Real Cooking for Busy College Students

A hands-on class culminating in a family-style dinner.

Flashback to July 2013: Elise Hayashi excitedly waited for a new semester away at college. Independence! Freedom! Unfortunately, her first round of midterms brutally murdered that initial excitement, and eventually, the dining hall spaghetti looked and tasted like the enchiladas. Even the all-you-can-eat soft serve machine lost its appeal. Elise desperately longed for the flavors of good, home-cooked food, so she and fellow dorm-mates agreed to invest in kitchen equipment to recreate the food they missed. Though this led to many nights of questionable fried rice, they were also some of Elise’s fondest freshman year memories.

In the meantime, we're happy to report that Elise has become a much better cook. She has fed 18 Reasons staff a number of times, and cooked delicious oyakodon at our April 2019 Community Dinner for a crowd of 80. In the many Cooking Matters classes Elise has run in the past two years, she gets the most excited to work with teens to be more confident in the kitchen. Using her experience as a budget-strapped and constantly hungry college student, Elise will teach your own student the fundamentals of creative cooking so they can go away to school with the confidence to create versatile meals and sustain themselves through every exam season. She hopes that students will leave with the ability to make a meal and take a nap between classes - vicariously fulfilling her college dream. 

Born and raised in Colorado, Elise Hayashi grew up in a family where knowing how to use a paring knife was more important than riding a bicycle. This sparked her passion for food and cooking at an early age, and she enthusiastically relocated to the Bay Area to study nutrition science at UC Berkeley. Outside of the classroom, Elise helped implement childhood obesity and exercise research, and worked as a pastry assistant to fill her free time with galettes and mousses. She also broadened her experience with food by studying and cooking her way through the Mediterranean diet in Italy, and working on an organic farm in Japan. Now, she is excited to merge her gastronomic backgrounds to share her love of food with the 18 Reasons community. During the rare moments when she is not eating, Elise can be found trying out new sports, playing and listening to live music, or wandering the aisles of grocery stores and farmers' markets.