Fork in the road
Culinary school is almost over. For the last 5 months, I’ve been suspended in a cozy bubble of schedules, teachers, and rubrics, and suddenly it’s about to burst into pure uncertainty. My mind is jumbled with ideas and projects that I keep returning to with, alternately, excitement or anxiety. Hopefully some of those will be trickling out through this newsletter in coming weeks. At some point, I’ll get an internship at a restaurant to complete my school requirements. Probably some point in the spring. For the next few months, I’m hoping to work in a bakery or cook meals for delivery.
I’m taking stock, as one does at an ending, of what just happened. What did I learn? How did I change?
I went from feeling disoriented and sluggish in an industrial kitchen to finding a kind of dance in the quick, directed movements around the space. I’m better at estimating time for recipes. I can use a pressure cooker, a pasta machine, multiple kinds of juicers, an ice cream maker. I know how to cater-wrap (pull out plastic twice the length of the item to be wrapped, set the item on top of it and then pull the plastic over to create a complete seal). I’m better at chopping. My ankles and back don’t seem to hurt after standing for awhile. (I’ve also hopefully learned everything that will be on my final on Tuesday- you can look at my study guide & help quiz me if you want.)
Perhaps more importantly, I still like cooking. Cooking in an industrial/academic setting feels different from cooking at home, or cooking by myself, but not worse. I feel awake, vibrant, competent. I find it easy to settle into a flow state. Even though the busier days end with such rushed cleaning that I fly out of the kitchen so high on adrenaline that I can’t slow down until I’m on the subway, even on those days I have a sense of calm satisfaction that I didn’t usually feel at my computer jobs. We got something done, right? For better or worse, the cooking always gets done.
I wouldn’t say that everyone needs to attend a program like this to change their professions. I bet most of my learning will be done on the job. But I think that for me, it has allowed a kind of confidence to blossom, something I found elusive no matter how much I was cooking or baking for my off-license home kitchen schemes. Seeing myself in my mind’s eye, chopping at my station in my coat and apron and stupid little hat, I start to believe that I can really do this.
These five months were my launching point. My nursery. My new kitchen family. Among my classmates, I have people I could call on for help with an event or to ask about egg substitutions in cakes or for encouragement after a rough day. Among my teachers, I have loving mentors whom I believe I’ll be able to call for advice and (soon) to eat with, for years to come.
I’m ready for the next change.
What I’m reading
Food and Healing, by Annemarie Colbin
Food is our helper, our ally, our support, at times our undoing. But it is not our salvation. A change in diet can help us — but if we remain concentrated only on the food aspect of health and well-being, after a while the pendulum will swing back and we’ll get sick again from the very same food that once made us “well.”
We have no right to be healed unless we are prepared to return that gift a thousandfold. Health for its own sake is an ego trip. It is wasted as a goal; but it gains meaning as a means, an instrument to further the evolution of our consciousness. We must ask ourselves, if we wish to be healthy, WHAT FOR? To what use will we put our health?
Regardless of what we eat, our bodies will automatically be healthy when we are aimed in a positive direction, following our individual path, centered and undivided in attention, doing our chosen work, grateful for life, and living with love.