Hey y'all, I'm Ayden! I'm a recent UW Madison graduate and forever foodie moving towards the next step of life. 

I come from a food family where supper time meant that, no matter how little money or patience for one another we had, we all would share a meal around our table. Since I could hold a knife I've been perched on a stool in my Grandma's kitchen, learning family recipes and the art of nourishing others through food. I remember standing on a stool as my Grandma guided my hand while I learned to properly season meat and vegetables. She taught me how to produce even cuts before I knew their technical names and kept me busy peeling more potatoes than I could count. Her watchful French eyes held my contributions to a high standard and I quickly learned how to do it right the first (...well, maybe the second) time. 

My Aunt's kitchen always curated culinary adventures! I remember venturing to the local Korean market to sample plump dumplings, steamy noodle soups, and crispy bibimbap from their attached hawker center. My first taste of sweet Korean short ribs wrapped in a tender lettuce leaf unleashed flavors, unlike anything I'd ever tasted before and transported me into a new world of flavor combinations. After sampling our fare, we would use the vague menu description, our palates, and pure luck to gather the necessary ingredients to attempt to recreate the delicacies we just savored. Together, we spent our grocery store runs perusing produce, picking up those unfamiliar to us to bring home and taste for the very first time together. Aunt Helen taught me the insurmountable joy which comes from exploring food and the cultures from which they are born. She taught me that culinary mishaps only bare more delectable second attempts. She taught me that shallots bring immense flavor to any dish and that mashed potatoes should always be infused with garlic. 

On our birthdays, my brother and I received the massive responsibility of choosing a special birthday dinner for the family to enjoy. This almost always meant one thing: giant bowls of steaming muscles in a white wine sauce, crusty bread, and shrimp cocktail. Null were the days of pizza parties or french fries, we knew that this was our chance for much more indulgent! My parents never shied from introducing us to new foods and my Grandparents were always quick to remind us that 'during the war, we'd be happy to eat *insert whichever food we felt finicky about*'. I learned to love everything and to ask questions about the food on my plate - its origins, its ingredients, its process. I became obsessed with knowing how food is made.  
 

My passion for food never faded. For the last five years, I've worked in varying cafes and coffee shops where I intimately learned the importance of the ritual of food and the not so sweet nectar of coffee. I barred witness to how an expertly prepared latte could turn a day around for a mom carting around their wild trio of toddlers or could be the final push for a student to power through zir's last stretch of a final paper. In college, my most memorable moments with friends almost always congregated around the table - yearly Friendsgivings where we gathered around the table to celebrate one another amidst a wide array of homemade dishes, birthday celebrations at our favorite restaurants and bars, long days huddled around a cafe table avoiding the necessary task of grinding out a paper, or summer nights spent sitting at the Terrace with a pitcher of beer and a brat.

 

As I grew older I began to explore the roots of the cuisines I grew up loving and which I only recently tried. My fascination with the art of cookery is deeply entangled with my desire to learn what brings people together and how abundance may be cultivated through circumstance and communal ingenuity. Learning how and why people turned wheat into bread, turned cabbage into kimchi, or intestines into chitterlings teaches us about resilience, patience, our connection to our land and to each other. 

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When COVID-19 moved into our lives, I found solace in being able to prepare delicious and nurturing homemade meals for myself and my partner. These meals offered not only a sense of routine in my newfound unemployment but also functioned as an act of kindness towards myself and her. It rapidly became clear that our new normal meant that I wouldn't soon return to the foodservice industry. I decided to try to turn my passion into something which could help support me financially - making and selling food for my friends & community members who may not always have the time to allocate towards homemade meals. 

Join me as I explore new recipes, uncover new (to me) histories, and learn more about how and why food runs so deeply in who we are. 

Cheers, 
Ayden

(he/him & they/them)