I’m teaching table service this summer and have a small class of mostly second year students. We had our first mock restaurant production this week and they did a great job. They invited people to come be our guests and then made the food (sandwiches and sides) and served them in the restaurant of their [...]

Having previously worked in the chaos that is television, I know that I don’t like to be the center of that particular spotlight. However, that does not mean that I don’t like a pat on the back now and then. I had the great fortune of asking a question at the right time and a [...]

fallen leaves, freshly sharpened pencils and making Mollie Katzen’s gypsy soup. My thoughts also turn philosophical. My thoughts lately have been about the consequences of raising a food snob and the old adage of “those who can do; those who can’t teach.” On the first subject, Julian’s birthday falls in the early part of this [...]

Though I have been spending the last three weeks scoring standardized tests, my calling still calls and, I am thankful, my phone is still ringing. We have a small catering gig on the 24th (baby shower, 20 guests). I also have three series of classes coming up at various points around Nashville. If you are [...]

Instead I have been pounding the virtual pavement looking for a day job to tide me over until things pick up in my culinary life. My new classes at the Pannery don’t begin until April and my gig at school evaporated. I do have a non-cooking job as a stop gap as of yesterday. I’ll [...]

I am completely done with culinary school, degree conferred, graduated summa cum laude. Yay! It is feeling anti-climactic though in that there wasn’t a December graduation ceremony (not that I would have attended) and I didn’t really tell people I was graduating, well, I am telling now I guess. I had plans for a party [...]

Things have been moving at a fairly brisk pace these days. The Hemingway’s Key West party went off without a hitch though the turnout was a little low. The food however was fab but there is not a single picture. Keifel had to work late at Apple because of the tax holiday and J&J and [...]

After a moment or two of thought, okay…not really, after agonizing over it for a week or two, I’ve decided to take the summer off and finish in the fall. Partly for financial reasons, and those are honestly the biggest decider these days, and partly for sanity reasons. I really haven’t had a break since [...]

Last Thursday my team and I produced our final project for Garde Manger. We had to do a theme buffet. Originally, my team thought we wanted to do a 1970s theme party with fondue and “basement party” food done well. After we all looked for recipes with no luck, we decided to go a different [...]

And tasty they are, too. At least the ones my team and our classmates made for our International Cuisine project. I got up in front of my sketchily-inaccurately drawn map of Denmark and chatted, nattered, and flapped about, about the land of the Danes (I often think of Denmark as the meeting point of my [...]