites into pillowed peaks and fold them into his pancake batter, flipping puffed silver dollar pancakes onto our plates, small pillars dripping with melting butter and maple syrup.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve developed from simply observing my parents, to acting as their sous-chef, to becoming the confident and independent cook I am today. My family makes everything from scratch, which I love, because it gives me a deeper relationship with all the ingredients I use and a sense of pride in what I make.

I love feeling like I can do anything in my kitchen, like I can look at our enormously overstuffed bookshelf of cookbooks and pick one at random and try my hand at any number of recipes inside. I try making things from all different cultures and types of food: spicy Thai curries, creamy Italian pastas, or the flaky cherry pie I made this summer with ingredients fresh from the local farmers’ market.

Learning how to cook has taught me a lot. I’ve learned about sustainability of produce and the importance of buying local and organic. Local farmers' markets are full of awesome produce and people, and are always worth checking out. It’s also made me take greater stock in what I put into my body. Things in restaurants these days can be not only more expensive than making a meal at home, but are often rich with loads of extra calories from a multitude of ingredients. You can take control over what you eat by making it yourself, and can cater it exactly to your wishes.

To me, the most important thing about cooking is knowing that what you make doesn’t need to turn out perfectly every time. You will mess up every now and then, and it won’t be the end of the world. It’ll be how you learn. Through trial and error, you can find what works and what doesn’t, what you like to do and what you don’t, and can refine your skills and your tastes from there. What’s awesome is that as you test your skills, you can find recipes in cookbooks or from food bloggers from all over the world and experiment as you like.

Learning how to cook isn’t easy at first, that’s for sure. It takes practice! As cliché as it sounds, the more you work at it, the better you’ll get. I’ve burned cookies, scalded pans, overcooked steaks, and chopped my fingers instead of onions, but making mistakes is part of the whole experience. My hands are tattooed with scars from slips of knives and from carelessly burning myself, and I’ve definitely set fire to potholders more than once, but that doesn’t matter.

That ability to overcome the small things that set you back, whether it’s over-salting something or not being able to set a soufflé, is a lesson that’s even more important outside of the kitchen. S*** happens. If you keep at it, cooking not only gives you the ability to turn a handful of ingredients into a delicious, cohesive product that you can be proud of, but it provides you with numerous lessons, and a sense of independence!

If nothing else, I hope I’ve made you hungry with all these pictures of my own experimentations. But seriously – get your butt in the kitchen and get cookin’!