Our instructors lead sessions, both in-person and online where students learn foundational techniques, flavors, and principles - not rigid steps. We call it the Courageous Cooking Method, and it's all about embracing what's seasonal and abundant, whether from the farmer's market or your fridge. This approach helps cooks gain skills and the freedom to trust their intuition.
Makenna Held: Owner and founder of Okay, Perfect, RecipeKick’s parent company. Which encompasses a production company, the experience at La Peetch (Julia Child’s Provencal home), RecipeKick, and more. Makenna is an entrepreneur, chef, advocate for human-centered business, and star of La Pitchoune: Cooking in France: which follow the joys, and tribulations of the recipe-free cooking school team and guests. Herself a Le Cordon Bleu grad, cooking instructor right here on RecipeKick (check out this caprese class, yum!), and author of Mostly French—available in 2025 wherever books are sold!
Our Mission is Simple…
Cook Better
We help you ditch rigid recipes, use your cookbooks better, and cook from the hip, so you can:
Save time planning, shopping, prepping, and executing delicious food for yourself and your loved ones
Reduce food waste and CO2 emissions
Shop seasonally, without a list, at any market from a place of joy
Create delicious meals on demand—no perfect recipe needed
It’s better for you, your budget, and the planet. With expert-led culinary adventures, online classes, coaching, and free videos, we're here to make cooking more delicious and sustainable.
Cook better. More deliciously. For good.
What Drove Us to Define These Core Values?
Kendall Lane: Culinary Director, Executive chef, and lead flavor expert at RecipeKick and the in-person Courageous Cooking School in France. She’s a graduate of Le Cordon Bleu, and spent 15 years traipsing the world from Michelin-Starred kitchens in Paris and Southwest France, to opening butcher shops in the United States. A master charcutier, butcher, and lover of curing meats and fermenting tasty foods. Kendall is also the star of La Pitchoune: Cooking in France: a docu-series currently streaming on the Magnolia App, Discovery+, HBO Max, Hulu and Amazon Prime.
Instructors worldwide: Combined, our instructors have taught thousands of students in-person and online, in countries all over the world. French, American classic, Creole, Mexican, Thai, Vietnamese, and more, our mix of former Michelin-starred chefs, culinary school grads, and talented, successful self-taught home cooks are experts in cuisines and techniques from around the world. Bonus, we are always adding and partnering with new instructors… some whose names you might recognize!
Our Community: With hundreds of active members (and growing!) our Facebook community brings together a diverse range of culinary perspectives, traditions, and expertise. Whether you're a beginner looking to pick up new skills or a seasoned chef hoping to experiment with new flavors, our community has something for everyone. We provide a space where our members can trade kitchen tips, troubleshoot recipes, and learn from each other in a welcoming, collaborative environment. So, join the RecipeKick community today on Facebook and be part of a supportive group of cooks striving to make memorable meals and meaningful connections through food.
Our Core Values
Community is Best Shared with Others
Waste Not:
Curiosity Over Conformity
Here at RecipeKick, we want you to “embrace the elaborate souflée of your own weirdness”. What does this mean? We want you to let your tastbuds and curiosity reign over ridgid rules and ‘expectations’. We love to do this in the kitchen first because it has ripple effects into our lives and greater communities. If we can embrace differences in our diets and food culture? Embracing other differences becomes easier. Differences are what make the world go round, but also scare the ever living daylights out of people.
When each of us is the most full-flavored version of ourselves in the kitchens, we can bring that out into our lives, into our communities, and into connection with our deepest selves. Cooking is a magical tool to unlock this in ourselves and in others. We know, because we’ve facilitated over 5000 people to cook better.
Delicious, Nourishing Food is a Human Right
Food insecurity shouldn’t be a thing of the present, but it is. In fact 1 in 10 people in the United States experiences food insecurity at any given time. We offer free memberships to all of our classes, to anyone on supplemental nutrition programs anywhere in the world.
Immigration, Travel, and Cross Border Existence is Essential to a Vibrant, and Sustainable Foodway in the United States and Beyond
What has driven us to define these values?
Food is inherently political. The how we grow it, the what we grow, the harvesting, the transport, the storage, the consumption. All of it is built on culture, consumption, and politics. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is at our forefront in everything we create, how we hire, how we build curriculum, and how we connect with our recipe-free methodology. We lead from that place, it is not an afterthought, it isn’t a program. We’ve built RecipeKick as a space to explore food and food culture from new lenses. Because we believe that diversity of flavors, chefs, communities, ingredients are what make the world a more delicious place. There is nothing lost when we look at new things, there is only things to be gained. There is so much food media out there that ignores cultural foodways outside of the mainstream. We abjectly refuse to do that. We come from food from a place of recipe-free not as a battle-cry against recipes, or history. But rather as a bridge to new foodways outside of those known to you.
We’re also and LGBTQ+ Owned and Centered Company: We center this not because we don’t welcome people who identify outside of this spectrum, but as a clear nod to history and the way in which the queer community has shaped the hospitality and food world (much of which has been buried by the loss of 10%+ of all gay men in the AIDS epidemic in the 80s). They were the early hospitalians, the restauranteurs, the barkeeps. They worked in hospitality because it was one of the few jobs they could access, and in many ways these contributions were erased due to the massive loss of life of the people who built this. You can read more about this in John Birdsall’s work.
We’re an academic led company, in fact our key officers are both career researchers and instructors. (Ew, I know…but we’re not boring! Promise.) What this means though, is we like to show our work. And cite our sources and explain the greater why and the context.
Our Why?
Food is inherently political. The how we grow it, the what we grow, the harvesting, the transport, the storage, the consumption. All of it is built on culture, consumption, and politics. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is at our forefront in everything we create, how we hire, how we build curriculum, and how we connect with our recipe-free methodology. We lead from that place, it is not an afterthought, it isn’t a program. We’ve built RecipeKick as a space to explore food and food culture from new lenses. Because we believe that diversity of flavors, chefs, communities, ingredients are what make the world a more delicious place. There is nothing lost when we look at new things, there is only things to be gained. There is so much food media out there that ignores cultural foodways outside of the mainstream. We abjectly refuse to do that. We come from food from a place of recipe-free not as a battle-cry against recipes, or history. But rather as a bridge to new foodways outside of those known to you.
We’re also and LGBTQ+ Owned and Centered Company: We center much of our work, company culture, methods, and more from a queer lens because of this. The Courageous Cooking Method is inherently queer, as it is a way to work against the status quo of food culture.
This does not mean we don’t welcome people who identify outside of this spectrum—in fact, most of our clients are not LGBTQ+—but we center from this lens as a clear nod to history and the way in which the queer community has shaped the hospitality and food world (much of which has been buried by the loss of 10%+ of all gay men in the AIDS epidemic in the 80s). Gay men were many of the the early, influential hospitalians, the restauranteurs, the barkeeps. They worked in hospitality because it was one of the few jobs they could access, and in many ways these contributions were erased due to the massive loss of life during the ADIS epidemic. You can read more about this in John Birdsall’s work.