adventure cook!

Adventure Cook is a school-based cooking class teaching children to love preparing good food. We bring the cooking class to your young cook’s school on a weekly or monthly basis. Along with preparing a delicious snack, this course pairs the food with a children’s book related to that week’s theme. Our course alternates sweet and savory food so children get to experience foods they wouldn’t necessarily make at home. Since many children bake sugar cookies with their parents or other grown-ups, we try more unusual offerings such as cranberry-date rollups, egg salad, scones, pumpkin tarts, homemade pasta, chicken pot pie, and crepes. We also have enough recipes so the classes don’t repeat semester after semester.

In 2009, two Austin-area moms, Amy Valentine and Meridith Taylor, started Adventure Cook at their children’s preschool. Shortly after incorporating the business, Amy was diagnosed with breast cancer and began 15 months of surgery, chemotherapy and radiation. Both women threw themselves into the business as a labor of love, building something positive out of an emotionally and physically difficult beginning. Discovering a “perfect storm” of interest in children and cooking classes, the two worked with the City of Austin Health Department to safely bring cooking classes to children at various Austin schools. Today, Adventure Cook works out of a commercial kitchen, and requires each teacher to have a Food Handler or Food Manager’s license, fingerprinting/background check through the Department of Public Safety, and First Aid/CPR training. From a beginning of two extracurricular classes at one school, Adventure Cook now offers more than 20 classes each week at up to 15 different area preschools, day schools and elementary schools. In addition, we offer Brownie and Girl Scout Troop cooking classes and customized cooking classes to meet specific cultural and educational components.

Please call or write us if you have any questions at all. We are always happy to chat with anyone about our services:

(512) 659-5939

Paperwork can also be mailed to:

This multiple week course is led and supervised by two adult cooks and is offered as an extracurricular activity through your child’s school.  Adventure Cook will teach kitchen basics including kitchen health and safety, nutrition basics, as well as how to prepare and enjoy a wide variety of kid-friendly foods.

The founders prepping for a class