Kate Crow shares her cooking journey and opening up her local soup business in downtown Muncie. Editor’s Note: The writer of this story, Arianna Sergio, is friends with Kate Crow’s son. By Arianna Sergio ate Crow’s first memory in the kitchen is from when she was around 9-yearsold. Her mother had gone for a walk with her brother, and there was a Shake n’ Bake chicken left cooking in the oven. The oven timer went off, and Kate’s mother was still gone. Kate thought she had to be the hero and take the chicken out before it burned. As she was pulling the chicken out, she didn’t have a tight enough grip on the tray and it tipped over, with two of the chicken breasts falling onto the electric coil, starting a small fire. Kate immediately shut off the oven and sprinted down the street to find her mother. The chicken fiasco didn’t keep Kate out of the kitchen. She remembers helping her mom prepare for dinners with her siblings. She recalls eventually cooking one of her first foods — salmon patties. Kate was in middle school when she took on this daunting task. There was only one issue — she didn’t realize she had to pick each and every bone from this fish in order to make them. Though she did it, and still makes salmon patties to this day, she remembers it being an “awful” experience at the time. As she grew older, her relationship with cooking grew stronger. Kate says she is a big people-person, so when she was in college, she would always have
friends over and occasionally cook for them. She says she wasn’t great, but she had a couple of recipes that worked for her. She would cook some of her favorite recipes from her childhood, or she would borrow them from friends. “The beginning of all of this was just recognizing that I enjoy feeding people,” Kate says. When Kate would learn a new technique, either by reading it in a cookbook or by watching someone else do it, she realized that her cooking could only improve from there. After watching one of her close friends cook for her and her husband, she became extremely interested in exploring various flavor combinations. She jokes that meals don’t have to be just “meat and potatoes” all the time. “[Cooking] became important to me because I enjoyed [the food] tasting better and coming from my fingertips,” Kate says. Her passion for cooking shined through, and this is when she realized she wanted to start a food business of her own, and Runaround Soup was born.
Someone wrote to me that they may have licked at the bottom of their bowl at work in public. That’s what it’s about.” - Kate Crow, owner of Runaround Soup
28 | Ball Bearings Magazine | Spring 2022
