Cook a Dish Using an Ingredient You Disliked as a Child.

“One night the entire dinner consisted of only boiled zucchini, boiled potatoes, and homemade bread and cheese. They called the zucchini “courgettes,” but they didn’t fool me: I knew that stuff when I saw it. I sat down with disappointment and dread. And then I tasted the zucchini. It was sublime, subtly multi-dimensional in flavor and velvety in texture, not like zucchini at all but some other fairylike, delicate thing of palest green, very fresh, with an herblike essence. That zucchini woke me up. Food was not at all what I had thought it was, it had possibilities and qualities that I had never suspected.”

“The first food that comes to mind is spinach. Ah, spinach in the canteen, in those days (70s), in my memory it was a kind of green mush, full of water, without much taste, that almost everyone hated. [...] Without really knowing why, one day when I was in my forties, I tried making some again at home, using fresh spinach, and it was a revelation! Since then, it's a vegetable I adore, and one I'm happy to make again as soon as the season starts up again.”