Amber Rose still doesn't cook at home.

It's one of those details that makes her laugh—how a girl from Edgewood who never pictured herself in a kitchen ended up as the head cook at Teutopolis Junior High, feeding every student who walks through the cafeteria doors.

The kitchen is only the latest in a series of unexpected turns. After high school, Amber enlisted in the Air Force. An injury cut that chapter short. She earned a degree in criminal justice and set her sights on becoming a police officer. That didn't pan out either. Eventually she found herself working in a daycare—a move that surprised even her own father, since Amber had never considered herself a "kid person."

"I fell in love with the kids," she says.

When her youngest son, Zeppelin, started kindergarten, Amber wanted a job on the same school calendar. She applied to the Teutopolis district for a teacher's aide position. The district had something else in mind—a spot in the kitchen.

That was 2020, right as COVID was reshaping school life. Amber didn't just cook. When custodial staff at the high school were out sick, she'd finish her kitchen work and cross over to clean their building. She later added two hours of custodial duty at the grade school after every shift for an entire school year. Summers, she helped deep-clean the junior high—scrubbing walls, wiping down desks, resetting the building for a fresh start.

By her third year, she was head cook.

Her mornings begin around 6:30, getting her boys moving and dropping Zeppelin at the grade school before arriving at the junior high around eight. From there, it's food prep until lunch at 11:18—a time she rattles off the way someone recites a phone number. Most days it's just Amber and one or two others running the operation. She's technically off the clock at two, but rarely leaves before three.

"There's always work to be done," she says.

The favorite menu item? Chicken nuggets. No contest.

But what happens inside that cafeteria goes beyond the serving line. Cafeteria staff see every student, every day. Some arrive laughing. Others carry the weight of a hard morning. Amber has learned to read the difference.

"There are certain kids that you just kind of feel for a little bit more than others," she says.

Sometimes that means making sure a child doesn't go hungry—especially the ones heading straight to practice. Sometimes it means a well-timed joke. She treats the students like her own, teasing them the way she'd tease her boys at the dinner table. The junior high kids, squirrely and sharp-witted, give it right back.

She loves watching them change. Quiet seventh graders arrive unsure of themselves and leave as eighth graders standing taller. She'll visit the high school kitchen and spot boys she remembers as small for their age now towering over her.

That thread of continuity is about to deepen. Next year, sixth graders will move into the junior high—and among them will be Zeppelin, known to his friends as "Zeppy." Amber is already looking forward to embarrassing him in front of his buddies. But the transition holds something even deeper: many of the incoming seventh graders are children she cared for years ago at daycare. She's known some of them since they were three and four years old.

"I'm excited because it's like now I get to see them again," she says.

Her oldest son, Aiden, graduated from Teutopolis and is studying welding at Lake Land College, attending classes two days a week and working on his off days. He's on track to finish this spring. Zeppelin, meanwhile, is all about cars and football—a devoted Patriots fan navigating fifth grade with the kind of energy his name suggests.

For Amber, the Teutopolis schools represent something she wished she'd had growing up.

"The school systems here are phenomenal," she says. "They really care about your kids."

She remembers how staff reached out when Aiden was having a difficult stretch in grade school—calling her, offering resources, treating her like a partner rather than a problem. That culture shows up in community events like movie nights and cruise nights, in a principal Amber calls "flipping amazing," and in a kitchen where one woman who never planned to be a cook somehow ended up in the exact place she was meant to be.

"I was honored that he even asked me," Amber says of being chosen for this story. "I just cook."

She does. And in Teutopolis, that matters more than she knows.