Passion, Love and Getting Burned

I like to cook, yes. I love food in general. Since I was 16 years old, every job I have ever had has always revolved around taking care of people who want to eat.

The truth is that it is an exhausting line of work to be in. Have you ever noticed that people are generally hungry again within 3-4 hours of eating a meal? In my world that means it is rare that I am ever not holding a knife, stirring a pot or cleaning up some mess that has resulted from the other two activities. I’ve worked 16 hour days without stopping, steam burned the top layer of skin off my hands, sliced the tip of my thumb so many times I don’t even feel it. Don’t get me started about taking inventory. I don’t always feel passionate about these things.

There are times I have had fantasies of winning the lottery or going to college. I try to wonder if I would be better off as some alternate version of me.  But then, I will invariably find myself wandering through the grocery store one day, with nothing in my cart, only to realize I have been there for half an hour just looking at all the different food products and imagining what I would do with various combinations of them.

That’s not passion. It’s a long term love… so clearly in front of you that you sometimes fail to recognize it’s there. A kind of love that can be exhausting. A kind of love that can cause you to cry (yes I have cried about being a chef at various points in my career), but a kind of love you wouldn’t be yourself without.

At MUSE we talk a lot about children’s passions. It’s an interesting experience for me to see how excited kids can get about cooking. Actually, to see how excited they can get about just about anything.

Me: “We are having yogurt for snack.”

Passionate Student: “Yes!!!!! We love yogurt!!!!! This is the best day ever!!!!!”

I know that I was like that once. I think it must come with being a kid and seeing things through a lens of focalism. When you are young, it is hard to account for the complexity of life experiences yet to come. And yet somehow, that inability to see the future has its adaptive advantages in helping us to follow our dreams…in giving us the guts to follow our dreams.

I went to a very traditional private high school. I had a very high GPA. I was surrounded by guidance counselors pushing college applications my way. I didn’t want to go to college and this was rare in a school that boasted statistics on percentages of graduates going on to four year universities. I was a fish trying to swim in a different direction and if it was not for one teacher who recognized the spark in me, I would be on a very different course right now.

Her names was Sister Maria Goretti. She was a nun who lived in the convent adjacent to the school. She knew I liked cooking and instead of a college application, she offered me a job cooking for the 20 nuns that lived at the convent.

 The Sisters were mostly elderly and Irish. They enjoyed pot roast, baked potatoes and salads with Ranch dressing. They had a penchant for having dessert and tea after every meal and sometimes they even drank wine. It was one of the best cooking jobs I have ever had, for the most appreciative people I have ever met.

At that time, you needed a certain number of experiential months of cooking to even apply to culinary schools. My job at the convent helped to get me into the Culinary Institute of America with a scholarship.

Looking back on my life so far everything seems very linear and the steps I took from one restaurant to another all make sense, even if they didn't at the time. I can recognize the kitchens and the experiences that wore me out and broke me down and the people in my life who kept me going just enough to not let the spark die completely.

I am 28 years old. In the scheme of a life, I have a long way to go. I don’t know where I will end up. How many more kitchens I will scrub and care for and make my own. I don’t know how many more thousands of people I will feed or what the culinary trends of the future will be, but right now I can look to the passionate students at MUSE and remember why I started doing this in the first place and I am grateful for that reminder when the times get tough.

17 years old. My first big catering job. A 3 course plated dinner for 150 people. I got all my friends to work as waitresses.

19 years old. My first job out of cooking school. Working at a cafe in Upstate New York. Yikes, that refrigerator looks gross!

24 years old. The Golden Door Spa. This picture was from a photo shoot for Traditional Homes magazine.