Food for Thought

Introduction: I have 23 years of experience in the food industry (from the back of the house to the front). Though not trained as a chef in the classical sense, I have learned through experience. I adore the art of cooking and presenting beautiful foods. I was blessed to have awesome country cooks in my family and a mom who love to experiment with foods from diverse countries. I was the cook and supervisor for a local friary for the past 8 years. Cooking for those brothers and priests was a beautiful experience. It afforded me the opportunity to plan healthy menus, to develop and maintain a budget (saving the company approx. $9-10,000 in 2 1/2 years), to develop cleaning checklists for kitchens, to shop for a house of twenty-five men, to handling feast-day meals of 50 or more persons, and to providing lunch and dinner for the finest men. What means the most to me, in what I do, is setting the atmosphere for food and fellowship to take place. I'm a psych major, and what I figured out was that everything could be solved at the kitchen table! Everyone came to my grandmother's house. Whether the most delightful news or the worst tragedy, it was brought to her kitchen: over good food and drink, it was celebrated, comforted, and blessed.