I was born in the South, grew up in the Midwest, spent 5 years in the Northeast, and now live in Los Angeles, which does not really seem like a part of the West. California feels a lot more like its own country. An interesting place. And a foreign one to me.

The landscape in L.A., as everyone can see on television, is covered with cement and strip malls. More than you can even comprehend until you’ve been here. And the climate is very dry. The kind of dry that makes hand lotion and really, truly drinking all of your daily water intake mandatory.

Moving cross-country was a severe experience and I did not anticipate the full effect it would have on my life. But the dryness was obvious and immediate. For months after we arrived, I would experience a feeling of shock, delight, even relief every time I flushed the toilet and heard it swish to life. I never thought much about something this routine before. But so much sudden water in an otherwise desiccated place seemed chronically ironic.

My husband and I stayed with friends for a few months until we got our first apartment here, in the month of November. We had moved out with only what would fit in our car, which amounted to two laptops, a laser printer/scanner/copier/fax machine, a king-sized sleeping bag and a week’s worth of clothes. These are pretty much the basics for making a living as freelance writers and editors. The rest of the contents were in storage and would have to be moved out in a truck when we had saved up enough for the rental.

The day we moved into the apartment, we bought a cheap 2-quart saucepan and a plastic serving spoon. I have always enjoyed cooking and baking, but I didn’t expect to do much beyond boiling in my new kitchen until we had moved in all our household goods. At that time, we were only occasional from-scratch cooks anyway. We each made a few specialties, but for the most part we subsisted on pizza, salad and noodles from a box or bag.

Times of transition are always scary, and I had trouble building a relationship with this new, dry land. Previous habits that had kept me in balance didn’t seem to work here. I would meditate and try to ground, and feel nothing but shifting dust beneath me. No wet loam, no thick old roots to cling to. Just dust and more dust.

We would take walks in the evenings to get familiar with the neighborhood and I noticed that every other house seemed to have a fruit-bearing tree of some kind. Oranges, lemons, tangerines, avocados. Beautiful trees, all dropping fruit onto private lawns. People treated them like rhododendrons or azaleas, as ornamentals with no other use. It was so odd to me, and it made me feel angry. I kept thinking, “Those are food trees! Eat that food!”

In Los Angeles, fruit on private property belongs to the property owner, but fruit in a public space is legally up for grabs. It’s public food. Organizations plant fruit trees in public parks as a community service. And fruit from trees on private property is public if it exists on public property. Like when it overhangs or falls onto the sidewalk.

There were some hard days that winter, when our paychecks from clients did not arrive on time. We would walk several blocks to the library to use their free wireless Internet access each day, and hope that the work we were doing would amount to a better life soon. There is a lovely lemon tree that overhangs the sidewalk around the corner and one rainy day on my way to the library we found one perfect lemon waiting for us in the middle of the sidewalk.

Lemon, as a fruit or as an essential oil, is said to have an uplifting effect on the spirit, and I can personally attest that it is true. I put that rain-splashed lemon in my jacket pocket and went to work with a smile that day. When we got home in the evening, a bit cold and damp from our walk, I boiled lemon slices in water with a touch of honey.

That boiled lemon was a mug full of sunshine and encouragement that began my connection to this landscape. I could finally feel kindness in the ground, see abundance instead of waste in the plants that thrive here. When I meditated, I felt my own slim root tie itself to the land with a tenuous slipknot.

My relationship with life in L.A. was beginning, but it needed a lot more nurturing to start feeling like home. That following summer we finally moved all our household goods from storage in Boston. I found all the mugs I missed and lined them on the kitchen shelf. I unpacked my grandmother’s mixing bowl and rolling pin (now mine) and put my giant stockpot on the stove. I settled into the kitchen, and discovered that cooking here is about more than eating. It is another fine way for me to ground.

I started with soups – the ones I used to make when we lived in Massachusetts. I like to make a new soup each week. My stockpot is big enough to make four or six lunch portions to freeze for later, plus several days of fresh lunch and dinner servings. For less than $10, two people eat delicious homemade soup all week long.

I made my favorite vegetable soup first. It’s based on cabbage, kale, carrots and potatoes, with peas and green beans in a tomato broth. Then, inspired by the cookbook Vegetable Soups from Deborah Madison’s Kitchen, I began exploring the world of cooking with dried beans.

The local wholesale club stocks 10-pound bags of black beans and pintos, and buying in bulk makes bean soup an even less expensive meal. It does not take much effort to soak dried beans overnight to make soup the next day. And when you work from home, you can get the soup going in the late morning and let the pot boil merrily all afternoon. I probably stop by to stir it more often than necessary, but I like to see and smell the soup periodically as it cooks. The soup and I get to know each other this way.

I use the pintos for a spicy pureed soup with accompaniments like brown rice, cilantro, grated cheddar, sour cream and a squeeze of lime. The soup is hearty and filling, and can also be boiled down until thick and used as the basis of a fantastic bean and cheese dip or as a filling for quesadillas. When I make black bean soups, I like to leave the beans whole. I’ve made both vegan black bean soup and an incredible three-bean chili with black, kidney, and great northern beans and organic ground beef.

Once I started cooking soups, a soup-of-the-week pattern developed. A freezer stocked with a variety of soups became a sort of soup security. Once that habit became established, we were always only 10 minutes away from a home-cooked meal of soup and sandwich, or corn bread or crackers or anything else to provide variety and interest.

Yes, I know cooking at home all the time is odd behavior in L.A. I’ve never lived in a place more devoted to restaurants and eating on the run. I also pay close attention to what people are buying in the grocery stores here, and I’m often the only one in line with a cart full of ingredients. Whole cabbages, carrots, onions, flour, sugar, eggs. The conveyors here are mostly covered in boxed meals, ready to heat and eat in minutes. And there’s nothing wrong with that, in theory. But it does leave out the joy and connection of cooking from scratch.

When you spend time peeling carrots, slicing them, roasting them in the oven for almost an hour until they caramelize, then boiling them with potatoes and onions and thyme in your own homemade chicken stock (that you made by simmering the collected bones and odd ends of chickens for an entire day) before finishing the soup by pureeing it with a stick blender and adding a touch of cream as a garnish, you build a relationship with that food. There is an intimacy in cooking. Your love is in there. And when you serve the soup to someone you love – a friend or family member – the care and joy and love that you put into cooking is transferred and shared.

No mass-manufactured foods are produced with this kind of love. It doesn’t matter how delicious the picture on the package looks, because calories alone cannot fill us up. We need to be nourished with more than fat and protein and carbohydrates. To cook for ourselves and our families – investing our time, attention and intention – is as sacred an act as prayer. Careful attention to preparing the foods we eat is another opportunity to give thanks and praise to the universe that provides such abundance, in 3-meal-a-day increments.

The word “cook” is a verb. It indicates an action. It can mean “prepare food by heating” or “perform” or “proceed well,” as in “Let’s get cooking!” It can mean “make do” or “concoct” or “invent” or “explore.” I’ve experienced cooking as an act of co-creation with the Divine, of combining the gift of ingredients – like a found lemon on the sidewalk – with my own labor and creative thought to produce connection, wellness, satisfaction, grounding, and nourishment. Cooking is only partly about eating and mostly about living fully as each meal connects to another and we travel forward into mystery.

Julie Cancio Harper blogs on food and the freelance life at learningtoeat.com.

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