I slide into my seat at a table set for ten, greeting the nine other exchange students with a smile. The sound of simmering meat and vegetables exits the kitchen, filling the air with a rich aroma of sauces and oils. Manuela stirs the food within the cast-iron pan and pops her head into the dining room where we all sit. “Un momentito, un momentito!” she calls as I sip from my glass, my stomach growling quietly. At two in the afternoon, I am ready to eat. In Spain, lunch is the most vital meal of the day. It is a time known as “siesta,” or “nap,” when all businesses close for two hours and students and workers return to their homes to enjoy a meal with their family. The other students living in my house are from all areas of the world: China, Italy, London, Southern Spain, Serbia, and Montana. Even though each student speaks a distinct native language, we all share one interest: the study of Spanish. 

After the sound of the stovetop stops, I turn to watch Manuela and her sister carry an enormous pan into the room. They place it in the center of the table and sing in unison, “que aproveche!” The food within the dish resembles a work of art: yellow and orange rice, juicy red peppers, pinto beans, sliced onions, green olives, chopped chicken and steak, and seafood all come together to form a symmetrical, authentic Spanish dish called paella. The colors layered throughout the dish are vibrant; shrimp still in their shells, their eyeballs intact and whiskers long, arch around the edge of the bowl. The oil continues to simmer and pop in the pot as Manuela picks up the large ladle. Just as my own grandmother does at meals, Manuela serves me a mountainous portion of food. Even as I say “basta, basta,”and attempt to grab my plate from her hands, she spoons more of the meal on the dish. I sigh and smile to myself as she places it in front of me, the rice and beans spilling over the edges of the plate. The other students dig into their plates around me. A young, handsome British boy shovels the rice into his mouth while the two reserved Chinese girls carefully cut their pieces of chicken and seafood into tiny slices. The steam of the food twists and turns in the air below my nose, and I scoop up a forkful of rice and vegetables to a bite that tastes unlike any other. Rich, but saucy-sweet, the paella warms my tongue. Its chicken is easily cut, cooked to perfect tenderness by Manuela. The vegetables are soft and coated with sweet sauce. The shrimp and calamari are fresh from the Spanish seaside. Each bite is better than the last. 

Before traveling to Spain on my semester abroad, I had tried paella only once. Every Christmas Eve, my family visits our neighbor’s house. The mother in the home is a lively, Puerto-Rican woman who is passionate about cooking and serving her family and friends. She makes her own version of paella laced with tomatoes and meat and mushrooms in a pot half the size as Manuela’s. When I tried her recipe one Christmas Eve, I was amazed. Paella is the ideal balance of starch, protein, and vegetable. I felt like I was nourishing my body, and also enjoying my meal. I thought that her dish was incredible. It was not until I tasted Manuela’s recipe that I realized that the paella I had tasted that Christmas Eve was average. Manuela’s recipe was incomparable. It was something in the juices. 

One afternoon, I observed her cook her masterpiece. I peered over Manuela’s shoulder in her tiny kitchen, a kitchen that could squeeze three people at most and contained a mere oven and sink. The radio was on, Spanish chatter and music exiting the speaker, and Manuela was humming a soft tune. The oil popped in a pan full of vegetables while the rice boiled under the water. “Necesitas creer este plato con paciencia,” she instructed me, stirring and sifting the pans on the stove. Her hands were fast as she chopped up more vegetables effortlessly. They moved around the stove in a blur, mixing and tossing and sprinkling food and spices and salts from their bags. After the rice was finished baking into the sauce, Manuela allowed me to decorate the top of the dish with the whole shrimp bodies. I was an artist. I carefully placed each shrimp symmetrically beside one another, creating a circle of pink at the top of the pan, as Monet does on canvas. “Que bonita,” she said to me when I arranged the last shrimp in its place, smiling and pinching my cheek. To me, cooking the paella felt difficult with multitasking and a constant movement. But for Manuela it was easy. She has hosted exchange students in her apartment for fifteen years and cooks paella once a week. She told me that it was her mother’s recipe, and she learned it from her as a child. I can picture her as a young girl standing on a stool in her mother’s kitchen, her mother leading her small hands as she stirs the pan, similar to my own experience with her. 

I connected with Manuela’s kind, gentle presence. As a host mother, she lives financially off of having students circle in and out of her home. Friends had previously told me horrific stories of students being placed in homes where the families were rude and had no interest in them, yelling at them to take shorter showers and refusing to let them in the kitchen in between mealtimes. But Manuela was a giver. Each afternoon, I would return to a freshly made bed. The showers were long and warm. She would allow the Chinese girls to cook a homemade, Asian meal in her kitchen with ease, and when they nearly set the kitchen on fire, she laughed about it. More than that, I loved when she would run her fingers through my ponytail and call “que guapa, mi hija!” Her tiny apartment was bursting with people from around the world. It felt like home. Her paella was a small piece of the incredible adventure I experienced while living under her roof. 

Manuela’s paella opened me up to trying new, authentic foods while I was in Europe. On my trip to Amsterdam, I tasted Dutch pancakes from a quaint diner. Drenched in syrup and doused in fresh berries, the pancakes were thin and crispy and sent me into a state of euphoria. While I was in Italy, I sampled roasted duck and sweet sardines. In Portugal, I ate lemon custard tarts, a signature Portuguese dish, which were cold and tangy. Each of the new foods I tasted opened me up to a different culture, even if I found them hard to swallow. I felt less like a tourist and more like a native. 

But nothing can compare to Manuela’s paella. I went to restaurants in southern and northern Spain and ordered the chicken paella on the menus. With each bite, it tasted as though something was missing. It could have been that there wasn’t enough spice added to the rice’s sauce, or that the vegetables were dryer than usual, but I think it was something more than that. The paella that I tasted at Manuela’s table was cooked by a woman with a love for her food. Her enthusiastic spirit mixed into the pan and united the flavors. Her vibrant laugh that echoed throughout the house, vivacious energy when Barcelona won the football game, and deep care for those around her all emanated from her and into the dish. From now on when I taste paella, I will remember Manuela’s apartment at mealtime. I will imagine the table full of kind people, and I will hear the rolling sound of the Spanish “r” off of everyone’s tongues, and I will see the pan of color resting in front of me. I will relax into my seat. A warmth of gratitude will fill my chest. I’ll know I am home.