Minimum Viable Kitchen
On an old idea and a foray into a new venture
Monday, June 7, 2021—Hello friends, it’s been a while. With the On Deck course creator fellowship ending last week, I hope to restart the weekly cadence for this newsletter.
I’ll keep this one short, because there are some big news that are long overdue to share. Firstly, homeownership has been a crash course in learning how to learn and mustering some good ol’ resilience from the pits of despair, something of a universal experience Amy and I were incepted into when this lukewarm take fired off on a 96ºF Utah summer’s day in the parking lot of a Home Depot took off:
We hosted our first grillout for friends and neighbors, old and new, at the house over Memorial’s Day to much success. It’s the first time I’ve cooked for a group since the last recorded hot girl summer of 2019, and at the end of the 12-hour shift my fatigue finally gave away to elation and gratitude and tears. It’s been such a long year, and I really miss cooking for people.
My first smoked baby back ribs on the discounted 22” Weber grill I bought the day before didn’t turn out too shabby. Amy, ever the studious home pizza maker, put her quarantine-sharpened skills to the test on a friend’s Ooni oven and smashed it out of the park. (Tools matter, people!)
I also turned 30 (!)—to very little fanfare and even less affectation. Compared to just a year ago, my life bears zero resemblance to my current reality: a career in tech I happily tossed out with the compost, a cute home I own with a partner in life I love (and the way it’s subsidizing both our career switcheroos), and a sizable backyard for all my homesteading projects (spoilers: I got chickens, but I’ll save the tale of willful ignorance for next week). For the first time in my life, I’m exactly where I need to be.
Life is good—and I can’t remember the last time I can say that in earnest.
Which brings me to the meat of the issue: my online course is ready for signups! It’s one of what I expect to be many calculated bets at self-actualization in this post-work chapter of my life.
Minimum Viable Kitchen is the culmination of my two years in fine dining, a year of pandemic homecooking practice, and eight weeks of intense training during my On Deck fellowship. It’s the course I wish I had when I first tried to learn how to cook at 27.
My course promise to you is this—
In 30 days, build an affordable kitchen system to cook more frequently, deliciously, and without recipes—no experience required.
It’s an idea I’ve incubated in the darkest days of lockdown a year ago, and has since been forged and reforged during multiple waves of the pandemic in my loft kitchen in Brooklyn. All to answer a single question: how do you make cooking everyday a habit that sticks?
The answer is a 30-day program designed around habit formation (for cooking daily) and a systems approach to facilitate anyone’s homecooking practice no matter the kitchen, reinforced with professional tools and techniques and my own very opinionated stance on best practices and workflows.
Amy, who’s spent a considerable time with me in quarantine and given the course the best testimonial a guy with no online cult following or track record could hope for, has this to say:
"I've piloted the course because we share a kitchen, and it's completely changed my relationship to cooking. I used to stress a lot about making a weekly grocery list, prepping for the week on Sundays, and food going bad. Now I make better meals and I get all that energy back."
In the first few days of the soft launch (first on Instagram, then with my cohort fellows in ODCC), 18 (!!) people have signed up to take the course, obliterating my initial sales target of 10. I’ve since expanded that number to 30, which is the maximum I’m confident I can support by myself for a live cohort-based course.
Should this be of interest to you, use the code STANSONLY for 25% off. A little thank you for being on this list and following my meandering journey. Signups close next Monday on 6/14.
I’ll let the sales page do the rest of the talking. See you next week for the fun chicken retrospective I teased earlier.