Chelsea Wong, an SF State journalism student and the creator of “Spank Mr. Kitten Magazine” (SMK), has switched hats from editor-in-chief to chef this spring.

Wong is taking a break from SF State to study culinary arts for a year and a half at the California Culinary Academy in downtown San Francisco.

“I’m really excited,” she smiled. “It’s actually been my dream to open my own restaurant and cater through that. I love entertaining. I love feeding people. I love cooking. It is very therapeutic to me.”

Wong said she likes to experiment with preparing a number of different foods, including seafood, stir-fries and desserts.

The best part, she said, is that you get to eat what you cook. But no take-outs or you get kicked out of school.

“There are a lot of stoners in my class,” said Wong, frustrated because the tuition costs about $42,000 for a year and a half. She does not like working with a class where about half of the students are serious about what they are doing, and half are not, she said.

Wong has nurtured a passion for doing her own thing as she has journeyed from the capital of California to the editor-in-chief of SMK and now to the culinary school.

Wong was born in 1983 in San Francisco, where she lived for 10 years. Then her family decided to move to Sacramento. Wong hated the idea.

“It’s soooo suburbia. I’m a city girl. I really love to be in the city. I told myself when I go to college I’m gonna come back to San Francisco,” she said.

It didn't take long for Wong to decide where to go to college after graduating from high school. She knew she left her heart in San Francisco, so she went chasing after it. In the fall of 2001, she enrolled as a freshman at SF State. Her second year in college, she and a couple of her friends from Sacramento started putting together a zine.

Wong and her friend Mel Roska worked together on theatre projects and collaborated on what to put in the zine. After endless brainstorming they decided to include comics, drawings, poetry, and just cool funny nonsense for readers to enjoy.

But of course, it needed to have a cool name.

One day Wong and a couple of her friends got together at her friend’s house for a party.

“This guy who got really drunk and wanted to sleep with my friend had a kitten,” she recalled. “And Mel was like, hey, wouldn’t be Mr. Kitten a funny name for a cat? So this is where the idea came from.”

The first issue came out in August 2002 and got an incredible response from people of all ages, Wong said.

“We even got a letter from the Sacramento library and they put that first issue in the archive,” she said.

Wong’s father works for a printing company, so she’s able to xerox copies of her zine for free. They print about 300 copies of SMK every month and distribute them around Haight Street.

“It is cool,” said Brian Phuripan, 25, who contributed to the December issue of SMK. “It is a good venue for people who can’t get published anywhere else.”

Derek Johnson, 30, describes SMK as “cute.” But he says he does not take it very seriously because “they don’t pay anyone.”

“It is a labor of love,” said Wong, who has not made any money producing the zine. “I do it because I love it. It’s my baby. When I get responses from people it makes me feel incredible. Even though it takes up a lot of my time and I have to deal with a lot of crap, it is something I really like doing."

“She is a triple threat,” said Rob Sordiani, 28, who considers himself lucky to be Chelsea’s boyfriend. He is amazed that his girlfriend finds time for him while she’s involved in cooking, journalism and SMK.

“She is very dedicated and hardworking person,” said Mel Roska, 20, co-editor of SMK.

Wong plans to come back and finish her bachelor’s in journalism at SF State after finishing culinary school. But she has big doubts about journalism.

She selected journalism for her major because she thought she could do much more with journalism in her life. But after Wong took Journalism 200 -- an introductory class -- the journalism profession didn’t seem so exciting for her anymore.

“I had Venise Wagner and she is an excellent teacher,” Wong said. “I really liked her teaching methods. But all these concepts in the journalism world really pissed me off. With the whole idea of trying to be objective, the big corporations and all of that stuff… It is a bit discouraging and contradictory."

After attending a speech on campus, a phrase of an award-winning journalist Reese Ehrlich got stuck in her head: “In the journalism world never ever take a job that you can’t afford to get fired from.”

“I don’t want to live that way,” Wong said to herself.

Wong said she might become a food critic or start her own food magazine, but for now she has chosen culinary arts.

“I want to be in charge!” she exclaimed. “I want to be in the kitchen and I want to boss people around.”