Michaela Badiana is a Gloucester Parks, Recreation and Tourism instructor who teaches both belly dancing and cooking classes. Born in Germany, she met her husband, a U.S. soldier, and after marrying the two decided to move to the States. At 23, Badiana’s experience with cooking had mostly consisted of easy food she could make while going to school for optometry. Moving to a new country, she found that beyond meat and vegetables, most of the food she was used to wasn’t available. “Thirty years ago, food was very different than it is today,” she said. “You had the meat and vegetables, but there wasn’t any halfway done stuff that you could throw together—or at least, I couldn’t read the packages to make it.” After getting married, her mother had given her a cookbook. “Germany—where I’m from, is very pork, gravy, potato oriented—like home cooking, slow cooking type thing and so there was a lot of failure, but somehow I just … we figured it out,” she said. At the time she and her husband li...