Mendolonium

Our head chef instructor for the baking and pastry program I am studying does much more than teach us two nights a week; she is an accomplished food writer/author and, in addition, devotes time going out to Los Angeles (LAUSD) schools to teach healthy cooking.   A couple of weeks ago during class I had a free moment while I had one product baking in the oven and another in cooling in the fridge and I asked chef if she ever needed any volunteers to help her out during her (LAUSD) classes.  She said that she didn’t really need any volunteers, but that the program itself was always looking for chefs.  “Oh,” I said.  Then after a couple of moments, what chef had really meant dawned on me, “Oh,” I said dumbstruck, “I will be a chef.” While I am sure it seems as obvious as white chocolate against dark to everyone else, somehow the conclusion that I was in school to begin a new career, to advocate for sustainable, healthy food, to have fun had not all added up in my mind to the fact that I am going to be a chef.  Chef; as in, I will be qualified to have people pay me to cook food for them.  I somehow was stuck with the idea that I would be  still be an engineer/analyst that happens to be rather good at and enjoy baking rather than an engineer/analyst and a chef or perhaps even just a chef.  This realization has officially blown my mind…in the best of ways.  And to celebrate, I think I’ll just have to go bake something.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 9th, 2011 at 10:56 pm and is filed under Me, So What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up?, Someone's in the Kitchen with Mama. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.