Self-Taught Homework #13: You make cheesesteaks for comfort and mini Wellingtons for hubris

As you enter the last traditionally oriented "Self-Taught" week, you make beef and parse out ambition, domesticity, and self-destruction.

After you serve individual Beef Wellingtons on Thursday, your boyfriend closes his eyes. That’s the signal for “this is good.”

When he returns to his body and his eyes open, he says, “I think it’s time for you to make your own recipes.”

You don’t say anything for a second. You’re a rule follower, a syllabus maker. As your knife slices through the pinker round of the small Wellington, you take a second to feel something small. Amazement? Pride? Before this week, would you even be able to imagine you’d be able to cook Beef Wellington, even if cooked as a miniature? Did you even know the elements of what Beef Wellington was?

But how could you plot out your own recipes if there is still so much you have never made before? What about all the technical, layered dishes—curries, coq au vin—that aren’t centered around store-bought pasta and chicken stock?

“I don’t know,” you respond after you take another bite of the meat pastry with a layer of a jammy mushroom sauce. “I think this ended up a …