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.