So I'm Going to Culinary School...in Ireland

Encountering doubt and delight in the experience of a lifetime.

I can’t believe this is a real sentence I am writing, but in 6 weeks, I will board a plane to spend the end of my summer in Ireland at culinary school. Specifically, I will be living and learning and cooking on the grounds of Ballymaloe Cookery School, a 100-acre organic farm on the southern coast of Ireland, about 40 minutes outside of Cork. I’m enrolled in their 5-week program where I’ll learn how to make a diverse range of cuisines from ingredients sourced directly from the farm or as locally as possible. I’ll collect eggs from the hens, make sourdough at sunrise, and filet a fish caught that morning in the Celtic Sea. I’ll meet people from all over the world and I’ll be far from home and I won’t have to check my work email the entire time. I’ll have a white chef’s coat and non-slip shoes and my own set of engraved knives!

Is this real life?!

*SQUEAL*

I’m going to put my phone on airplane mode and delete Instagram and try to defrost my brain. I need it! I’m too dependent on my phone, too dulled to the drum of the news and short form video and LetsRun message board threads about inane running topics I don’t actually need to read about. I don’t want my brain to feel this crowded, so this summer will be the perfect opportunity to clear some space.

I’m going to bring a paperback copy of East of Eden and a collection of C.S. Lewis’ writings and a couple of the All Creatures Great and Small books. We’ll see if I read any of them or if I decide to take a lot of long walks that end with me staring into the sea, or if I’ll loosen up a bit and stay up late conversing with new friends that I will be living and cooking alongside.

I AM EXCITED! I AM TERRIFIED!

I’ll be writing about it probably weekly-ish on this Substack as well as my food Substack called FOOD & STUFF (give it a follow if you want more logistical/cooking updates on this experience than emotional/theological ones). It should be fun to share about. And, as I mentioned before, I also am trying to give myself space to experience something special without feeling like I need to document it all, too. I’m not going to Ireland to become a content creator or a social media chef or any of that—I’m going because I guess I believe God has something for me in Ireland, and maybe it’s just joy and delight but maybe it’s something more. I have no idea.

I guess we’ll see.

I keep thinking how shocked a 22-year-old Grace would be about all of this. It’s outlandish! I had essentially zero experience in the kitchen coming out of college. But the summer after I graduated, partially out of necessity and partially out of curiosity, I began to cook and bake in earnest. I made ricotta gnocchi with cherry tomatoes that I grew in a plastic pot on my back deck. I seared chicken on a questionably-sanitary propane grill and served it with pico de gallo. I browned meatballs, simmered them in a spicy sauce, and served them over a burned pot of rice. I even tried making an omelet, but accidentally dumped an entire jar of pepper into it. Mishaps are a part of good cooking, too, I’ve learned.

My pastor at the time, Charlie, took note of my budding love of cooking and baking and introduced me to Robert Farrar Capon’s iconic book The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection. Charlie was an excellent cook and host himself — inviting groups over for dinners of roasted vegetables topped with fresh herbs, loaves of crusty bread with a slab of salted butter, and salads that were crispy and funky and better than I knew a salad could be. With Capon’s help and Charlie’s example, I began to understand why meals mattered. For Capon, cooking is far more than mere utility, perhaps the greatest gift we experience this side of heaven:

“Real eating restores a sense of the festivity of being. Food does not exist merely for the sake of its nutritional value. To see it so is to knuckle under still further to the desubstantialization of man, to regard not what things are, but what they mean to us — to become in short solemn idolaters spiritualizing what should be loved as matter. A man’s daily meal ought to be an exultation over the smack of desirability which lies at the root of creation. To break real bread is to break the loveless hold of hell upon the world, and, by just that much, to set the secular free.” (pp. 115)

I’ve been re-reading Capon’s book the last few weeks in preparation for this summer, and it’s been a real gift and encouragement—a way to reconnect with a meaningful theology about food when my mind is filled with a million doubts about this whole experience I’m about to undertake.

