Our story began in 1991 in Etla, the outskirts of Oaxaca city. Where Susana and Eric began a life in the countryside.
About Rancho Aurora
The Foundation
Rancho Aurora sits in the Valles Centrales of Oaxaca, northwest of the city, between the villages of San Lorenzo Cacaotepec and San Felipe Tejalapam. Eric Ulrich, father of Kaelin and Jesse Ulrich Trilling, planted the first tomato ranch here in 1996. The same land feeds the kitchen now.
In 1999, Susana Trilling formally established Seasons of My Heart Cooking School on this property, after years of hosting cooking classes in her home. Later on, still choosing the countryside, they decided to buy more land and build where the dome that houses the cooking school is the architecture of their vision.
Eric and Susana arrived in Oaxaca in the late eighties following the Oaxacan cuisine, they discovered it lived in home kitchens and in markets. She spent years eating her way through the state, learning from families who had been cooking the same mole for generations. By the time she founded the school, she had notebooks full of recipes, relationships with cocineras tradicionales, a clear philosophy about what it meant to teach cooking.
Rancho Aurora became the physical embodiment of that work, a space where students could learn in the same kitchen, at the same market, with the same people she had been learning from all along.