Kaelin Whittaker grew up in the kind of family that prioritized cooking from scratch. Some of the ingredients came from the backyard garden, some from U-pick farms and farmers’ markets. Her mother did the bulk of the cooking — roast beef or chicken or pork, baked macaroni and cheese, spaghetti — but, as Whittaker grew up, she started spending more time in the kitchen, cooking with her mom and learning to bake from an elderly neighbour.
The family sat down for dinner together and bonded over meals. When Whittaker started her own cooking school and meals-to-go business in 2015, one of her taglines was “inspiring people to slow down and sit down to enjoy a meal together around the table.”
Now the owner of Awn Kitchen, she’s never strayed from that philosophy — though COVID-19 certainly tested it, and it wasn’t just because she could no longer have people in her house for cooking classes and meals.
The pandemic nearly derailed her plans to move her business, then known as The Ruby Apron, out of her home and into her dream location in a Lansdowne strip mall. The space came available at the end of 2019. Whittaker was a week away from signing a lease when Alberta shut down in March 2020.
“It could have been the end of my business,” she says, noting that she’d collected $35,000 in tuition fees from students who had booked classes through the end of June. “Most people, thankfully, took credits, but it’s money that you’re out in the future. I’m still bouncing back from that. I really didn’t know if my business would survive, let alone expand.”
The business has both survived and expanded, in large part due to word of mouth about Whittaker, a terrific, inspired teacher whose passion for simple food cooked with local ingredients is infectious in a healthy, non-COVID way.
Much of that passion was nursed at home by her mother, with whom she used to travel the world taking cooking classes. But, in January 2015, Whittaker ventured out on her own, for a three-month cooking course at the renowned Ballymaloe Cookery School near Cork, Ireland.