You see: a few weeks ago, shortly after receiving an email about paying the balance of my tuition, I called my mom in tears, feeling so conflicted about whether or not taking 6 weeks off of work to go to culinary school in a somewhat remote village in Ireland was actually a good idea. Even though I had known about this school for years and often joked that I wanted to abandon my responsibilities to go, it wasn’t until last fall—shortly after deciding to give up my deposit and slot for grad school (chronicled here)—that I decided I’d try to enroll.

I’ve been registered for 7 months—enough time to question if I am making a mistake. That day when I called my mom in tears was the first time I expressed my actual, authentic feelings about this experience I was pursuing; up until that point, I only projected confidence, clarity, excitement, and enthusiasm. And while all those emotions were true, so were the nerves, the doubts, the anxiety that I might be unhappy there or be awful at making new friends or terrible at cooking or delusional about my capability to get so outside of my comfort zone. And most of all, I’ve wondered if by pursuing this, I’m being very, very selfish.

When I was sharing some ideas for a recent Substack essay I wrote about singleness and the church, I had an individual express concern to me that the reason people like me might be staying single is because of selfishness. Opening yourself up to critical comments is part of what comes with sharing online, so I expect it from time to time. But critical comments—for better or worse—can prompt you to really think, and sometimes that is necessary. While this comment irked me for several reasons, some which I ended up including in my piece, it hit a nerve on an area of real sensitivity for me, too.

In many ways, I do live a selfish life. Most days, I do what I want, when I want. I have a lot of freedom with my time and money and how I spend both. But I suppose what I’m trying to do and have been since I graduated from college nine years ago is form a life that makes space for more than me. It’s hard to figure out how to do that sometimes with so many people’s lives and schedules looking so different from mine, but making space at my table is probably the most natural way I’ve found opportunities to do that.

A real Irish sheep I saw in Ireland circa 2023.

I love feeding people and making something that nourishes their bodies and brings them delight. I love making space for conversation that stretches from the dinner hour to our bedtimes. It feels like what I was made to do and a way to get outside of myself, too. I live so much of life in my head, and honestly, it’s incredibly exhausting! Cooking and hosting feel liberating—a way to come back into my body and into fellowship with others. And even, to feel fellowship with God. Again, Capon from The Supper of the Lamb:

“Man’s real work is to look at the things of the world and love them for what they are. That is, after all, what God does, and man was not made in God’s image for nothing. The fruits of his attention can be seen in all the arts, crafts, and sciences. It can cost him time and effort, but it pays handsomely.” (pp. 19)

The greatest compliment I ever received from someone was when she told me that being in my space made her feel at home. So I guess that’s a big reason why I’m going to culinary school this summer. I don’t have to do this to feed people well or practice hospitality, but there’s something in me that knows that cooking and preparing things with my hands for people I care about is probably what I feel most confident I was made to do. I love it. I see this a chance to chase something I love because it is brings me joy and I think it makes more joy. Maybe it’s selfish, but maybe it’s something more.

I guess we’ll see.

It moves to me think that God has given me this summer as a gift, even though I never really asked for it. In the winter of 2024, when I was going through one of the darkest periods of my adulthood, a verse from Psalm 31 was constantly repeating over and over in mind: “I will rejoice and be glad in your faithful love because you have seen my affliction…You have set my feet in a spacious place.”

God gives good gifts. I hope and pray that this summer will be a time of receiving his good gifts of life, of friendship, of adventure, of experiencing spaciousness. I’m probably being over-the-top; I am, after all, a romantic at heart. But so is Capon, and so I close with this quote from the end of the book—a benediction for the summer I never saw coming:

“Why do we marry, why take friends and lovers, why give ourselves to music, painting, chemistry, or cooking? Out of simple delight in the resident goodness of creation, of course; but out of more than that, too. Half of earth’s gorgeousness lies hidden in the glimpsed city it longs to become. For all its rooted loveliness, the world has no continuing city here; it is an outlandish place, a foreign home, a session in via to a better version of itself—and it is our glory to see it so and thirst until Jerusalem comes home at last. We were given appetites, not to consume the world and forget it, but to taste its goodness and hunger to make it great.” (pp. 189)

A spacious place on the Dingle Peninsula, 2023.