“Patti Smith donated that stove,” someone says.

Just those five words alone and they had me. It’s a beauty. Eight burners, great BTUs, two ovens that fit whole sheet trays. I knew I was home. It’s early November 2012, right after Hurricane Sandy hit New York with a ferocity no one anticipated. Pastor Ann Kansfield is showing me around the kitchen at Greenpoint Church where she implemented a hunger program for the Brooklyn neighborhood. Now they’re cooking for Sandy relief.

I’ve walked by this church countless times, meaning to volunteer at its soup kitchen for years—yes, literally years. There’re always great excuses to not go. Complicated scheduling. A sun that sets too late, one that sets too soon. No job, too many jobs. Too sad, too happy. I am a grade-A procrastinator. It took the hurricane to finally get my ass through the door, even though it’s located just a few blocks from my apartment.

Kitchens I understand. Food too. It’s where I am most efficient, and that’s all I wanted from this time. To be of the most use—to cook, to feed people who lost their homes. To take my professional cooking experience of more than 15 years (Roebling Tea Room, the Queen’s Hideaway, Egg, and more) and apply it to something other than dinner service.

Donations from the Greenmarket are dropped off by City Harvest, bags and bags of produce, stored on the picnic tables in the backyard, some labeled—butternut squash, onions, cabbage—others just a mix of root vegetables. Volunteers gather daily to cook food and deliver it to a fire station in the Rockaways. I set up a station and start cutting onions, not quite knowing what I’m making. You can’t go wrong beginning with onions.

It’s a weird time. There’s a nor’easter, a gasoline shortage, and Manhattan south of 30th Street is without power. When the city does get turned on again, and restaurants reopen, service starts slow. The hours spent working at a nearly empty restaurant feel pointless, even if I know it’s important for it to be open and for the staff to earn their income.

So I quit my job. I feel the very tangible notion that the hours I spend feeding a few could be better spent feeding hundreds. I keep cooking in the soup kitchen at Greenpoint Church through the holidays and into the new year.

Five years later I’m invited into another soup kitchen, St. John’s Bread & Life in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn’s largest emergency food provider. A friend suggests I meet with the director who is looking for someone to run a job-training program teaching people the basic skills they need to get jobs in kitchens.

The interview is two days after the 2016 election and I’m hungover, like a lot of America. Since those months in the Greenpoint Church, I’ve been freelancing, trying to find more purpose beyond other people’s restaurants, trying to find a balance between making money and helping people.

I sign on to create a curriculum that will teach people how to cook, how to move and communicate in a professional kitchen, how to work safely and cleanly. The pilot year of the program starts January 2018 and I work full-time to get it off the ground.

A kitchen quickly reveals how much you don’t know. The learning curve is sharp, and there’s nowhere to hide. When I start working at Bread & Life, I realize there’s a new learning curve for me, one that involves poverty and its bureaucracy. I used to think all I had to do is train people, teach them the names of equipment, to say “behind” on the line.