Cooking Food Tied to Memory

Think of the moment when you’re about to taste a dish you love.

Maybe you remember it from a small restaurant you wandered into once, or from a meal you ate so often it stopped feeling special — until you were far away from it. You might even have cooked it yourself before. And then you take the first bite, already expecting that familiar comfort.

And it’s just… wrong.

Sometimes you can point to what went off — the flavour, the texture, the balance. Sometimes you can’t. You just know this isn’t how it’s supposed to taste, and that makes the disappointment sharper than you expected.

Food memory works like that. Certain tastes become anchors. When a bowl of pad thai tastes exactly like it did on a pavement in Bangkok, or when syrniki taste the way they did when they were served to you for breakfast years ago, it brings back more than flavour. It brings back the feeling — comfort, discovery, familiarity — the reason that dish stayed with you in the first place.

That’s the kind of food I cook here.

I’ve lived outside my home country for almost fifteen years, and cooking has become my way of staying connected — not only to home, but to places I lived in and places I passed through and never quite let go of. In my kitchen, I try to recreate dishes that mattered. Not because they were impressive or complicated, but because tasting them again helps you understand something about the place they come from.

When I cook food tied to memory, I cook for how it felt the first time. Flavour matters, of course, but texture matters just as much. A dish can be technically correct and still feel wrong if that balance is missing.

I cook syrniki with texture in mind, because softness is what people remember most.
Pkhali, to me, is about the richness of Georgian spices and the way vegetables and walnuts come together to feel fresh and full at the same time.
Ramen is comfort food — the kind that made sense immediately when I first tasted it in Japan, and felt impossible to recreate at home until I learned how simple it could be when treated with care.

I rarely cook viral recipes or follow trends. This isn’t an international food blog trying to cover everything. Today Meow is a home archive of recipes for dishes that hold memories — of travel, of places lived in, of moments that stayed — and are worth cooking properly.

If you’re trying to recreate something you once ate and still remember, this is how I approach it.