As soon as you open the door, a wave of various food smells and spices hits you. The Gourmet Cooking class students work in groups, boiling their pasta and making their sauces from scratch. They have their white aprons on and the girls tie their hair up in a bun or a ponytail to avoid having it fall in their food. No matter how hectic the kitchen gets, the students are focused on the task at hand and always keep their eyes on the stove.

“[Cooking] is cool because it’s an art and you can be creative with it and you have a recipe,” said cooking teacher Maria Kelly said. “My advanced level kids will take a recipe and change it to whatever they want and then it becomes their own. So it’s not like a set thing. Like today we’re doing pastas and everybody is doing their own sauce and adding their own touch to it. That in itself is an awesome thing. In this class they get to be creative, let loose and just be imaginative whereas maybe in other classes they can’t do that.”

Cooking isn’t just a class for these students, some of them take what they’ve learned home and make meals for their families.

Freshman Sliwa Younadim believes it’s important to know how to cook.

“It’s important because when you grow up and leave your parents you’re going to live alone or with your partner so you have to know how to cook for them or yourself,” she said.

Kelly explains how important it is for her to provide her students with the appropriate tools to help them develop their skills.

“In general taking my passion and then bringing it on to my students will show through and they see it,” she said. “Everyday, I can’t wait to get to work and that’s an awesome thing- if you love your job that much. So, I get to give all my little tips and healthy tricks to my kids and they get to take it home and bring it to their parents- that’s like the best thing in the world for me. It’s an awesome job.”

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Fatima Farha and Shameer Riaz contributed to this article.