Personal Essay

What Does Your Kitchen Say About You?

Learning to cook as a digital nomad in a stranger’s kitchen

The adorably slanted gas stove adjacent to our regiment of cooking oils and vinegars. Photo by author.

A splash of soy sauce quivers as it hits the scalding surface of my cast iron. It envelopes itself around the two yolks I’ve already broken. The kitchen fills with a palpable aroma of umami, and I close my eyes to invite it in. By the time I open them, the green onion on top of the eggs has wilted. The edges of which have crisped from the oil, slightly caramelizing in the fermented brown liquid. I plate them and pair with fresh fruit, a pile of kimchi, or leftover rice.

I never thought how badly I would want to cook until I didn’t have a kitchen to call my own.

This is our first month living nomadically, and while simultaneously falling dutch oven-deep into the world of cooking and food writing, I want to be in the kitchen more than ever. Except this kitchen is not my own — it’s an Airbnb owner’s. And by that I mean, it’s essentially no one’s.

The only people who regularly inhabit these rooms are not regulars. We are in a front-back duplex in the heart of Phoenix and over the course of a month, at least five different tenants have shared a wall with us. Each have perhaps only used their kitchen for making coffee or toast or heating up leftover Pad Thai from…