There are few places where Row (she/her) feels more at home than in a kitchen. Cooking is her happy place. And food is her love language, especially the soul food she grew up learning to make at her grandmother’s side: collard greens and candied yams, mac and cheese, all kinds of comfort-food classics.
“I had always wanted to pursue culinary, but I kept pushing my dream to the back burner,” she said recently, reflecting back on the first time enrolled in job training at FareStart, almost 20 years ago.
The timing wasn’t right for a whole host of reasons. Things are different now.
After years of working in the warehousing industry, Row was starting to feel ready for a change, when she was laid off from her job at a building supply company. It was time to give FareStart another chance. She picked up right where she left off, just as her 5-year-old daughter started kindergarten.
Row was antsy to get in the kitchen and start leveling up her cooking skills, but she had to take a step back first. Like all FareStart Food Pathway Program students, she spent her first month focusing on basics: life skills, resumes, thinking critically about different career paths and whether culinary really feels like the right fit.
“That taught me patience,” Row said. “It was what I needed at the moment. I just didn’t know it right at first.”
When the time finally came to start training in the kitchen, she could tell right away she was right where she belonged.
“It was so cool,” she said, “to just feel that ambiance and the trainers just zooming around in a peaceful way.”
Row listened intently to all the fundamentals of kitchen safety Chef Traiel (he/him) taught while guiding the class step by step through making sandwiches for FareStart’s Community & School Meals. Stacking turkey sandwiches on ciabatta rolls with pesto mayo, tomato jam and red wine pickled onions took Row back to the days when she would have FareStart meals as a residential counselor at DESC, where she supported people experiencing homelessness on their journey to stable housing.
As her kitchen confidence grew at FareStart, one day Row asked if she could use some leftover peaches to make a cobbler. At first, she thought she’d make it like she always did — without following a recipe. Then Chef Traiel convinced her it was worth her time to measure all the ingredients.
“The reason I want you to learn this is because you want to be able to make this again and again,” she remembers him explaining. “And if you’re out sick, somebody else can do the same thing you did without you being there.”
It was one of her favorite lightbulb moments at FareStart.
“I made enough for everybody to try,” she reminisced. “Even folks all the way upstairs came down. It was so good!”
So good that Chef Traiel realized Row was ready to shift her focus to the front of the house, where she learned all about “expo,” where a chef checks every ticket, makes sure every plate looks good, then makes the hand-off to a server. She learned to “love that fast pace when we get on all those tickets coming in. It can get overwhelming, but you can’t freak out.”
Week after week, Row showed up with an unstoppable eagerness to become a better chef. She could hardly believe how fast the program flew by. At graduation, she held her head high and felt proud of the accomplishment she and her classmates were celebrating.
“I love the fact that I put my mind to something, and I completed it,” she said. “It was a very emotional and exciting moment.”
Row is continuing her culinary education at Renton Technical College, where she reports for duty at 5:30 a.m. when she’s on the breakfast rotation, takes classes until early afternoon, tries to squeeze in some studying before picking up her daughter from after-school care, cooking dinner, getting her to bed, then hitting the books again.
It’s a lot. It’s exhausting. And she loves it.
“I’ve been through some trials and tribulations over the years,” she said. “Sometimes I go outside with my chef jacket on, and people are like, ‘You’re a chef?’ And I’m like, ‘Yes, I am.’ I feel almost famous.”
Learn more about our Food Pathways Program and other graduates, like Juju, Tennessee, Jessi and Jason.
