This Eid break, I decided to get together some of my male friends from the Balkans for a nice dinner composed of our favorite meals from back home. With eight people to feed and six dishes to prepare, I desperately needed everyone’s help, and so laid down my plan in a group Facebook message.

The instructions seemed pretty simple. One of the guys would find the cooking pans and dishes. Another would bring the ingredients to the kitchen and be responsible for the washing and the slicing. Someone would make pancakes — not even the mix, they just had to fry them — and the person who worked the least would prepare dessert.

I planned to start cooking at 4 p.m., so that we could eat by 7 p.m. In my mind, this timeline was realistic. In real life, 7 p.m. came around and only one of the dishes was ready: the appetizer.

“You’re sure you can separate the egg yolks from the egg white?” I asked one of my helpers as I stirred the soup and co-ordinated the main dish.

“Of course,” he replied confidently.

Yet five minutes later, when I passed by my egg-separator to check on how he was doing, I saw that our last six eggs were floating together in a big bowl — orange yolks submerged in a sea of egg white. My helper was holding a spoon in his hand.

“Can we separate them like this?” he brandished the spoon circularly, miming what I gathered to be the fishing of egg yolks.

Everyone but me was dying of laughter. My friend Stjepan could not breathe: “Man, I can’t believe you just did that.”

Neither could I.

Obviously feeling sorry for what he did, my egg separator then tried to fix the damage by opening a can of coconut milk that I needed for the soup. He ended up cutting himself, and so I ran to my room for some Band-Aids, juggling my multiple roles of Chef, Nurse, Cooking Instructor and Girl Who Is Scared of Blood. I played all of these roles without much grace, of course.

By the time the person washing the vegetables handed me a plastic bag in which the bell peppers were floating, I realized I’d had enough. If I had done the cooking alone, things would have gone far more efficiently; my helpers were kind and well-meaning, but they were making too much of a mess. “Shall I keep them in the kitchen or exile them forever?” I wondered in frustration.

The moment I realized I was a feminist was when I first started noticing an injustice in the separation of chores back home. After lunch — always prepared by grandma — the men would retire to their bedrooms for an afternoon nap. We, the women, would stay to watch an episode of a soap opera and wash the dishes. If I set the table, my sister would clean it, and vice-versa. Our brother never participated since no one asked him to. As we grew up, it became normal to do everything as the men stood on the side.

Many years later, at NYU Abu Dhabi, I am now enrolled in the literature course Global Women Writing. In this class, we grapple with big questions concerning the intersections of gender and literature, economics, politics, psychology and more. I learned that Virginia Woolf believed women needed rooms of their own in order to write fiction. Yet this idea didn't solve my dilemma; Woolf had not offered advice on how to share the kitchen. I had to think harder. Shelley? Adichie? Brontë?

I know that bad cooking skills are not attached to the Y chromosome, but even as a high school student, I was already taking up the responsibility of food preparation. I believe in grand ideas of equality, and yet in my own kitchen I was taking the role prescribed to me by society.

I was not aware of this earlier, but being likeable is important to me. Society has signaled to us that, in order to be liked, a girl must be nice, nurturing, kind and warm. Traditionally speaking, is there any better way to show these characteristics than by preparing a hot meal?

According to researchers at Stanford University, there exists a paradox when it comes to women and likeability: “The more competent a woman is, the less likeable she is judged to be. The opposite also holds true: the more likable a woman is, the less competent.” Think of Hillary Clinton running for president. What do people hold against her?

Despite my kitchen trials with my male friends, I decided to go back and show each one of them how to wash, cut and prepare vegetables. The cooking took three hours longer and the kitchen was left a mess, but I felt better with myself for making a small impact and applying big concepts.

I do not take all these ideas about society, equality and feminism for granted anymore. The dinner was amazing. I know that next time I cook, I will have six good friends to help me.