It’s a Sunday in December and Benedictine Sister Vicki Ix is very busy making spaghetti bolognese for 40 of her sisters in the kitchen of the Benedictine Monastery in Bristow. She dices onions, carrots and celery — the “holy trinity of yum” — and talks about her life as director of vocations for the order, all the while giving plenty of cooking tips.

“Recipes are nice, but it’s more important to learn a good technique,” she says while crushing garlic. “The technique you can use throughout your life.”

As she cooks, Sister Vicki works alone and talks straight into a video camera. She’s filming an episode of her cooking show, “The Bristow Bistro.” Soon she will post it on YouTube, making it available for anyone with an internet connection.

She hopes the videos will teach people how to make great meals and raise their awareness of the monastic lifestyle.

“People really like to watch other people cook,” Sister Vicki said. “And YouTube’s free. I’ll use any application I can find to tell people about the monastic life.”

While the online videos are something new for Sister Vicki, cooking is something she’s done since growing up in New Jersey. She started at age 9 learning from her mother.

“My mother hated to cook, so when I figured out how, it made her so happy,” she said. “It became another way to love my mother.”

Eventually, Sister Vicki turned her passion for cooking into a career, and in 1989 she spent a year at the New York Restaurant School, studying culinary arts and restaurant management.

She worked briefly as a sous chef at the New American Restaurant in New Jersey and then at the gourmet cookware company Williams-Sonoma, doing cooking demonstrations.

She found that when she was cooking full-time, she no longer enjoyed it. She left the business and eventually went back to school — St. John’s College in Minnesota — where she decided to get her master’s in divinity. It was there she realized she was being called to the monastic life.

After she joined the Benedictines, she thought her days in the kitchen were over, but instead, she found herself cooking frequently and loving it.

“Now that it wasn’t my job, it was fun again,” she said. “Now I’m back to cooking for love.”

For her job, Sister Vicki travels a lot, spending time shuttling between Richmond and Bristow. When she’s in Richmond, she cooks dinner two to three times a week — usually pasta or whatever is in the pantry. Every once in a while, she is allowed to “kick it up a notch” with a more elaborate meal for special events.

Those are the days she loves most, cooking something really special for the people she loves. Her favorite dishes to cook are Italian, and she finds the process of putting meals together to be akin to a spiritual exercise.

“I’m a person plagued with ideas, they come all day long,” she said. “When I’m cooking, it stops. It’s almost contemplative, and can be like a ballet when I get moving. It gets me to a creative place I can’t get anywhere else.”

The special occasion meals — sometimes salmon or London broil — are the ones she usually tapes for YouTube.

In addition to her cooking show, Sister Vicki has a frequently updated blog, monasticsonajourney.blogspot.com, and a Facebook page. So far, she’s been impressed with the way these new technologies have helped her to branch out to women in discernment all over the globe.

“It’s been a nice way to keep the sisters in discernment up to date,” she said. “(The blog)’s been amazing to me. One time, I opened my profile and it said over 1,000 people had opened the site. They may not all be nuns, but they have a better understanding of who we are.”

Even the cooking show, which started in December, has allowed Sister Vicki to make new connections.

“There’s a woman in Australia who watches faithfully,” she said. “She likes my spaghetti sauce.”

For Sister Vicki these tools are not intended to make her an Internet celebrity. She views her work online as part of her ministry — just one more thing she can do to get women interested in the monastic life.

“Being a vocational director today is all about visibility and helping people find our way of life,” she said. “I’m the ambassador, the first sister people get to meet. I can help people realize we’re just human beings.”

And, even for the sake of her ministry, Sister Vicki does not want to go entirely virtual. For her, three methods of online social networking are more than enough.

“I’m drawing the line there,” she said. “I am not going to tweet. No one, except my prioress, can make me tweet.”

Twitter or no twitter, Sister Vicki’s work is paying off. Not only has she been able to help people look at the monastic life in a new way, she likes being able to awaken more people to the joys of cooking.

For those people still learning, she suggests one way they can improve their skills is by investing in a good set of knives.

“It’s the best tool for your kitchen,” she said. “If you have a good knife, you can do anything.”

The other important thing to remember is to have fun.

“Never apologize,” she says, in her best impersonation of Julia Child, her personal hero.

“Make what you make and make it with your heart. That’s your gift.”