over a text conversation with a friend who pointed out that galettes are usually savoury french crepes, i amended — ok then i am making the american bastardisation of galettes. what i mean is: i was and have been making shortcrust fruit tarts messily assembled on a baking tray and messily scooped into our mouths alongside strawberry ice cream. little crumbly tarts with their edges folded in to envelope the fruit, raised and a little leaky.

the dough for the pastry is done by hand; i pinch butter into flour and roll my fingers in the mixture, encourage the ingredients to cling until they are a soft sticking shape. it all gets under my nails no matter how short i keep them, so i wash them out after, but for 15 minutes i am just my hands and the mixture, just the shape of a pale yellow mass ambling in my mixing bowl. there’s always music on in the kitchen when i’m making food because that’s where i am, suspended gently between the skin of my palms and the beat or flossy melody of whatever’s playing.

it’s the way i love, this food-making. pressing my fingerprints into dough that won’t hold the creases or ridges, tucking fruit into dough that will pull in the juice and turn buttery and sweet, or browning garlic in a pan or fanning slices of orange and lime out over chicken thigh to go into the oven. filling the already humid kitchen with more heat for the payoff of the smell of cooking and the half hour i’ll spend with people i love being surprised that the food is edible and actually pretty damn good.

i never learned to cook in any formal capacity, and have followed very few recipes, preferring instead to fuck around and find out in the kitchen. there have been times this has been disastrous, but mostly it’s me and my playlists and some wine and friends if i’m lucky, bumbling about making something passable but very full of my own heart. i have been thinking about what it means to want to take care of people, what it means to want people i love to eat well in the wake of discovering that for me, falling in love and being treasured felt like eating the most luxurious comforting meal. i think it means i want to pass on that same sense of satisfaction, the flipside of yearning and reaching out — its antithesis. the feeling of coming home and being safe, of turning to every soft hungry greedy feeling and feeding it gently instead of shaming it. the feeling of allowing yourself in your body to feel pleasure and fullness. to not go hungry.

a tangent i’m puzzling out: this specific way of experiencing pleasure and joy and love, so tied to fullness for me, is almost definitely a result of me having had to unlearn shame about my body over the last 12 years. coming from that into acceptance and shedding the guilt about eating has existed intricately with coming into love for myself, a sort of blossoming that i feel physically. (i used to hear beauticians at the facial or spa spaces my mom and i went to talk about soft fat and hard fat, how soft fat was easier for the machines to break down and metabolise so we could lose the weight, and hard fat was difficult because it would have accreted in the body over years. i still think about how my mother took to that news, and how much i wish i could hug her into un-baggaged love about her body, because her body is what’s kept her alive and what’s kept us all loved.)

a blooming — this newfound desire to prioritise my own comfort and seek out the slow, seeping contentment that comes from being settled and sure of yourself. this hard-won and determined, methodical, sustained insistence on my love for myself and on feeling pleasure in this body in a way unstained by guilt. it’s a happiness i wrestled for myself, won from myself. i am still trying to figure out how to say it all. i am still trying to figure out how to share it all. it’s how i love, this food-making. this sharing and eating and tasting good things. this existing in the physical space of making things that feel good. this thick-as-molasses, slow-moving, visible joy.