Selena Gomez Says Cooking with Boyfriend Benny Blanco 'Really Grounds' Her: 'It's OK to Just Be Simple'

Selena Gomez says cooking with Benny Blanco is one of their favorite ways to spend time together.

On Wednesday, September 4, Gomez, 32, opened up about her relationship with the music producer, 36, while hosting a virtual event on Instagram for her Rare Beauty brand.

During the question and answer session, the musician spoke candidly about the advice she could give her younger self.

“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” Gomez told the crowd. “I was very strict with myself. If my teacher scolded me for talking too much, I would go home and think about it all day. If I fell in love with a boy and he asked a girl out in front of me, I would be a wreck forever .”

Timeline of Selena Gomez and Benny Blanco’s relationship

Gomez and Blanco.

Selena Gomez/Instagram

I was too hard on myself, she added. “I didn’t think I was enough or sometimes I thought I didn’t fit in and in the end you are just who you were made to be.”

Gomez was asked how she learned to fight those feelings over the years.

“This might sound a little silly, but just step back and just look around, you know?” she said. “For example, at home I like to just go and sit outside and put my feet in the grass and sit there and maybe listen to music and just try to find things that really ground me.”

Selena Gomez during an Instagram event.

Courtesy of Instagram

“I like fresh food and stuff. I started getting into it because of my boyfriend,” she said of Blanco. “I’m just in the garden picking out food to cook with. It sounds so silly and petty, but the older you get the more you realize that it’s okay to just be simple and have simplicity.”

The Disney alum also shared one of the couple’s favorite things to cook together – and opened up about sharing their creations with friends and family.

“One of the things I do, for example, is we make a bunch of tamales, which is one of my favorites, and we’ll give them to a bunch of random friends,” Gomez said. “We’re going to do it randomly one day and it’s a long process, but it’s so much fun. We’re going to listen to music and have drinks and make tamales and go give it to our friends.”

Gomez and Blanco at a Los Angeles Lakers game in January 2024.

Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times / Getty

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Food has played an important role in the couple’s relationship from the beginning. Back in March, Blanco — who is also an author Wide Open: A Cookbook for Friends — revealed Gomez’s favorite dishes that she often cooks for her.

“She’s a big fan of steak. So anything that contains steak. Or, I just brought her yesterday, she’s not in my book, but I brought her, she likes soup,” Blanco revealed at the time. “So yesterday she was filming a series so I made some soup and brought it to her.”

Also in March, Gomez raved about her boyfriend’s kitchen, showing off its custom design and personal touches in an Instagram video.

“One of my favorite places is in… his kitchen,” Gomez wrote in the video, which shows work surfaces filled with vegetables, meats and other foods in a pan covered in aluminum foil.

The Just the murders in the building the star and the pop producer first publicly confirmed their relationship in December 2023, but Gomez then wrote on social media that the couple had been together for six months before the official revelation.

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Source: HIS Education