Pass It On

Amanda Varnell and Sarah Hooper of Dish t' Pass

Anyone who's ever shared a home-cooked meal with friends and family knows that you get a lot more than physical sustenance around the table. We don't sit down to just fuel our bodies like we do our cars. It's something more than that.

We gather for relationships, from the ones that happen in the kitchen over the mincing of garlic and the stirring of great pots of greens to the ones that linger long after the table has been cleared and people sit talking into the night, glass in hand. There's a magic surrounding food, cooking and eating, and that's a magic that is deeply understood by lifelong friends and business partners Amanda Varnell and Sarah Hooper, the founders of Chattanooga's first and only recreational cooking school, the Dish t' Pass Cooking School and Catering Company. They call it food love.

Neither of these women are classically trained chefs. They didn't attend culinary school, and they don't claim to be hyper technical experts. What they do have is a lifetime of experience cooking for their families, friends and their community. They also share an abiding passion for food. What this means is that they learned everything they know on the ground, over the course of raising a family. As their families grew, they grew as cooks.

But don't let that fool you; their first careers as homemakers, while a huge part of their experience, are not all they have: Sarah ran an in-home bake shop to help put herself through college, and Amanda has been teaching cooking classes around Chattanooga for almost eight years. It was when they teamed up to both teach and cater together that the business grew to the point that they had to open up a shop because the demand was so high. As Amanda puts it, Dish t' Pass, which is located downtown across from the YMCA, is a brick and mortar extension of their lives to date. It is absolutely the logical conclusion of these two women's paths.

They actually met twenty-five years ago at the Chattanooga Theatre Centre, and it doesn't take long around them to realize that their gift for entertaining is one of the traits that make them such great teachers. Some of the best chefs in the world can't necessarily make learning to cook accessible and engaging, but between their background in theater, their long tenures as moms, and their obsession with all things food love, they're perfect instructors for anyone who's looking to learn how to make good, simple food for their family or to just relax and have fun.

Apples at the Dish t' Pass cooking station.

Their background as moms also gives them a ton of firsthand experience with the challenges of the home kitchen. They know the reality of time and budget constraints, and they know how to make great food in spite of it all. They know that sometimes the best things are the simple things, and that a home-cooked meal doesn't have to be fancy or complex to make everyone who eats it feel taken care of. They've spent their lives learning how to love people through food and how to make meals that not only taste delicious but nourish as well, and now they've opened their doors to share that lifetime of cooking with love, an ingredient they swear you can taste, with others. And it's true. You can taste the difference.

Their mission is to teach everyone that they too can make wholesome, delicious food from scratch; they teach everyone the art of food love. The message is simple: you don't need packets and processed food nor do you need a culinary degree to feed your family well. They teach how to make ordinary food done exceptionally well by demonstrating basic techniques and recipes that anyone can adapt and customize to their needs.

Perhaps even more inspiring than even the techniques is their infectious enthusiasm for cooking. You can't leave Dish t' Pass without wanting to cook, and they empower and equip their students to gather their families around the table to share in the warmth that is a well-made, home-cooked meal. Because they know that everyone lives better when they eat better, Dish t' Pass is emphatic about making cooking from scratch inclusive, and they teach everything from classes for scouts to a fun girl's night out class to their recent corporate team-building exercise for BlueCross BlueShield.

Even the corporate sector can see the benefit of the relationships forged in the kitchen. It's universal. In a time when a lot of us feel cloistered and perhaps a little isolated, it's never been more important that we return to that fine Southern tradition of gathering around the table to linger over our favorite dishes to pass. As our farmers markets grow and the local food scene flourishes, we're all going to need to know what to do with all of that beautiful produce, and that's exactly where Dish t' Pass comes in. It's there to not only foster the joy of cooking and remind us that a humble meal can be just as spectacular as a production, but to give our community the basic tools we might have forgotten about: our ability to take raw, whole ingredients into the kitchen and just whip up some honest-to-God supper.