“My favorite part of culinary arts is probably seeing people’s faces as they eat my food. Knowing that you did well and receiving compliments when you’re cooking makes you feel good about yourself after. The most fun is when you fail and you just eat whatever’s left.

Over the pandemic, I started cooking a lot because I had nothing else to do. I started doing these service projects at the homeless shelter with my friends. We wanted to bring that to the school and see if we could get more people to join. At that point, it was only one to three of us, and the max we could have at the homeless shelter was eight people, so we wanted more people to come. The homeless shelter lets students gain service hours doing meal service for lunch and dinner. They have all the ingredients, and you just need to make a meal out of it for 40+ people. A few plans I have for Culinary Club is to do more collaborations with service clubs so that we can help cook at other events or participate at food bank volunteering events. 

One really challenging recipe I followed was the Japanese souffle cheesecake because it would always sink and deflate before it baked. I overcame that by trying multiple times and finally getting the meringue to be stiff enough. I think that when you first start, all you can do is read off of recipes and follow them. I feel like the biggest challenge I faced was getting away from recipes and trying to explore more and test out new combinations. For example, instead of using regular chocolate chips, I’ve made caramel swirl cookies. I think a good starter would be cupcakes or muffins, and brownies are also a good place to start. So to beginner chefs: make sure you allocate a lot more time than you expect because one, there’s cleaning up, and two, you never know how long it’s gonna take for things to incorporate well, and there’s a lot of manual effort involved.”