Chef Katie Cook has been preparing culinary fare professionally for more than 15 years, and has been in the food service industry for significantly longer. As a graduate of the Oregon Culinary Institute, she has worked in well-known restaurants of the Portland area such as Ciao Vito, Veritable Quandary, and Castagna. Additionally, Katie worked for three years at the luxury destination fishing resort Steamboat Bay Fishing Club in Alaska, two of those as the Executive Chef, where she received glowing reviews in Forbes Magazine. Her storied career also includes having her own private chef business and being the Servsafe instructor for the Oregon Restaurant and Lodging Association, helping countless culinary professionals all over Oregon achieve a national level of food safety certification. She has been teaching cooking for ten years, seven of which were at Portland's Culinary Workshop (now-closed), and she is currently also the Assistant Director at Little Kitchen Academy, where she teaches children exclusively.

"Teaching at Kitchen Culture gives me the opportunity to share some of what I have learned with people in my own community! I love working with other people who are passionate about food, and want to know more. I want my students and neighbors to walk away with as much information as possible, being confident in the new skills they have learned. But I also want them to laugh and have a great time doing it!"

Leta began her love affair with pasta as a toddler seated around her Sicilian great-grandmother's dining table, where Sunday suppers were an all day affair.

Later in life, a passion for cooking led her to Oregon Culinary Institute and on to a position at Union Square Café in New York City. The majority of her time there was spent working on the pasta station and in the pasta prep room. There she learned the value of starchy pasta water, to source seasonal ingredients, and how fresh pasta is made. An obsession was born.

After leaving the fast-paced world of restaurant kitchens and world travel to raise her two children, she found a new avenue for her passion through teaching pasta-making classes in Portland, OR.

Pasta Maia was launched in 2017 with the desire to foster community through pasta. In traditional Italian kitchens, the matriarch is the pastaia, providing hand-made pasta for her family daily. It is with this spirit that Pasta Maia is brought to you.

Melinda began teaching 20 years ago at Le Cordon Bleu, where she found a love for fostering the passion of other young culinarians. There, she became a renegade and a pirate, leaving to become a Kitchen Ninja at Oregon Culinary Institute where she taught, among many other classes, Food Ethics and Social Responsibility, alongside a wide variety of the weekend classes for consumers. At OCI, she once again discovered a love for teaching people that cooking can be fun and not a chore, that a person’s knife skills can improve dramatically over the course of a couple of hours, and that the joy people have when they learn something new brings them back to their own kitchen with more confidence. She ran Portland’s Culinary Workshop with her best friend for ten years doing just that, and taking people on world culinary tours.

Sam is originally from the Catskill Mountains in upstate NY, where at 15, she got a job at a farm-to-table restaurant in a country town. The owner baked his own bread and she became entranced by the process and the product. This early experience of the “slow food” movement shaped her outlook on health, the craft of food culture, and the connections we build with others around food. She continued to work in restaurants for the next 20 years, learning, experiencing and enjoying what it means to work with and in the food world.

After moving to Oregon in 2014 and discovering the glorious bakery culture in Portland, Sam took a “proper” class at Tabor Bread. She’s baked sourdough (almost) every week since then and in 2018, after becoming a Certified Holistic Nutritionist, she started teaching sourdough workshops. She hopes more folks can experience the joy of home-baked bread, and the connection it can foster to ourselves, our health, and our community.

Cooking and storytelling are at the heart of Swati’s creative pursuit. And yet no matter where her stories adventure to, she most often comes back to that which is most comforting—the everyday Indian cooking of her upbringing, in which lies an incredible alchemy. Like the act of turning dried legumes and ordinary vegetables into beautiful, colorful, balanced plates of food using only the manipulation of spices, and the elements of taste and texture. Swati appreciates the Ayurvedic principles that accompany cuisine, and believes that food is medicine. Her style of cooking helps tie her and her family to their cultural heritage, something she never wants to lose.

Swati holds a degree in Food Studies from New York University, and currently lives in Portland, OR with her two children.

“Making dinner is my daily spiritual practice. When I walk into my kitchen after a long day, chopping vegetables, opening my spice box, the sounds and aromas of cooking for my family, are somehow both calming and exciting at the same time. I hope that my classes will encourage you to approach Indian cooking with ease, joy, and inspiration.”

A passion for local produce and an obsession with the art and science of food preservation inspired Traci Hildner to create Lucky Larder in 2015.

An avid vegetable gardener, it was those first few successful gardening years that led her to seek out various methods for extending the life of her harvest and reducing food waste. In addition to her own kitchen experiments and studies, Traci completed Acidified Foods & Better Process Control training with the Oregon Process Authority and is a Master Food Preserver and Family Food Educator for the Oregon State Extension Service. Combining her experience in produce preservation with her masters degree in teaching, Traci established Lucky Larder to share her knowledge and food with others.

In 2022, searching for a permanent teaching kitchen for her preservation classes, Traci decided to open Kitchen Culture, offering a wide variety of cooking classes alongside a consignment kitchenware store.