Did I plan on baking every single recipe in the book, front-to-back, no recipe left untouched? Absolutely not.

So what happened? What pushed me to continue going, churning through recipe after recipe until I hit the magic number 89? I boiled it down to three main answers.

I feel like I grew up on Greek cuisine. Almost every weekend, I would go to the same Greek restaurant in the town over with my grandparents for dinner. I would always order avgolemono soup (I called it lemon soup at the time). As I grew up, I discovered Cava, a Mediterranean quick-serve restaurant that has exploded in the D.C. metro area in recent years. And now, I had another opportunity to explore one of my favorite types of food with this Greek Cuisine Adventure.

When I first think of Japanese food, sushi of course comes to mind. What comes next, nigiri and sashimi. After that—edamame, gyoza, udon, and then I’m really wracking my brain for specific dishes. Given my obvious lack of Japanese cuisine knowledge, I wanted to use this week’s Cuisine Adventure to expand my palette and try new dishes. Japanese culture and cooking is so rich with tradition and variety that this was the perfect week for me to really learn and explore.

Out of the six dishes I cooked, five of them I had eaten in Spain. This presented an interesting opportunity for this Cuisine Adventure because I could compare my re-created dishes to my more traditional food memories.

I’ve never been to Korea, have never eaten at a Korean restaurant, and have never cooked a Korean dish before. So coming into Korean week, I was a little overwhelmed with navigating Korean cuisine and concerned if I’d be able to find accessible recipes that my family would enjoy eating.