From Traciana’s Cuisine & Home Diary
I’m sitting at my kitchen table with a cup of tea that’s gone cold twice while I try to figure out how to write about something I’m still learning to see.
My grandmother never taught me anything. Not directly. But as I’m writing this first diary entry—Season 1 of Hustle Detox forcing me to slow down enough to see truths I was too busy to process—I keep thinking about her hands. How they moved through her kitchen with quiet certainty, like she was conducting some invisible orchestra. She’d hum while she cooked, not because she was performing joy, but because something in the rhythm of chopping and stirring just… brought it out of her.
I used to think she was just old-fashioned. All that fuss over setting the table properly, insisting we sit down to eat even when it was just leftover soup. “The kitchen is the heart of the home,” she’d say, and I’d roll my eyes because what did that even mean?
Now I’m here, decades later, trying to write about why I started paying attention to my kitchen, and I finally get it. She wasn’t talking about the room. She was talking about presence.
There’s this monk I met in Switzerland who told me that every meal is an opportunity for gratitude. Not the hashtag kind—the real kind. The kind where you actually pause and think about the hands that planted the seeds, the sun that helped them grow, and the distance this food traveled to end up on your plate. He said most people eat like they’re refueling a machine, but food is actually… communion.
I laughed when he said it because it sounded so mystical. But then I came home and caught myself eating breakfast standing up, scrolling through emails, treating my body like it was just another task to complete. And I thought about my grandmother’s hands. About the monk’s gentle smile. About how maybe the most radical thing I could do was just… sit down.
So I’ve been experimenting. Nothing dramatic. Just small shifts. Like actually tasting my morning coffee instead of treating it like caffeine delivery. I set my phone in another room when I eat lunch. Chopping vegetables slowly enough to notice the sound they make, the way they smell, how my shoulders relax when I’m not rushing.
And something is shifting. Not just in my kitchen, but in how I move through the rest of my day. Like when you start with intention in one small space, it ripples out into everything else.
I’m realizing my grandmother wasn’t trying to teach me about cooking. She was showing me how to inhabit my life differently. How to find the sacred in the ordinary. How love moves through small acts of care—even when you’re caring for yourself.
The monk wasn’t talking about food at all. He was talking about attention. About the choice to be present instead of just being efficient.
Maybe that’s what I’m really learning to write about in this diary. Not recipes or room arrangements, but the quiet alchemy that happens when we stop rushing through our lives and start actually living them. When we remember that how we do anything is how we do everything.
Even though we sit at our own table. Even though we hold our cup of tea.
Even though we choose to begin again, one small ritual at a time.
What I didn’t expect was how writing this down would become… something else entirely. Josh, my podcast producer and editor, keeps pushing me to go deeper with each revision. “What’s happening here, Traciana?” he’ll ask when I send him another draft. “What are you not saying?”
And with each red line, each margin note questioning my easy answers, I realize this isn’t just about food and home anymore. It’s about the way I’ve been sleepwalking through my own life. The way I’ve been treating everything—my body, my space, my daily rituals—like items on a checklist instead of opportunities for presence.
Josh sees patterns I don’t see. He’ll circle a paragraph and write, “This is where you’re avoiding something deeper.” And he’s right. I am avoiding something. The recognition that I’ve been living efficiently but not intentionally. That I’ve been optimizing everything except the experience of being alive.
So now these diary entries have become this intense excavation. Each one pulls me further into territory I never expected to explore. We’re developing this into something that feels… necessary. Not just for me, but for anyone who’s ever caught themselves rushing through their kitchen, their own life, wondering when presence became such a foreign concept.
— T
This is part of my ongoing exploration in the kitchen, at the table, and in the quiet spaces where life unfolds. More diary entries coming as I continue to piece together what my grandmother knew all along.
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