Watching Emilie Sonne move around her Tulsa kitchen is a lesson in purpose, in being meticulous and quietly joyful at the same time. Diffused kitchen lighting, soft music piping through the house, baking trays of roasted sweet potato and cubes of crispy tofu cooling on the stove while photo-ready assembled dishes wait for their turn at the living room window to find the good sun—all work together as a kind of mise en place. Everything is in its right place, including Sonne.
“I’ve always been a find-your-niche kind of person,” Sonne said.
She’s the owner of Pare Provisions, a vegan cottage food company, which turns one on February 14. Sonne, 52 (and vegetarian since 14), prepares scratch-made vegan dishes out of her home kitchen in Tulsa for a devoted group of weekly patrons.
“Usually between 15 and 22 people order each week, which is sort of exactly where I wanted to be a year after I opened. I’m big on intention-setting, so I’m really pleased I’m getting close to that,” Sonne said.
She and her husband moved from Texas to Oklahoma, her home state, in 2017. The relocation set off a career odyssey that saw Sonne, whose professional background is in HR and operations, working for the women who own Antoinette Baking Company for a couple of years, then taking on short-term contract office work from home during the height of the pandemic. Sonne said she found the time in isolation turning her into “a bit of a weirdo” and knew she needed to make a change.
There’s no more COVID-adjacent phrase than “sourdough influencer,” and Sonne started obsessing over a local one: baker Sarah Grunewald, or @sarahdoessourdough on Instagram. Grunewald’s cottage bakery, which has earned her tens of thousands of followers across her social accounts, is based in Broken Arrow.
“I don’t know her at all, but she runs a great business and shares a ton online,” Sonne said, “so I was able to sort of imagine myself in that space, but with what I love, which is vegan food.”
Sonne’s husband is vegan—not by her influence, but via his regret after horking down what she called the world’s largest pastrami sandwich before a long drive years ago—and she cooks exclusively vegan food at home. Even their dog, Junebug, tends towards the lifestyle, preferring cornbread and tofu over meat. (Their other pet, a headstrong cat named Natedogg, is a carnivore.) The state’s cottage food laws, it turns out, are ideal for vegan chefs: the main things you cannot prepare for sale are meat, poultry and seafood, foods that Sonne hasn’t eaten since she was a teenager. Armed with decades of vegan cooking experience, Sonne built a simple business plan, and Pare Provisions was born.
It’s her confidence in her cooking that lets the ingredients shine, as in her version of what the average person might picture when conjuring a classically vegan meal, the Buddha bowl: grain base, lentils, tofu, sauerkraut, and a fresh cilantro pesto sauce to mix in. The beautiful, rainbow presentation of this dish represents Sonne’s sense of care about the food she makes. It also swings closest to the way she eats.
“Embarrassingly, what I prefer to eat is mostly just like, rice, tofu, cucumbers, carrots,” Sonne said.
This preference doesn’t limit Pare Provisions’ range, which any given week could include vegan reimaginings of popular soups and dairy- and carnivore-friendly swaps for the vegan-curious: crispy and chewy roasted homemade seitan chicken wings with chipotle barbecue and ranch or tofu burnt ends over mac and cashew cheese. Her recipes are welcoming to vegans, but also everyone else. Many of her repeat clients aren’t vegan.
She also tiptoes into the playful, replicating foods that feel impossible to veganize and that many vegans may not have gotten to eat in years, like Caesar salads, reubens with seitan pastrami and cashew Swiss cheese and, curiously, deviled eggs. They’re made of coconut yogurt, potato, black salt, agar and a willingness to be absurd.
“Aren't they hilarious? It looks so eggy. I haven't had an egg in a million years,” Sonne said. The first time she offered them, she sold 20 orders.
There is one frontier Sonne admits she’s yet to conquer, however.
“French patisserie is my Mount Everest. I love baking. I actually consider myself a more skilled baker than a cook,” Sonne said. But when it comes to veganizing dishes whose essence comes from butter and eggs, “It’s the only place where I’ve consistently, spectacularly failed.”
Regardless, she plans to perfect her macaron recipe and offer it as a future “roadie,” the bonus treat she includes with orders. It’s so-named for her grandmother Polly, or Gam, who used to tell her grandkids, “Don’t forget to grab a roadie!” as they exited past her front-door candy dish.
I don’t doubt she’ll accomplish this and reach a grateful ordering public. I sampled one of her cherry and almond Bakewell bars and reacted so effusively she offered me another one to-go: a roadie, if you will. I am not vegan, but that felt irrelevant when I ate her food, which is a very specific magic she’s cultivated. Instead of evangelizing a certain type of diet, she’s quietly offering food that draws people in.
“The biggest surprise for me has been that I don't get more questions like, ‘What's in this?’ I kind of love that people are willing to try things and spend money trying things,” Sonne said.
Happy birthday, happy anniversary and happy Valentine’s Day to Pare Provisions, whose love is a two-way street.
“I love making food. If this had flopped, I of course would have stopped doing it,” Sonne said. “It's a symbiotic relationship. I do love the planning and creativity, and then having people that are supportive and intrigued and give me honest feedback is necessary for me to continue doing that.”
