Chicken Tortilla Soup – My First Real Dish at Culinary School Today felt different. It was the first day that really felt like cooking. Not measuring. Not memorizing. Cooking. The kind where you stop reading and start listening, to the sound of the pot, the smell in the air, and the feel of what’s happening right in front of you. The Food Bank doesn’t hand out recipes the way you’d expect. They give you a list of ingredients, teach you the fundamentals, and let you figure out the rest. Don’t like too much spice? Use less jalapeño. Like your soup thinner? Add more stock. Prefer it smoky? Let it cook a little longer. It’s about learning technique, but more importantly, it’s about learning how to trust yourself Cooking by feel, not by fear. Building Flavour from the Ground Up We made Chicken Tortilla Soup.Simple ingredients, big lessons. It starts with cubed chicken thighs seasoned with salt and browned in oil. That’s where the flavour begins. When the chicken hits the pan, it leaves behind those brown bits on the bottom, the fond, or the sucs if you want to sound fancy. Those bits aren’t burnt. They’re the gold. That’s the flavour you want to build on. Once the chicken was browned, we took it out and added diced onions, garlic, and sliced jalapeños to the same pot. The heat loosened all that flavour from the bottom, turning it into a base that smelled like comfort. That’s called deglazing, it’s what brings the dish to life before you even add liquid. Then came the tomatoes. Fresh ones, quartered and diced. We cooked them down until they started to melt into the onions and peppers. When you see that happen, you know you’re building flavour properly. Then we added the stock. Not water. Water just cooks food. Stock connects it. All that work from Day 6, simmering bones and vegetables for hours, paid off here. It added body and depth without needing cream or butter. It made the soup taste like it had been cooking all day, even though it only needed twenty minutes.

It’s October 2025, and I’m finally sitting down to share something I did way back in January through March of this year. For twelve weeks, I went through the Culinary Training Program at the Central Texas Food Bank, and it’s taken me this long to process it all.I’ve thought about it nearly every day since, not in a “that was fun” way, but in a something about that changed me and I still can’t explain it kind of way. So this is me, nine months later, trying to make sense of it. It’s a recap, a reflection, and something that’s been burning inside me to share. I don’t know what it means yet.I don’t know where it leads.But I know I’m supposed to do this, to write it, to film it, to share it. Worst case, I donate money to the Food Bank, help some people in need, and finally get this story out of my system. Best case… it becomes something much bigger. The Call I’d applied for the program back in October 2024, forgot all about it, and then out of nowhere on December 27th, I got the call: “Hi Andrew, you’ve been accepted! Orientation’s on January 6th.” Six. Fucking. Days. I stood there thinking, how the hell am I going to pull this off? Christmas wasn’t even cleaned up yet. I called my wife. Then my business partner. Both said the same thing: “Fucking do it.” I hesitated for maybe thirty seconds, thinking about the business, the kids, the timing, and then my wife looked me dead in the eye and said: “You haven’t worked this hard building a business just to say no to the things in life you actually want to do. So fucking do it.” And that was that. Decision made. Why I Said Yes This wasn’t about changing careers. It was about doing something for me, something that lit me up again, made me curious, and reminded me what joy actually feels like. I’ve always dreamed of going to culinary school. But in my dream, I’m retired, living in Paris with my wife, eating croissants in the morning, drinking wine at night, learning from some charming old French chef who smells like butter and garlic, and eating like absolute royalty.

Hi, I’m Andy Cairns, a Scottish dad, living in Austin, Texas, who somehow went from serving un-washed potato skins to studying Culinary School at the Central Texas Food Bank. Cooking wasn’t always my thing. Up until my twenties, I mostly lived on takeaway and whatever my parents made. That all changed when I left Scotland for Australia on a one-year working holiday visa. My cousin and I spent months driving around the coast in a camper van. Somewhere between Melbourne and Cairns, I stayed with a total stranger named Jai, a mate of my gran’s friend’s son, who became one of the biggest influences on my life. On my second night there, I tried to impress him by cooking potatoes. I didn’t wash the dirt off the skins before frying them. He refused to eat them.I ate them out of spite. He said, “I’d rather you sat on my face than eat your food.” That was my first cooking review. But turns out Jai was an amazing cook, and under his wing, I learned everything from how to hold a knife to how to actually set an oven timer. That’s where my love for food started. Then I met Anya, my now wife, when I was living in Brisbane. She worked for a company in Austin,Texas that had merged with mine. We became friends, started dating long-distance, and in 2013 she moved to Australia. I quickly realised I needed to know how to cook something edible if I wanted to impress her. So I learned. And cooked. And experimented. And she stuck around. Must’ve done something right. Fast forward over a decade: I’m now living in Austin, Texas with 3 kids, still cooking, still learning. But more importantly, I’m on a mission to help people rediscover real food. the kind that nourishes your body, sparks joy, and brings people back to the table. I started Culinary School not to become a restaurant chef, but to understand food from the ground up, the science, the craft, the hospitality, the heart. Through this Skool, I’m sharing that journey with you. The stories, the lessons, the food, the laughs, and the moments that remind me why food matters.