The internet has a way of making mastery look instant.<\/p>\n
A recipe goes viral. A creator racks up millions of views. A dish lands on your feed so quickly and cleanly that it. Feels like it appeared out of nowhere. But behind almost every \u201covernight\u201d success in food media is the kind of grind most people never see: the early restaurant shifts, the side jobs, the recipe tests that fail, the years spent trying to find a voice before anyone is listening.<\/p>\n
Shereen Pavlides knows that road well.<\/p>\n
Before she became the force behind Cooking with Shereen<\/a> media gave her a direct line into people\u2019s kitchens, she spent years trying to build a life around food without losing herself in the process. She worked in restaurants starting at 13. She took a detour into the corporate world after college. She worked two jobs. She became a mom. She trained at the Institute of Culinary Education in New York. She styled food, developed recipes, wrote for newspapers, hosted segments on camera, and kept chasing a version of the culinary world that would let her do things her way.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was 15 years of sort of struggling and trying to find my way,\u201d Pavlides says.<\/p>\n That sentence is the real beginning of her story.<\/p>\n What eventually made Pavlides connect online wasn\u2019t some polished brand strategy or a trend she chased at the right time. It was conviction. She believed people could cook from scotch. She believed it didn\u2019t have to be complicated, and maybe most importantly, she believed that confidence in the kitchen could change the way people felt about themselves. That\u2019s why her work hits the way it does.<\/p>\n She\u2019s not just giving people recipes. She\u2019s empowering them.<\/p>\n Pavlides\u2019 path into food was never linear, even if the passion was always there.<\/p>\n \u201cI always worked in restaurants since I\u2019ve been 13,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd when I got into\u2014after I graduated college, I thought I had to go into the real world, so I worked for a private mortgage insurance company as a sales rep.\u201d<\/p>\n Even then, food never really left. She continued working in restaurants.<\/p>\n After getting married and having kids, the pull back toward food got stronger, but she also knew the version of restaurant life she had known earlier no longer git the life she wanted.<\/p>\n \u201cI wanted to go back to my passion which was food, and I wanted to do it my way,\u201d Pavlides says. \u201cI didn\u2019t want to go back into restaurants because now I\u2019m a mom, and I didn\u2019t want those type of hours.\u201d<\/p>\n She began looking at food through a wider lens. Not just kitchens, but media. She went to culinary school while juggling motherhood and trying to find opportunities that made sense for her life in New Jersey.<\/p>\n \u201cI knew I wanted to do food media, recipe development, and food styling,\u201d she says. \u201cThere\u2019s so many other facets to food aside from the restaurant.\u201d<\/p>\n That stretch of her career became a long apprenticeship in persistence. She worked as a food stylist and recipe developer for national and Fortune 500 food companies. She wrote for newspapers, did weekly videos, guest hosted a local cooking show, and she even found her way back into the kitchen at the Four Seasons for a year because, as she puts it, \u201cmy love can never kind of ever get out of the kitchen.\u201d<\/p>\n When she speaks about these years, what comes across is how she continued moving, and kept learning and adapting.<\/p>\n \u201cThere was a lot of rejection,\u201d she says. \u201cThere was a lot of roadblocks.\u201d<\/p>\n Then came QVC Television Network. She landed a job as a food stylist, stayed for a year and was promoted into an on-air guest role representing Cook\u2019s Essentials. In one sense, it was a breakthrough. In another, it sharpened what she still wanted.<\/p>\n Even while she was cooking professionally, she didn\u2019t feel fully heard. \u201cI always felt like I couldn\u2019t share my voice,\u201d Pavlides said. \u201cMy passion, my vision.\u201d<\/p>\n That tension became the bridge to what came next.<\/p>\n Social media didn\u2019t start out as Pavlides\u2019 primary plan, however, she quickly realized that it could serve as a practical solution for audience demand of her culinary creations.<\/p>\n At QVC, she was demoing products, creating recipes, and constantly hearing the same request from viewers.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople would say, \u2018Oh, I want that recipe,\u2019\u201d she says. \u201cAnd I thought, \u2018Ah, let me just start a YouTube channel on the side.\u201d<\/p>\n That small side move turned into something much bigger. YouTube let into TikTok. The social media platform arrived just before the pandemic, and for the first time, Pavlides had a platform that belonged to her.<\/p>\n \u201cThis was away for me to share my voice,\u201d she said. \u201cI was always passionate about cooking from scratch, and the companies that I worked for, they wanted to represent their products, which necessarily was already a fabricated product that wasn\u2019t from scratch. So I always felt like I couldn\u2019t share my voice, and here was a way that now I can share what I think is important.\u201d<\/p>\n That early message came with force. Pavlides says her style was more in your face, and direct before timing took over. The pandemic hit, people were at home and suddenly had a lot of down time. Most people were looking for something useful, and even hopeful to occupy themselves. Pavlides suddenly had their attention.<\/p>\n What she saw next is what kept her going.<\/p>\n \u201cThey were showing me their videos,\u201d shay said. \u201cThey were so pumped. They were making potato galettes and flipping them in the pan, and they felt so good about themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n That reaction gave her something more meaningful than metrics. The voice within her that kept urging \u2018keep going\u2019 had brought her to a calling. There\u2019s a reason she always comes back to confidence when she talks about her audience. It\u2019s not abstract to her. She\u2019s a testament to it.<\/p>\n \u201cI think it\u2019s empowering them to let them know they can do it,\u201d she says. \u201cI gave people the confidence to get back in the kitchen and to feel good again through something as simple as cooking.\u201d<\/p>\nFinding Her Way Back to Food<\/h2>\n
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<\/div>When Social Media Became Her Voice<\/h2>\n
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