The spirit of adventure comes naturally to Kathryn Schick.
A commercial airline pilot for American Airlines, the Kenwick resident is also an avid cyclist who visited all 50 states and 12 countries. She’s also lived in an Airstream trailer, bike-packed around Michigan and slept in a van for multiple days while road-tripping around Alaska and Iceland.
While her newest endeavor – sharing her favorite improvised recipes and stories from her travels via the website and Instagram account Kenwick Kitchen – might seem relatively tame compared to these other global experiences, Schick said honing these new digital skills (photography and web maintenance) has been its own adventure.
Among her other discoveries as a food blogger after years of being a casual home cook? Learning to follow and write recipes.
“I cook so much by feel and taste and what’s in my fridge and pantry, I never realized the work that goes into recipe development,” she said.
Traveling, however, has long been an important part of Schick’s existence. Her father was also an airline pilot, and her family often took advantage of the perks that came along with his job.
“We would pack up at a moment’s notice and spend a few days wherever we had the opportunity to go,” she said. “I was so lucky to have a chance to see so much of the world.”
Looking at Schick’s career path, one might be inclined to think she always wanted to follow in her father’s footsteps, but her path to the skies was a bit less direct.
“Before training to become a pilot, I rode horses professionally,” she explained. After high school, she briefly attended the University of Kentucky — but unsure of her direction, she soon left UK to pursue her passion of riding full time.
“I loved it, but I came to a point where I knew I wasn’t good enough to make a career of riding, and that’s when my dad suggested I become a pilot,” she recalled. “My first thought was, ‘I can do that?’ So, I decided to learn to fly, and the first time I flew, I knew it was what I was meant to do.”
Schick enrolled at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, where she studied both online and at the Louisville campus, which closed in 2019. “With an international airport and the UPS global hub in Louisville, it’s a great place to train to fly large aircraft,” she said. After graduating, she joined the crew at American Airlines, where she has worked since 2011.
Like so many industries, aviation took a hard hit with the onset of COVID. And in March, Schick and her husband, Travers, found themselves abroad needing to quickly make their way home due to the pandemic. Travers, who builds jumps and courses for equestrian events, was working in Tokyo, constructing courses for the 2020 Summer Olympics, and Kathryn had met him over there.
“We were there, and all of a sudden we had to quickly get home. Like so many others, we were nervous and afraid and unsure,” she recalled. “The first few days after we got home were hard. Along with the general fear of COVID, we were both unsure of what was happening with our jobs, and things were very uncertain.”
Fortunately for the couple, both soon found out their jobs would be safe in the long term, even though things would look different in the interim. Reductions in travel have kept Schick grounded for the majority of the year. To productively fill time at home, she has dived into gardening and working on some home improvement projects … and she is doing a lot of cooking.
The circumstances surrounding COVID-19 have allowed her the time, and provided the impetus, to take Kenwick Kitchen a bit further by creating an actual website (www.kenwickkitchen.com) to complement the Kenwick Kitchen Instagram account that Schick had started in 2018. The project started as a direct extension of her love of stepping into her kitchen and making a meal out of whatever is available.
“I love to cook with whatever I have lying around,” she explained. “I follow recipes loosely, and I cook on instinct and by experimenting.”
Her recipes tend to reflect that laid-back approach – in one blog entry for a squash blossom quiche recipe, she wrote, “I never want anyone to feel like a recipe isn’t approachable or as if they can’t recreate it because of the absence of one single thing. The base recipe is essentially 6 eggs with 1/2 cup of milk. That’s it! The rest is all up to you. ... If you don’t have squash blossoms, no problem! Just make it your own with what you have on hand, and share it with someone you love.”
“If I could give people only one cooking tip, it’s to not be afraid to modify a recipe or try a new idea,” Schick said. “Most recipes have a few key ingredients, but the rest are flexible based on the cook’s taste and preference. If you’re cooking and you decide to add something that you have on hand on a whim, it’s hard to go wrong. We all have a sense of what ingredients taste good together, and experimenting is really rewarding when your creation turns out to be delicious.”
Largely influenced by her travels, Schick’s recipes are designed to use simple, fresh ingredients that most people are likely to have on hand. She also focuses on simple cooking techniques that don’t require special tools — an ideal approach for home cooks who want to spice up their repertoire without stepping too far out of their comfort zone.
“I want everyone to feel confident and comfortable in the kitchen and not be overwhelmed by my recipes,” explained Schick.
Followers of Kenwick Kitchen’s Instagram account (@KenwickKitchen) will notice the Schicks are also fans of “van life,” having rented converted Sprinter vans for many of their outdoor traveling adventures. Being home more this year has provided them the opportunity to work on another dream project: converting their own Mercedes Sprinter van into a small recreational vehicle, fully equipped to road trip in comfort and style.
While Schick is looking forward to getting back to work (she’s currently picking up only occasional flights), she said the time on the ground hasn’t been a loss. In addition to her personal projects, she’s also spent time training to fly several new aircraft models.
“The great thing about flying large aircraft is that there are things that are always the same, in the same place, and the steps you need to take for every flight don’t vary,” she explained. “Still, we train extensively on each type of aircraft, and we know each type of plane we fly well.”
Female pilots are still somewhat rare, but Schick hopes to see that change.
“Women are exceptional at all of the things it takes to be a good pilot – we are intuitive communicators, we listen, we stay calm in crisis, and we are both caring and steady and pay attention to details,” she said. “Women can really excel as pilots, and young women who are interested should definitely pursue a career in aviation and aeronautics.”