Cooks and Their Kitchens: Mentors, Guides, and Inspirations

My mother called me into the kitchen one evening when I was seven years old.

“I want to show you something.” She pointed to a pot of potatoes bubbling on the front burner. “In five minutes, the potatoes will be ready. After I drain them, they’ll need a moment or two to dry on the burner.” She opened the oven door to reveal a meatloaf sizzling in its pan.

“The meatloaf will be ready in two minutes, but it needs a little time to rest on top of the stove before serving.”

She unplugged the kettle and poured boiling water over a mound of broccoli in another pot, salted it, covered the pot, and turned the burner to high.

“If I put the broccoli on to boil now, it will be ready at the same time as the potatoes and the meatloaf. Do you see?”

I nodded, though I didn’t really see at all.

“When you make supper, try to make sure everything is ready at once. That’s called timing.”

That was my first lesson on the importance of timing in meal preparation, and I’ve never forgotten it.

My mother was my original kitchen mentor. She taught me how to clean asparagus, sauté mushrooms, make a Béchamel sauce, take on a big cooking project like Chicken Chausseur or Boeuf Bourgignon without freaking out. She taught me to wing it, use what I had on hand, never stint on butter, find the best ingredients, and especially, have fun at my own dinner parties.

Plus, as one of my brothers has said, she gave us the greatest gift of all: she taught us how food should taste.

In the 60-odd years since those first lessons, I’ve learned from every chef, sous chef, dishwasher, and home cook I’ve worked with. How to cut soft chèvre with dental floss (plain, not mint-flavored), boil the bones first and skim the stock before adding the aromatics, slow-roast onions with spruce branches for mushroom soup. Clean fish scales with a fork. In all those years, though, one mentor stood out. Her name is Lyn Fabio, and I met her in The Chocolate Claim kitchen, circa 1994. She is of the same culinary strain as my mother: meticulous, bold, inspired.

I was six months new to the Yukon when I landed a job in the beloved, iconic café owned by Jose Janssen. Hers was a collaborative kitchen, where ideas were shared freely and cooks supported each other. Lyn was my supervisor in the savory section.

Chef Lyn Fabio in her natural element: on a beach in Haines, with a pan full of shrimp.

On my first day she watched me chop vegetables. I held my knife with my forefinger resting on the spine of the blade.

“Your hand might get really tired by the end of the day,” she said. She stood beside me and showed me how to grasp the hilt with my whole hand.

“It might feel weird at first, but I think you’ll like it better in the long run.” She was right, and her advice came in such a gentle manner that I felt lifted up. She’s been lifting me up ever since, offering inspiration and encouragement.

Lyn grew up in Montreal, where her dad, an Argentinian Italian, regularly brought home exotic foodstuffs for the family to try.

“I don’t remember ever being forced to eat the weird things— rattlesnake, seal, pig head. It was always like, ‘Oh, yeah, let’s try this,’” she recalls.

That culinary curiosity drives her still. I have a cupboard full of ingredients she’s brought back from travelling—grains of paradise, dried mulberries, Urfa biber—but the difference between us is that she dives in. She tries them out.

Lyn’s been cooking all her life—she started young, cooking for the family when her mom was at work. She worked at the Claim for years and successfully challenged the Red Seal exam (which most provinces and territories in Canada use to issue trade certifications). She’s cooked in school kitchens, in windy campsites, on beaches in Haines, on mountain pass movie sets in hairy conditions, and for a culinary festival in a borrowed food truck at the edge of a farmer’s field near Whitehorse that had just been cleared of manure.

Some of those adventures we shared. In 2019, on our way to that food truck, I asked her, “Do you think there’ll come a time when we’re too old for this?”

“I hope not!” was her reply.

Lyn is not just a culinary artist but a textile artist too, bringing the same curiosity and attention to detail to her work with cloth, gut, and fiber. When we last spoke, she was just back from a residency in Blönduós, Iceland.

There, she worked with natural dyes, explored seaweed as a medium, experimented with weaving necklaces from wool, and walked every day past a lamb processing factory, where she watched women clean lamb’s heads to ready them for market.

“I never got to eat fermented shark,” she says with regret. “But I did eat lamb, with separate purées of black garlic, and parsley, and lacto-fermented rhubarb. It was the most divine piece of lamb ever.”

She came back from Iceland with a copy of the cookbook Slippurinn by Gisli Matt, who runs the renowned local food restaurant on the archipelago of Vestmannaeyjar.

I can’t wait to see what she does with it.

First published in Edible Alaska, Spring 2025.