Andres had cooked his grandmother's chicken mole a hundred times, but he had never measured anything. Abuela Gloria didn't believe in measuring. She tossed in chiles by the handful, poured broth until the pot "looked right," and eyeballed the chocolate. When he asked her how much cumin went in, she shrugged and said, "Enough."

That worked fine at home. It did not work in Chef Barrera's culinary arts class. "For the regional competition, every team turns in a written recipe," she announced on Monday. "Exact amounts. The judges will cook from your card, and if they can't make your dish taste the way yours does, you lose points."

Andres's stomach dropped. He could make the mole with his eyes closed. He could not write it down.

On Saturday, he showed up at his grandmother's kitchen with a set of measuring cups, a notebook, and a small kitchen scale. "I'm going to follow you around," he said. "Every time you grab something, I'm going to measure it before it goes in."

Abuela Gloria laughed at him, but she let him do it. Her handful of dried chiles turned out to be six. Her "enough" cumin was a teaspoon and a half. When she poured the broth, he stopped her and measured: four and a half cups. By evening his notebook was stained with sauce, and his recipe card was finished.

At the competition, Andres followed his card exactly, step by step, the way the judges would. When the mole was done, he tasted it. It was close. It was very close. But it wasn't Abuela's.

He thought about the card, and then about his grandmother's hands moving over the pot. He added a pinch of salt, tasted again, and smiled.

That night, before he handed in the final copy of his recipe, he added one more line at the bottom of the card: Taste it. Then trust yourself.