Anyone Can Cook

By Vienna Alexander, ’25 English, Professional and Technical Writing

An egg makes a satisfying crack against the edge of the glass bowl. A whisk clunks back and forth against the bowl in a persistent, swirling motion. Around the spacious room tucked just inside the SJSU Wellness Center, pans sizzle while mouths salivate, and the space quickly fills with pleasant aromas and chatter. Household ingredients become delicious meals as San José State students level-up their cooking competencies. In the Cooking Healthy, Eating Well (CHEW) kitchen, anyone can learn to cook.

CHEW cooking classes are free workshops that teach SJSU students how to prepare quick and easy meals catered to a college student’s time, budget and cooking equipment. The recipes use seasonal, low-cost ingredients, and many things can be made from scratch. For example, at the taco demonstration this semester, participants mixed base ingredients, kneaded the resulting dough and then cooked it in a pan to make tortillas.

College students have busy schedules, and oftentimes the easiest task to delegate is preparing food. Similarly, making nutritional, healthy choices can easily become less of a priority. Nutrition correlates with energy levels — the life force that students need to get through that next paper or exam. This makes cooking skills a great asset, but they take time to learn. And while there are many resources online to learn how to cook, nothing compares to in-person, hands-on experience. For an SJSU student, taking their first cooking course can be the first step to transforming the way they approach nutrition and cooking.

“Once students go to their first cooking class, they see that it’s possible to make something with the kinds of ingredients they have at home,” says CHEW Instructor Zachary Spence, ’26 Nutritional Science, Dietetics. “They feel more empowered to cook once they’ve done it before.”

The classes are offered throughout the semester, with a broad range of recipes. The registration fills up quickly, with students eager to enter (and re-enter) the CHEW kitchen. This spring had 10 courses, including recipes for onigiri, Japanese pudding, vegan pineapple fried rice, breakfast tacos, sweet potato and chickpea curry, crepes and fettuccine alfredo.

Delicious and nutritious

While they may not be directing you inside your hat like a certain famed rodent with a knack for cooking, the CHEW instructors are in your corner, guiding and supporting you through each step of the recipes. 

“I think it’s really fun just because it’s a safe environment where making mistakes is not an issue,” says Katelan Liang, ’25 Nutritional Science, Food Science. “You’re in a space where you can do it because there are people who can help guide you through it.” 

Liang is a lead CHEW instructor who shares her deep love of cooking with students. “I always loved cooking growing up and I think being able to teach cooking demos in general is a very rewarding process because you get to see a lot of people who might be beginners or nervous to cook, learn and gain the confidence to do it.”

Since CHEW instructors are SJSU students too, they can relate to balancing their academic workloads with the time necessary to cook nutritious food. This also impacts how they curate recipes in order to make them doable for other college students. As Liang explains, “I think being in college and living on my own has most definitely forced me to be a better chef and to improvise a lot, because there are a lot of times where following a recipe is expensive.”

The environment of the classes also forms a community among both students and instructors alike. “I feel like I’ve made a lot of meaningful connections with people here,” says Liang. “There are a lot of people here who come to many of these demos and I see them and talk to them. It’s just really rewarding. I think the program in itself has grown further than we honestly ever thought it would.”

After students have finished making the dish, it’s time for the moment of truth: the taste test. Often, people have “surprised faces, and they are like, ‘Oh my God, this is good! It didn’t take that much work but it came out really well,’” recalls Liang. “Those are my favorite moments.” 

Finished crepes in front of the countertop projector view. Photo courtesy of Vienna Alexander.

With the help of CHEW, students not only succeed in making tasty food, but they also improve their knowledge of nutrition. CHEW has found that students who attend the classes have reported a higher than average intake of fruits and vegetables compared to the larger campus population. This is a great stride, as numerous studies find that the majority of university students (68.4% in one instance) consume less than half of the recommended five servings of fruits and vegetables per day; many students only consume one to two servings. CHEW also found that SJSU students reported feeling more confident in their cooking knowledge in areas like knife skills, following a recipe, cooking in a short amount of time and creating meals on a limited budget. 

Recipes from previous CHEW demos are also posted online, making it easy for students to reference and recreate meals, or discover ones curated in past semesters. 

An SJSU student’s first cooking class is just the start of their culinary journey, regardless of their aspirations. 

Liang offers students the following advice on cooking and nutrition: “Cook more. It doesn’t matter if it’s bad at first. It honestly does so much more than you think it does; you feel better, you eat better and you do better. I think it’s an essential skill that everybody deserves to have.”

Top image: Instructor Katelan Liang leads a cooking class in the CHEW kitchen. Photo courtesy of Vienna Alexander.

Learn more about CHEW and the Wellness Center at SJSU.