Adam Huening
The decadent scents of garlic and thyme mingled playfully in the small kitchen in Grace Fiske’s home. As the chicken neared completion and the sauce under preparation, Fiske swiftly sliced fresh basil and barely shed a tear when she minced onions. She worked with smile etched on her faced as supper time descended on the home her father built on top of a hill in the middle of the woods.
In the living room, her father Rod hemmed the bottoms of his jeans by the pale sunlight streaming in through the window while her boyfriend Larry thumbed through a book as he lingered on the edge of a late afternoon nap. Through the narrow doorway leading from the living room, Fiske was in her domain, preparing another meal for her family.
“When I cook, I’m in my zone. Nothing stresses me out,” Fiske said as she slid the freshly chopped basil to the side of her cutting board. “It helps me de-stress.”
Fiske, a senior at Greensburg Community High School, is preparing to take her love for cooking out of the small kitchen of her home and into the big world of culinary arts by way of the Art Institute of Indianapolis. She got one step closer to her dream a few weeks ago when she entered the school’s Best Teen Chef Local Cook-off Competition and walked away with third place, a bronze medal and a $1,000 scholarship.
While the choice to follow her dream into the world of cooking was a fairly easy decision for her, it’s not a choice a lot of her fellow seniors are making.
“I hear a lot of nurses and a couple of doctors, but no one is really into the culinary arts. It’s kind of my own thing,” Fiske said. “It was this or a music teacher, but it came down to what do I want to do? More so, what do I want to work for? I wasn’t willing to work at being a music teacher. There’s a lot of people becoming music teachers, so why not be a chef?”
The thought of wearing the white hat and fancy white jacket brought a contented smile to her face. Her infatuation with cooking began when her father showed her how to make scrambled eggs when she was little, she said. Through the years, she has been perched in the kitchen trying different concoctions and dishes. Fiske is not a fan of cook books. Instead, she has learned her techniques the old-fashioned way, by failing and then succeeding.
“It’s a lot of trial and error. I’ve learned mostly from making mistakes, and I’ve made a lot of mistakes,” she said. “The real secret to everything is butter, not margarine. I grew up using butter so there’s no comparison.”
She has become the household Emeril whipping up nutritious meals and decadent baked goods for her family much to the delight of her mother, Julie, whom Fiske said is glad to have the nightly burden lifted from her. Everyone in the family now has there own particular dish. Macaroni and cheese from scratch is a household favorite as well as her stuffed shells and skillet Italian beef. Her brother, Roderick, who is an engineering major on full-ride scholarship at Purdue, was treated to homemade cinnamon rolls during his spring furlough. Fiske said her sister Liz declares her older sibling makes “killer peanut butter cookies and bread sticks.”
“I actually owe her a lifetime supply of breadsticks,” Fiske said.
The meal she prepared on that particular night, however, was the same she prepared for the judges at the Art Institute - chicken covered in a decadent sauce of her own concoction.
Fiske said she visited a few colleges before landing on the Art Institute. After being disappointed or uninterested in several of the state’s universities, she discovered the International Culinary School at the Art Institute. A little research quickly proved the school was offering the full course meal she wished to devour to help her burgeoning future.
“I knew it was the one, the right one almost immediately,” Fiske said. “When I first heard about it, I thought, ‘Wow, I didn’t know Indiana had cooking schools.’”
She was quickly accepted and began applying for as many scholarships as possible to help her pay for the more than $80,000 it would take to earn her bachelor’s degree in culinary management.
One of those scholarship was the cook-off. The school accepted 12 students into the competition. Fiske was an alternate. A few days before the cook-off in Indianapolis, some one dropped out and Fiske had to sear through the preparation work.
“Everyone else had two and a half weeks to prepare. I had two days,” Fiske said. “I guess you can say, I came from behind and snatched it from them. I was in kick butt mode.”
Everyone prepared the same dishes except the main course - the chicken. Fiske said they had to create an original recipe and sauce from the ingredients provided. She quickly came up with an award-winning creation that included basil, thyme, tomatoes, white wine and cream.
“The white wine and thyme sets it off. It’s what makes people say, ‘Wow, what’s that, it smells good,’” Fiske said. “The sauce has its own distinct flavor. The part I like about it is it has a lot of different colors playing on your eyes.”
The sauce and the whole performance earned Fiske a third place spot. She thinks her messy station might have cost her the gold, but she noted the mess is part of being a good cook. However, when it came down to award time and she was one of three left standing, her heart was racing.
“They announced my name and I was just ecstatic,” she said.
With satisfied customers at home and a bronze medal, Fiske feels she is on her way to becoming the chef she wants to be. After school, she hopes to return to Greensburg and do catering and eventually open her own restaurant. For now, she’ll be living with relatives near the school, commuting back and forth, creating new and exciting foods and making her dream a reality.
“My parents always told me to follow my dreams and do what I want to do, so that’s what I’m going to do,” Fiske.
