料理
liào lǐ · HSK 7
to cook
🍲 料 ingredients + 理 manage = managing ingredients = to cook, cuisine
料 means material or ingredient; 理 means to manage or put in order. Together they mean handling things or, most commonly, handling food: to cook and the resulting cuisine. The 日本料理 (Japanese cuisine) sign uses this exact word.
料 — rice 米 + dipper 斗
料 combines 米 (rice/grain) with 斗 (a measuring dipper), depicting the act of measuring out grain. From this concrete sense it extended to 'to measure, estimate, anticipate' and to 'materials' (things measured out for use), as in 材料 'materials' and 预料 'to anticipate'.
理 — jade radical 玉/王 + village 里 (phonetic)
理 is a semantic-phonetic compound: the jade radical 王 (玉) on the left signals meaning, while 里 on the right gives the sound. It originally meant the natural veins or grain in a piece of jade, then extended to 'pattern,' 'order,' 'principle,' and finally the modern senses 'reason' and 'to manage.'