There are things you do not realize you will miss until they are gone.
Not the big things, those you anticipate. You prepare yourself for the distance, the time zones, the holidays spent in a different hemisphere. What catches you off guard are the small, ordinary things. The smell of something specific on a Sunday morning. The texture of a food you never thought twice about because it was simply always there.
But somewhere in my first months in Houston, standing in a grocery store aisle reading labels on corn flour packages, I realized I was trying to reconstruct something that back home required no effort at all. It just existed. Someone made it, it appeared, and life continued. Here, it became a project, a small weekly ritual of getting it right, or close enough.
Then there are the things I have not been able to recreate at all. Some foods are not just recipes. They are geography. You cannot fully import them because part of what makes them what they are is where they come from.
What surprised me about Houston is how much Latin food exists here, and how different it is from what I grew up with. The city has an extraordinary food culture, rich and diverse and generous. But Latin food in the United States is its own thing. It has adapted, merged, and invented itself into something new. I have learned to appreciate that. I have also learned that appreciating something new does not mean you stop missing the original.
Cooking away from home teaches you things a recipe cannot. It teaches you which parts of your identity live in your hands, in your instincts, in the way you season without measuring. It teaches you that food is not just nourishment, it is continuity. A thread that connects who you are now to who you have always been, no matter how far you are from where you started.
I am still learning to cook in this city. Still figuring out which substitutions work and which ones betray the original entirely. Still finding, occasionally, an ingredient that makes something taste almost right.
Almost is enough, for now. Almost means I have not forgotten.
