There are nearly innumerable ways to cook an egg, but only a few ways to break them. At a very young age, under the command of my young mother, I took the little white egg out of its refrigerated Styrofoam coffin, its slick shell slipping from my foolish fingers. The sight of the yellow goo oozing onto the tile was almost too much to bear, knowing that I destroyed an innocent egg. I killed something that wasn’t even alive. That’s the weird thing about eggs: they were never living, but they are produced by a living creature, and have the potential to live if fertilized. For some reason, everyone accepts that this is normal, but if you contemplate the notion, it's all kinds of weird. After the egg drop, hot tears of embarrassment streaked my cheeks as I confessed my sin to my mother. Devoid of anger, she cleaned up the broken eggs without words.

That was the first instance of my initial interaction with cooking that my brain has allowed me to recall. While the egg’s innards were removed from the floor and my clumsiness forgiven, the ghost of anxiety prevailed in my minuscule mind. I had very little knowledge of my relation to the environment and the world, completely unknowing of the height and width I possessed and the objects that surrounded me accordingly. I never perceived my childhood self to be invincible, but rather understood I am incredibly mortal. Combinations of worry and genuine clumsiness plagued me regularly, and proved to be an unhealthy dose of anxiety that frequently left me in fearful tears.

Throughout my days as I aged and time took its toll, my mother and I prepared many baked goods together, and I mostly ceased to break eggs. My overall lack of knowledge of my immense size and the rapid rate at which I grew was a contributor to stupid slip-ups that led to things like broken eggs. I had trouble controlling my lanky limbs that grew incredibly fast, which was the insatiable cause of my clumsiness. There were and are slight moments of anxiety between the moment I remove an egg from the refrigerator before holding them up to the light to check for the horrifying notion of getting a fertilized egg and consequently a chicken fetus that the fear of it falling through my fingers and oozing on the ground flashes before my mind’s eye.

While it is the idea of the corruption of the splendor and untarnished shell of a raw egg that continually thwarts my taste for the precooked food, I do quite fancy a dish whose recipe requires an egg properly prepared. Thrown into a batch of cookies, morphed into an omelet, corrupted into a breakfast casserole all rather enthrall me. Eggs, when broken intentionally and used properly are amazing, creative, lovely and beautiful. Eggs broken without intention are terrible.

It has only been recently that I learned my mother is an uninventive cook. Many of her dishes are soups cooked in crock pots for hours on end, often devoid of creative medleys of flavors and interesting concoctions of spices. I believe that I have always known that my mother is not necessarily the best cook in the entire world, but compared to my limited pallet and terrible cook of a father, I had no other experiences to compare it to. My mother’s food often tasted like the color brown, and my father’s cooking was the adult equivalent of finger-painting. Due to continual lack of exploration in the culinary field, there was a systemic absence of iodized sodium chloride in our house. We had no table salt. Ever. All meals were memories of the ones before them, devoid of any substantially different flavor, or any vague whisper of flavor whatsoever.

My brother Jeff and I were subjected to the terrible foods prepared by our parents. Our mother and father would, without fail, at every dinner, have a side of microwave-heated canned green beans. They would sit in their little glass bowl, a square of watery unsalted butter perched atop the dreaded beans, mocking us. It was as if the green beans knew that our parents would force us to consume them in addition to the food that plagued our plates. In an effort to evade the inevitable punishment that would result from leaving the dreaded beans cold on my plate, I would shove them in my mouth, refuse to swallow, and run to the nearby bathroom off the kitchen where I would expel them in the toilet. It was not before long that my parents realized my ploy, and I was punished with housework and forced to chew and swallow my beans before them. This forced consumption of green beans led to my heightened gag reflex, and every time I ate the dreaded green cylinders filled with grossness and soaked in sorrow, I would vomit.

It was not until that I started working in restaurants and retreat houses in my adolescence that I began to learn exactly what real food actually was. I tried my first fresh, French cut green beans garnished with salt at 16, and I could scarcely eat enough of them. I loved the crunch as I bit down, the slick beans gliding over my tongue, and the utter fact that I was not forced to try them. They were incredibly well prepared.

The summer after I turned 17, I left my house and family to live in a retreat center in the small town of Valparaiso, Indiana, among a rather unknown order of women who were Catholics consecrated to the single life. Their jobs were simple: to fulfill their duties as they regarded their faith life, and tend to the retreatants in the necessary manners. I worked in the kitchen and lived among them.

I washed all the dishes the head chef used that were too big to fit in the dishwasher. I spent about 12 hours a day on my feet, suds-ing the enormous pots and pans until my fingers were wrinkled and pruned. The first week was filled with tedious work with dishes, day in and day out. We worked every day, from dawn until after dusk, seven days a week with very few breaks. The breaks we did have were utilized for spiritual reflection and introspection. The few times I was allowed to sit down and rest, I would read the biographies of saints in the hopes of not only learning the interesting literature the Church put forward, but also to eventually emulate their mindfulness and prayer life.

These were the days of the first week, when I would go to bed with feet sore from being shoved into Keds all day. My dish days soon ended. After I had proven to be proficient at scrubbing pots, I was allowed to prepare various side dishes. The first thing I was allowed to make were caramelized onions, and I somehow managed to catch them on fire. I can say with utter conviction that I am not sure exactly how I incinerated them. But somehow catching onions on fire was significantly less mortifying and anxiety-causing than broken eggs. At least onions couldn’t really break like eggs could. I never broke an egg while in Valparaiso. Granted, I did almost cut off various phalanges on numerous occasions while cutting and preparing food. I do believe that I broke at least a few minor kitchen appliances, specifically an egg slicer, but nevertheless left the kitchen unscathed.

The experiences I have acquired have progressively exceeded that of broken eggs and incinerated onions, shaping me into a relatively competent cook. Over my most recent winter break, my family, being 10 humans large, purchased five dozen eggs. There was a plethora of eggs simply sitting in our refrigerator, begging to be broken. Inexpensive and versatile, my family regularly consumed hard boiled eggs, egg salad, fried eggs, poached eggs, microwaved scrambled eggs (this is actually really easy and delicious, especially if you put it on toast with a little bit of ham or sausage, because the protein, carbs, and fat keep you full for a solid five hours), cracked them into cakes and made egg casseroles.

Egg casseroles are among my favorite dishes to cook. With a simple amount of ingredients: eggs, cheese, bread, vegetables and the likes, there is an immense concoction of deliciousness that can be prepared. There are very little rules to making an egg casserole, and after learning what temperatures and times to cook it, I mastered the art very quickly and began taking extreme liberties with the dish. I can throw together creative concoctions of ingredients to produce hearty fresh food with no instructions and no limits. I love the feeling of being free that cooking brings. There are no instructions or rules, it is trial and error and correction that compose the greatness of dishes and meals. The instantaneous gratification and fruits of my labors are readily available and easily consumed in such a way that I can quickly get feedback and continually improve my culinary skills, allotting the substantial growth that I have undergone as of late. Small Katie plucking eggs from their coffins in the refrigerator would likely take pride in the older version of herself, delighting in the skills that almost-grown-up Katherine possesses in the kitchen.