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00:01 If you look at every culture closely,
00:04 there's always a form of pasta.
00:06 It just like leaves a really warm feeling,
00:09 comfort food, I guess.
00:11 Feeding people, having people in your house,
00:14 it's just such a big part of the cooking journey.
00:17 The reward comes when your guest or your child
00:21 is taking a taste and they say, "Wow."
00:24 That's where you've nailed it.
00:27 I want to bring back the joy of cooking in the kitchen.
00:31 I want them to make a mess in the kitchen.
00:33 I want them to get hands on.
00:35 Eating out is such a trend,
00:37 but when they make a homemade cook
00:39 and they have friends coming over,
00:41 it's just such a beautiful thing.
00:44 And I want that culture to keep it alive.
00:46 I just want to give them a taste of it.
00:48 My name is Fiona Afshar.
00:49 I'm 57 years young and I live in Malibu, California.
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00:56,
01:24 At the beginning, I had no idea you can actually make money.
01:28 I was like blown away, right?
01:30 Because this is what I love doing.
01:32 I don't put price on it.
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01:36 Growing up in a Persian household
01:41 was really based around a lot of food.
01:44 Food was a language of love.
01:46 That's how we show our love.
01:48 We make so many dishes and we want to feed you,
01:52 feed you, feed you, because we love you.
01:54 The more we feed you, the more we love you.
01:56 (upbeat music)
01:58 Once I had Kimmy, my third child,
02:08 I'm like, okay, what am I going to do now?
02:09 You know, I was itching to get that creative side out.
02:14 So I poured it all into the kitchen
02:16 and I became really creative with the food.
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02:23 I wanted to give her easy, delicious meals
02:27 to cook and prep.
02:28 I decided to make little videos.
02:31 And then my youngest daughter, she's like,
02:33 "Mom, why don't we put it on Instagram
02:36 "so you can share it with everybody?"
02:38 So she opened up an Instagram account for me.
02:40 I was not a social media person at all.
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02:46 I went and watched a tutorial
02:50 from a very famous chef, Tom Keller.
02:52 I made it with his recipe.
02:54 I'm like, oh my gosh, this is actually really easy.
02:59 I found that the pasta dough
03:01 is such a forgiving and versatile dough.
03:05 So that's how the pasta journey began.
03:08 As soon as I started posting pasta,
03:11 the whole social media went viral.
03:14 And I'm like, oh my gosh, people really like pasta
03:18 and they wanted more.
03:19 So I'm like, okay, you guys want pasta?
03:21 I'll give you more pasta.
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03:25 These guys started picking up my videos and reposting.
03:31 And I thought that was amazing.
03:32 So that also added with the following as well.
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03:38 I really don't know until I have the pasta sheet laid out.
03:50 And then I come up with design.
03:52 That's where the creative part is.
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03:57 Every season has its own special color, right?
04:02 And when you go to the market,
04:04 you see what the season brings you.
04:06 There's so many options for greens.
04:08 You can do parsley, gives you that bright green.
04:11 I would roast the beets,
04:13 get that beautiful red color in the dough.
04:17 So let me show you around my kitchen.
04:20 This is my big pasta machine,
04:23 which I do a lot of my work on.
04:26 And then I usually use this smaller pasta machine
04:29 for filming.
04:30 This is some of my tools, not all of them.
04:33 I have a room full,
04:35 but these are the ones that I will always go to.
04:37 I do love to display my herbs, my tomatoes and veggies.
04:42 I love using various different olive oils,
04:46 you know, extra virgin, high quality.
04:48 If you smell olive oil, it should really taste like olives.
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04:55 They gave me eight designers.
05:01 They said, "Can you pick five of them
05:03 and bring their pattern onto the pasta?"
05:06 So I picked these five
05:08 and I brought them into the pasta sheet.
05:11 And it was just such a fun video.
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05:19 My younger brother, one day he came,
05:33 he goes, "You have to open a shop.
05:35 You have to sell your pasta."
05:37 I'm like, "No, I'm not doing that.
05:39 This is fun, I don't want a business."
05:41 He's like, "Just give it a try for a month.
05:43 It's Shopify, we'll close it if you don't like it."
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05:49 As soon as he opened shop for me,
05:55 he's like, "Ding, ding, ding, sales started coming in."
05:59 I'm like, "Are you kidding me?
06:01 People are actually paying a hundred bucks for pasta?"
06:04 Before you know it, it went on Drew Barrymore,
06:06 on her yellow list.
06:08 That went really viral.
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06:15 I'm just not advertising it so much
06:23 because I don't have the manpower.
06:25 As of now, I've got two amazing grandmas,
06:29 one of them being my mom and my brother's mother-in-law.
06:32 They come here, I train them how to do pasta shapes
06:35 and designs.
06:36 They work more than me.
06:37 They don't even take lunch breaks.
06:39 They love doing it.
06:40 So we work, we make pasta boxes together.
06:43 So it's very organic, very homemade and full of love.
06:46 And when it gets really, really busy,
06:48 I have friends and family.
06:51 One is doing the packaging.
06:53 My brother does all the shipping.
06:55 Nobody gets paid for this.
06:57 Not that I don't want to pay them, I want to pay them,
06:59 but it's like an insult to them if I offer anything.
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07:09 People from all over the world were in my kitchen
07:13 and I was in their kitchen.
07:15 I had people from, you know, 4 a.m.
07:17 They stayed up to take my class.
07:19 And I charged about probably 35 per class.
07:23 So I would have 100 people in my class.
07:26 They show me their dishes.
07:27 It was priceless for me.
07:29 It was amazing.
07:30 And I'm so proud of all of them.
07:32 Fiona's Pasta, cooking with Fiona, it's more of a passion.
07:37 We're not relying on the income of it.
07:39 Whatever comes in is tucked away.
07:42 It just has so much potential to grow so big.
07:46 But in a way, I'm holding it as a baby.
07:49 I'm not letting it go because it's so dear to me,
07:52 so personal.
07:53 It's my art.
07:55 It's my passion.
07:56 I don't want to take it somewhere in a manufacturer,
07:59 mass produce it.
08:01 I think it will lose its essence.
08:03 I'm thinking maybe one day somebody will come
08:06 and by then I'm old, I'm tired, I'm done with this.
08:09 And they'll say, we want to buy Fiona's Pasta.
08:12 Then I would sell them.
08:13 But I'm not old, I'm not tired.
08:16 I'm going strong and I'm having fun with it.
08:19 [music]
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