From interning in a kitchen breaking down hundreds of lobsters to hunting truffles in Italy to hosting random four course dinner parties, Amanda Shulman lives to cook. The University of Pennsylvania senior has completed the first level of basic cuisine from Le Cordon Bleu in Paris and is as likely to fall asleep reading a cookbook as she is reading a textbook studying for class.

The aspiring chef and writer is the editor-in-chief of UPenn Spoon, a branch of the national college food website Spoon University.  She runs her own catering business, pens a food blog, stayhungree,and interns at both a bakery and a restaurant in Center City.

“I’ve always been passionate about writing and food, and linking the two together seemed like a natural thing to do, ” she says.

Shulman’s major is political science and her minor is journalism. In the fall of 2013 she spent the first semester of her junior year in a Penn Abroad funded trip to Rome and discovered how much she enjoys shaping ravioli. Making pasta is her favorite pastime.

She hosts a series of dinner parties in which she invites random people, some of whom she’s never met, to a four course dinner she prepares. The menus are based on her mood and what's in season.

“The whole idea is to bring people together through the shared experience of a meal,” she says. “I announce on Facebook that I'm having a dinner party. I'll get a bunch of messages and try and compile a group of somewhat random people. Maybe they know one another from passing or being in the same social group, but most of the people at the table would never break bread together.”

Recently, she threw an all-pig themed dinner. The amuse bouche was a bacon wrapped date. The first course was pork belly with butter-braised leek, sour dough croutons and poached egg yolk. The second was hand-rolled papardelle with pork sausage and kale ragu. The third course was braised pork shoulder and porcini mushroom stew over polenta followed by the fourth, a chocolate salted caramel peanut tart.

“Making something and giving it to someone is such a personal experience,” she says.  “It’s truly a way of connecting and sharing.”

Cooking was a major part of the aspiring chef’s childhood growing up in Greenwich, Conn. Every Friday night her mother served roast chicken with vegetables and baked potatoes that Shulman helped prepare. Everyone in the family had to attend.

“Everything happened around our family dinner table, and I became obsessed with creating things and the act of feeding people,” Shulman says.

Making dinner is her favorite part of the day.  When she’s not in class, it’s all she thinks about.

“I spend 50 percent of my day planning menus and drafting recipes and the other 50 percent cooking.”

In 2014, Shulman won the Heled Travel and Research Grant, an endowed fund at Penn’s Kelly Writers House that enables a student to travel during the summer to conduct research leading to a significant writing project.

Shulman spent part of the summer researching and hunting black summer truffles in Italy. She traveled to San Miniato, in Tuscany and Perugia in Umbria and met with truffle hunters, studied truffles and their origins and learned how to incorporate them into the regions’ cuisines.

The experience, she says was “a complete dream come true.”

She blogged about her journey and last December gave a presentation in the Arts Café of Writers House. A video recording and audio recording of the program is archived on the Writers House website.

Part of that summer Shulman worked in the private dining room of the food website Tasting Table. She helped cook meals for dinner parties for eight and once broke down 300 lobsters to make 1,000 lobster rolls. Shulman also worked in the test kitchen of Food 52 the summer before.

Shulman likes to de-stress by baking and is currently interning at The Bakeshop on 20th Street in the Rittenhouse Square area twice a week and once weekly at Amis restaurant in the city’s Washington Square West section.

She calls the Philadelphia food scene amazing and is excited about the prospect of working in a kitchen in the city after she graduates or in one of the world’s culinary meccas somewhere else. She wants to “travel and taste all over the world” and the best thing about food is that it’s everywhere, opening the doors to endless opportunities to do that.