Cooking for friends is a creative act. You’re designing an experience people can eat.

Feeding people is design work with a deadline and an audience in the room. You are choosing an order, a pace, a smell at the door and how much of the evening happens in the kitchen, and all of that is composition. The food is only part of it, because the experience is the thing you are actually making. It is also one of the few creative acts that disappears on purpose.

Cook for two or three people this month, even something plain, and decide one detail ahead of time that is yours. Notice what they remember afterwards.