Get a Kick Out of Cooking
Teenage sisters Angel and Julie use their skills in the culinary arts to support their passion for martial arts.
Elisa Canete taught her girls two things about life: you have the power to climb to the top, and everything tastes better with a little sugar. Angel, 10 and Julie, 14 now have their own taste for international cuisine and want to share it with their community.
The girls’ favorite treat is empanadas: pastries hearty enough for lunch or sweet enough for an afternoon dessert. They make empanadas the way they know best, like their mama taught them. Elisa Canete grew up hand-rolling the pastries in her home in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She taught her daughters just as she learned, to carefully press wheat dough and stuff the savory bites with beef, onions, olives, egg, and spices.
In 2017, the girls began selling empanadas alongside bite-sized ricotta cheesecakes at The Community Tap’s Young Entrepreneurs Market (YEM) in Greenville. After a successful sellout, they knew they were cooking up something special. This year, they participated again. The girls pushed back bedtime to hand-press over one hundred empanadas to sell at their table, aptly named A Taste of Buenos Aires.
The Canete girls used the profit to help pay for airfare to karate competitions, a passion requiring national and international t ravel. Julie, the older of the Canete sisters, competes on the US Junior National Team, spending six days a week at the dojo. Angel is following in her sister’s footsteps, training just as intensely. Both girls frequently travel to compete and they’ve got boxes filled to the brim with glimmering gold metals to prove it.
Julie’s en route to compete with the USA National Karate-do Federation for the future Olympics and she hopes continuing to sell food will help her achieve it. Angel has dreams of becoming a chef. “I try to copy recipes from cooking shows, but sometimes it’s really hard,” Angel said. “I want to be like the chefs on TV.” Angel and Julie watch cooking shows, help their parents cook, and never miss out on the opportunity to try something new. “Food isn’t about just cooking and eating— you get to experiment with so many new things,” Julie says. “It’s like an art.” Both girls love to eat and are drawn to foods from different regions.
The Canete family moved to Greenville from Florida in 2016 so the girls could train and compete for karate with the US Sensei. Angel explains that the move wasn’t too difficult and she was especially excited because their kitchen is much bigger now. Sitting on the edge of the counter is a shiny KitchenAid mixer. Angel was given the mixer from a friend for her birthday. “I was so happy—I use it all the time,” Angel says, beaming. Now the girls can keep experimenting and mixing, be it empanada dough, sweet caramel glaze for a Tres Leches cake, or a coconut filling for their favorite cookies—anything for the sweet tooth after a long day at the dojo.
