From the stove range to the oven, kitchen appliances roar to life as delicate aromas waft around the room. Whether a dish is sweet or savory, served hot or cold, senior L Nguyen is sure to know how to craft the culinary concoction.

Nguyen, who usually makes Vietnamese food, is best known for cooking up food for various CVHS events like I-Fest, Vietnamese Student Association potlucks and Desserts for Difference club meetings. She can sometimes be found walking around the hallways holding a Tupperware container full of treats.

She says her current undertaking — making 195 servings of boba milk tea for this year’s I-Fest — is her hardest yet. At this scale, it’s hard to transport, package and store everything.

“[The drinks] can’t be made [beforehand] in preparation because my fridge simply cannot hold that much,” Nguyen said. “Also, I had to do a lot of recipe-testing to get the boba just right.”

With over 22 gallons of tea, this is her largest scale project yet. She usually makes around 50 servings for I-Fest and 30 servings for club events.

For club events, Nguyen said that “half of [the food] is for the club and the other half is for friends and teachers.”

But before all the potlucks and parties, Nguyen first started cooking to try and replicate some of the dishes she has seen in food videos from YouTube creators like Preppy Kitchen, Diem Nauy, RunAwayRice and Pastry Living.

“I like food, and I would always see videos of food that just looked so good,” Nguyen said. “[Cooking] also didn’t seem that hard to do — although I now know that’s a lie.”

Even if it’s hard work, Nguyen then applied her skills toward cooking for school activities because she likes cooking as a hobby and showing off her creations.

“Sometimes, I want to try out a recipe but don’t want to eat all of it, so I’m basically using school as a testing ground and [a way] to get rid of leftovers,” Nguyen said.

Her first formal experience cooking for a school event was when she helped with I-Fest in her freshman year.

“I just remember it was kind of stressful to figure out the logistics of transportation, storage, cost [and] time to make the food,” Nguyen said.

With more practice over time, however, Nguyen has slowly learned how to manage all the logistics that come with cooking a dish.

Usually, Nguyen’s culinary process begins with her finding inspiration by scrolling through social media until she finds a dish that looks “challenging or delicious.” She’ll also occasionally take requests or look in her pantry to see what’s available.

“Sometimes, I have an ingredient that’s about to expire, so I try to make something that uses up a lot of that ingredient,” Nguyen said.

She then searches online for any relevant recipes. Nguyen has a mental list of recipe writers she trusts, including websites like RecipeTin Eats and Cakes by MK.

“I usually try to find someone who specializes in a certain dish or dessert, because they get really good at making that one thing,” Nguyen said.

Nguyen cross-references multiple recipes to find the best one, making adjustments on-the-fly to better suit her personal tastes.

“There’s a lot of prior experience [involved in] knowing which sources to trust and how much to adjust [measurements] based on taste,” Nguyen said.

After sourcing ingredients from Costco, H Mart and H-E-B, Nguyen spends 30 minutes to an hour prepping her the kitchen before she starts cooking — though she’ll skip this step if she’s just cooking for herself.

Besides tidying up her workspace, Nguyen also measures out her ingredients and gets any equipment she needs to use.

“I keep everything organized by doing a preclean before baking or cooking so I can maximize space,” Nguyen said. “My kitchen isn’t huge, but it’s a fairly decent size, so I usually have room for everything.”

Recipes can then take anywhere from an hour to five hours to execute, depending on the complexity of the dish.

“I usually feel excited to start, exhausted during the middle of it, and then satisfied and relieved when it’s done,” Nguyen said about the process of making a dish.

And then comes the cleanup.

“I make my brother clean the kitchen up, and that takes about 30 minutes,” Nguyen said. “I feel exhausted [again] when I have to clean up [alone] and my brother’s not there to help me out.”

Although Nguyen doesn’t plan on going to culinary school, she still believes that knowing how to cook will be a useful skill in her future.

“Cooking is simply a skill I will use and enjoy in college while I watch my roommates eat instant ramen every day,” Nguyen said. “Maybe I’ll get them to pay me for [my] food.”

She recommends that anyone interested in learning to cook to learn a few fundamental concepts in cooking before memorizing recipes.

“Start off very simple and to figure out what [you] enjoy cooking the most,” Nguyen said.

Nguyen, for example, says that banh bo nuong (also known as Vietnamese honeycomb cake) is her favorite dish to make. But at the end of the day, Nguyen sees cooking food is a way for her to connect with people — or as a way to “bribe” them, as she jokingly puts it.

“The fastest way to someone’s heart is through their stomach,” Nguyen said.