LEWISTON — Kristen Little wasn’t yet a culinary student at The Green Ladle when she began volunteering in their kitchen during the spring of 2020.

After the pandemic hit, students and staff at The Green Ladle rallied to help prepare and deliver thousands of meals to homebound members of the community over several months. But they needed more volunteers.

When Little’s brother Nathan, then a senior in the program, started driving to The Green Ladle to help, she went too.

“When I saw my brother going, three, four days a week, I was like ‘oh Nathan, want to just drag me along?’ she said. “I just want to get out of the house, but then it kind of turned into I was coming here without Nathan and I just wanted to be involved, because what Chef (Dan Caron) does, it’s amazing.”

“She was there every single day helping us to cook food to deliver food,” instructor Caron said.

Pastry instructor Rebecca Levesque said Little, a senior at Lewiston High School, has spent hundreds of hours in The Green Ladle kitchen, volunteering to help others in need and signing up to help staff events.

So when the culinary instructors were asked to nominate a student for Lewiston Regional Technical Center Student of the Year, Levesque said they immediately thought of Little.

“It’s funny, I planned on nominating her for two years, just so you know,” said Caron, known to his students as simply “Chef.”

She was the first culinary student to earn the recognition in at least nine years, he added. Each of LRTC’s 20 programs nominated a student for the award.

“Anything she can do to give back to the community, she’s there,” Levesque said. “She just has such a wonderful giving personality. … It’s the person that really goes over and above. She’s involved any way she can.”

Once nominated, Little had a week to write an essay and compile a portfolio of activities, accomplishments and recommendation letters.

Caron shared that one of the LRTC administrators told him Little’s portfolio “was just amazing, there was not one misspelled word, everything was just amazingly done.”

With the recognition comes a $1,000 scholarship and the invitation to a banquet hosted at The Green Ladle to celebrate the student of the year from each of Maine’s career technical schools.

As a sophomore, Little had initially signed up for LRTC’s law enforcement program, thinking she wanted to pursue a career in criminal justice.

“But then after working with Chef and all the teachers and really getting to know the program, I kind of got stuck in a good way,” Little explained.

When she asked to switch to the culinary program a month before school started, the instructors found room for her.

Although Little said she prefers the cooking side of the program, she spent a great deal of time baking and frosting this year in preparation for the SkillsUSA Maine competition in March. There, Little and two other students won gold in the wedding cake decorating competition.

Each team was given four hours to assemble, ice and decorate their cakes.

“It goes by so fast,” Little said. “Really, you don’t even have as much time as you think that you do. Because when you’re trying to pace yourself so that you don’t end too early, it’s easy to get behind. Because four hours to make a whole wedding cake as perfect as you can is not that much time.”

Working at the Green Ladle is “pretty fast paced, but at the same time, laid back,” she said. “We all kind of become a family.”

On her first day in the two-year culinary program, Little fondly remembered when Chef Dan Caron tossed half a dozen eggs around the kitchen.

“Chef was trying to encourage us to not be afraid to make messes, not be afraid to have accidents (or) spill something,” she recalled, adding that most students were shocked.

The easy, fun atmosphere at The Green Ladle has made it a great place to learn, but it’s the focus on community service which Little said makes the program and instructors stand out.

To help fund the food delivery program in 2020, The Green Ladle purchased a food truck to sell food at events, Caron said. Even after the delivery program ended, the profits are still set aside for community service initiatives.

On Christmas morning in 2020, Caron and others prepared meals for the homeless. Little, who came with her brother, was the only student to help, according to Caron.

“She’s just always that person I can count on when we have a large function or when we opened up our food truck,” he said.

After graduation, Little aims to attend Urshan College in Missouri to study human services.

“Chef pushed me towards the customer service side because I kind of got more outgoing as the class went on,” Little said.

“She’s a great cook, but when I needed somebody out front to be the host person or to be friendly … she was that person I wanted to represent who we were,” Caron said.

In the future, she aims to work with children in need.

“I realized that I really like helping people (and) working with people,” she said.

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