Today we’d like to introduce you to Gina Carrera.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Gina. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
I was born and raised in Mexico, where my family owned a Winery and a Food Processing Plant. Between my dad working in the food industry and my mom catering events and teaching cooking lessons in her spare time, me and my siblings were born with a natural passion for cooking. Fast-forwarding time, my family has owned several restaurants, my brothers are chefs and our passion for cooking has grown. I started baking and cooking at home, then my mom got me as many private lessons as she could find, I always wanted to learn more!
Most of what I did when I was young was candy making and confections, I started selling my creations and someone asked me to teach a small group of girls. I was young and it sounded like fun so I agreed and I completely fell in love with working with kids and teaching what I loved doing the most and I taught for the next eight years. Then, I turned my full attention to my career as an Architect, but I always knew opening a cooking school was what I wanted to do later in life, later… when I grow up and have kids!
I moved to Texas almost 15 years ago to work full time in a Building and Design firm where I worked for a few years. I got married and traveled a lot. When we decided it was time to have kids, I retired from the Architecture work and spent a few years traveling, we also moved a couple times while being a stay at home mom and working on my business plan. While we traveled, I collected tons of recipes, lessons and experiences in local cuisines from every place I visited, so that’s what my cooking school is all about. Food made from scratch, with real ingredients but focusing in the culture and the experience of making it. Now, I spend my days having fun in the kitchen while cooking with young and old and take as much time to travel the world with my family as possible to keep sharing those experiences with my students here.
Has it been a smooth road?
It’s never easy being an Entrepreneur. As much as I always knew that I wanted to open my own business, I had no idea where to start, I was on my own in a different Country and English being my second language, all paperwork and the behind the scenes of a small business wasn’t easy. Then, being a stay at home mom, between working from home, the kids, the house and all that made it even harder to find the time and focus to make things happen.
So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the Cook N Grow story. Tell us more about the business.
At Cook n Grow, we make cooking fun! We want to teach the kids where food actually comes from, using real ingredients instead of cans. We focus in the experience and culture behind food, that’s why we teach mostly international cuisine. For the adults, we offer BYOB cooking experiences. People come to us not to become a professional chef but to have a 100% hands-on experience with great food and enjoy themselves while they learn that Cooking doesn’t have to feel like a chore. Cook N Grow allows me to share both my passion for teaching and cooking and I’m so grateful for the opportunity to cook with the Houston Community.
How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
I think we live so fast and finding the time to pause and enjoy cooking from scratch in a daily basis is becoming harder everyday. This is why we tend to find spending time and resources in experiences other than goods. We sell entertainment and culture which we can never have too much of.
We have two now, but we’ll continue to open more Cook N Grow studios in the next years all over Texas.
Contact Info:
- Address: Cook N Grow
2004 S Mason Rd.
Suite 2A
Katy, TX
77450 - Website: cookngrow.com
- Phone: (832) 913-8726
- Email: katy@cookngrow.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cook_n_grow_katy/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CookNGrow.Katy/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/Cookngrow_katy
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/cook-n-grow-katy/
Image Credit:
Cook n Grow, Portraits by Caroline
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