Like most Indonesians, my love language is food.

If you’re a tourist spending some time in the country, you might find it weird that hotel staff or new acquaintances ask you if you have eaten*. It was something that originated during the colonial times, they said. Most people couldn’t eat regularly those days, as food was scarce. When you met someone you cared about, you asked them if they had eaten—if they hadn’t, you shared your food with them.

It’s something that we carried within us, I believe. Food is something we’re always ready to share with friends, families, neighbours, and guests—from birthdays to graduations to funerals, we open our house and invite everyone to just serve themselves with food from the buffet or the dining table, or we pack a little bit of everything inside those carton meal boxes and deliver them to our neighbours, or carrying the boxes to the office to share with our colleagues.

Whether we’re celebrating or grieving, we mark every milestone in life with food.

So, of course, it was only natural that my cooking repertoire expanded exponentially when I moved to Amsterdam. I relearned how to make all the things I want to eat to sustain me and my mood throughout the seasons (so thankful for the Indonesian supermarkets around me, where I can get grilled fish paste, salted egg, or lime leaves). I slowly built my confidence and, after a few successful tries, tweaked the recipes and made them my own.

Stews, clear soups, porridges, and coconut-based broths such as rendang, sop, semur, gulai, bubur ayam, and opor for autumn and winter; stir-fries and grilled/fried/steamed dishes such as tumisan, pepesan, sate, gorengan, and balado for spring and summer.

Cooking the kind of meals I crave is my way of nurturing myself.

It’s funny because my friends and I are always asking each other, “What do you feel like eating?” instead of “What do you want to eat?” as if there’s a direct correspondence between how you feel and the kind of meal that matches the occasion (but, yes, of course, there is). We’ll brave 2 hours of traffic jam just to go to a certain street food stall, or even take the train to another city over the weekend for what we call “culinary adventure”—basically stuffing ourselves with good food the whole trip. Asking myself what I want to eat, going to the supermarket, and cooking it myself is pale in comparison to those efforts.

Food heals me and makes me feel better. I am a simple person at heart.

Naturally, cooking is my way of nurturing others, too.

They said you should not make any important decisions when you’re hungry. I don’t always have the right words, but I always have 20 minutes to cook more rice, can always whip some eggs with spring onions and shallots, and it doesn’t take 10 minutes to prepare stir-fried green beans and tempe with garlic and soy sauce. Hot jasmine tea pouring non-stop into your cups. Come, sit, eat. Take out some takeaway containers from the drawers. Do you want to bring some leftovers home?

This is what you need to know: if I ever cook for you, I actually love you.

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*) Another common question tourists usually find intrusive is, “Where are you going?” Actually, the person who asks doesn’t really want to know where you’re going; they just want to make small talk, so you can reply with something like “jalan-jalan” (going for a walk).