With every chop of a knife, sizzle of a pan and roaring flame of a grill, juniors Sam Grillo and Pedro Aldaco, founders of Pinewood’s cooking club, are cultivating a space where students can explore cooking creatively.
Grillo and Aldaco were inspired to start the club due to a shared passion for cooking and creating food, a practice that was integrated in both of their families’ cultures from a young age.
“Being Italian and Filipino, [my family] was very focused on food,” Grillo said.
As a result, Grillo and Aldaco aim to teach members the basics of cooking while also encouraging them to gain independence in the kitchen and experiment with more complex recipes by themselves. Although Grillo and Aldaco don’t have an official kitchen, they use portable grills and equipment to conduct their meetings outside, in the Murphey Patio.
The club also serves as a melting pot of cultural cuisines from around the world, and Grillo and Aldaco attempt to elicit that cultural originality and diversity from their members.
“We teach everything, but we are trying to get kids to teach their own recipes from their own households and other foods from around the world,” Grillo said.
Grillo and Aldaco also said they appreciated the challenge of managing a wide variety of experience levels within the club.
“When we started our first lesson, some people would go ahead and some would lag behind,” Grillo said. “But it’s about checking in with everyone to know where they are at.”
The cooking club is a fun place for Grillo and Aldaco to express themselves through cooking and bring together students who want to do the same. Aldaco shared a story of a student cutting extra lettuce during a lesson and eating it on the side, which he said made him and the rest of the club laugh.
Cooking club is a cultural mixing pot here at Pinewood, pun intended. Behind Grillo and Aldaco’s leadership, the club aims to see more success as it continues its conquest of culinary expeditions from across the world.
