A recent meal I made for my wife: roasted chicken with wheat beer and orange gravy, molasses and orange-glazed carrots, and roasted brussels sprouts with red chile.

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Remembering my earliest attempts at cooking, like remembering my earliest stories, makes me wince. A bad piece of writing can be revised, but only so much can be done with a bad meal—and they’re rarely abandoned, as bad stories can be, so somebody usually has to eat it.

Now that I’ve spent years in the kitchen, I wish I could redeem those early efforts. Every Sunday night, I make a dish of my wife’s choosing, usually something I haven’t attempted before, from a cookbook I bought for her birthday. I make dinner most nights. Every once in a while, the meal doesn’t turn out as I planned, but it’s not a problem. There’s always tomorrow night. I wish I approached writing fiction with the same day-in, day-out attitude. I rarely have anxiety about preparing food.

But that wasn’t always the case.

In eighth-grade Home Economics, students worked in small groups because there were only so many kitchen stations. My group included Jessica, who took care of her younger siblings, and Larry, who is likely serving 25 to life somewhere for an unspeakable crime. We coasted on Jessica’s goodwill and culinary skills until that fateful day when the poor girl didn’t come to school. She was sick, so Mr. Future Criminal and I were on our own. Why it is important for students in the eighth grade to make cream puffs, I’ll never know. I’ll save you the excruciating details, but poor Larry and I failed miserably, spooning runny pudding onto rock-hard nuggets of browned dough just as the teacher stopped by to assess our finished product.

In college, as a vegetarian who lived at home in a family of meat-eaters, I eventually progressed beyond heating up cans of vegetables in the microwave. My most ambitious attempt involved re-creating a dessert—halva with blueberries—that I’d eaten when a Hare Krishna cooked a pre-show meal for a band I’d helped book and promote. Even though my version looked like purple Cream of Wheat, it didn’t taste bad.

In graduate school, my wife and I rented a house with a big kitchen, and my mom sent me my first cookbook. I made a lot of good food in those years, including a from-scratch Boston cream pie that I didn’t decide to make until midnight one evening, but I mostly remember the disasters, such as the baked pasta with chicken and gritty spinach—even though I thrice-washed the leafy greens—that I served to good-natured friends.

A decade ago, I made a mediocre-to-lousy dinner for two new professors in my department, a married couple, one of whom is now my (terrific) boss. At least once a semester, I suddenly recall that horrible night in a blinding flash—it involved four warning signs I’ve learned to identify when anticipating personal disaster: I drank too much and made a not-so-discreet trip to the bathroom to toss up my own mediocre-to-lousy cooking, engaged in boisterous conversation about Van Halen, and drunk-dialed one of my MFA professors. I hope my boss doesn’t remember that night. Recently, she told me that her first year “is a little fuzzy,” so I may be in the clear.

While the memories of these meals make me wince, I recognize that they played a small part in helping me develop as a cook, just as I recognize that my early fiction eventually led to better fiction. If I can think of my writing as something to make every day, with the knowledge that I will make something again tomorrow, so there’s no pressure, I know I would have an easier time slinging words across the page. Until then, though, the meals I make carry the extra duty of sustaining not only our bodies, but also my spirit. Even when I feel like a loser who’ll never again be able to string together enough words to make a compelling scene, let alone an entire novel, and when I fear I might snap and end up bunking with poor Larry in the state penitentiary, I almost always have enough energy to walk into the kitchen and see what I can rustle up for dinner. Like the baker serving cinnamon rolls to the grieving parents in Raymond Carver’s “A Small, Good Thing,” I fight off my worries by feeding people.

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