Musicians all around the world are struggling with loss of income due to the inability to perform live concerts with audiences. While I am fortunate to still have a steady income I know all too well what it feels like to be hung out to dry having gone through the 14-week BSO lockout in the summer of 2019. I remain grateful for so many colleagues who stepped up to help us in our time of need and am giving back by donating to musicians' relief funds and also raising money through lessons and masterclasses.

One of the questions I get often is "What would you do if you weren't a musician?" For me the obvious answer is something related to food! I love cooking, sweet foods in particular. I'm actually half-Italian so cooking is very much in my blood and I somewhat got started with several recipes for fancy traditional Italian desserts passed down from my grandmother, an Italian immigrant. These are usually very labor intensive but worth every second of effort. One of my favorite things to do is create new recipes, flavors, and dishes, often with health and sustainability in mind. I don't eat red meat and prefer to go easy on gluten consumption so in a way this fetish started out of necessity. I recently came up with a turkey bolognese sauce recipe that is almost indistinguishable from the more traditional but less healthy and environmentally friendly beef bolognese. Making this takes about 7 hours start to finish (!) so I work in extremely large batches and store it in my freezer so I still have time to practice!

Even when not creating new recipes I also like pushing the boundaries with quality, tinkering with existing and more traditional foods until I get them exactly the way I want. I have a recipe for chocolate chip cookies that I have dubbed the "Mad Scientist Version" because I felt like one with the amount of effort needed to perfect the process. There's no magic ingredient but the recipe is a full 2 pages long so following the details exactly yields a delicacy that has been known to disappear quickly at parties and other social functions. My latest project has been home-made ice cream. I've come up with through experimentation an extremely meticulous process that is too complicated and boring to explain here to make my ice cream at the highest quality, enough that I stopped buying my favorite flavor and brand at the store because I now prefer my own version! However, I also invented some new flavors, for example Cardamom French Vanilla, an unexpected but addictive blend of traditional and more exotic flavors. What's next? Time will tell :-)

Any of this sound interesting? Shoot me a message through my website (below). I believe recipes are best shared for the greater good so I don't keep these a secret!

Professional bio at www.austin-larson.com/about