If you had asked me a year ago what I'd be doing today, I would have said breathlessly with bright eyes that I'd be living and working in the behind-the-scenes world of film and television production in Los Angeles, a recent transplant from Huntington, WV.
Instead, I'm still in Huntington, and I went to my first Knife Skills & Fabrication and Mise en Place classes today. In other words, I started culinary school. Breathlessly with bright eyes.
A big change of plans, of course. And while some people these days might term this my quarter-life crisis, I think it's really just the product of being a.) a recent college graduate w/ two, um, nontraditional bachelor's degrees, and b.) a twenty-something. To be sure, it's also the product of spending August through December of last year working on Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution for ABC (which, by the way, won the Emmy for Outstanding Reality Program last week). So I owe many thanks to everyone I worked with on the show, but extra thanks to Jamie Oliver, Anna Jones, Abi Fawcett, and especially Anna Helm-Baxter-- one of the food stylists from the show who recognized something in me and graciously handed me my first freelance gigs in NYC as her assistant, and whose website sweetbyhalf.com you really should check out-- for turning me on to food in the first place.
"Why food?," you might ask if you know me, "Aren't your degrees in Theatre and French?" Yes, they are (at least I know what "mise en place" means), and I still ask myself that first question every day, but I think I'm coming 'round to a preliminary answer, at least (I'm going to wax poetic here for a minute, so please bear with me. Or skip ahead.). My background is in the arts, all of them. I'm an actor, a musician, a writer, and an artist (of the painter/ sculptor/ potter variety), and I think I've finally figured out that I love all of those things so much because they create community. They force all kinds of relationships to be made, be they actor-audience or musician-listener, artist-artist, writer-reader, or any of a million other iterations, and I thrive on community. I love it. I need it. Can't get enough of it. And food creates immediate, visceral community, whether that's in the prep kitchen or at the table.
I have a few confessions to make before we start all of this. First, I don't want to be a restaurant chef, I don't want to open my own bakery, I want to make food pretty so it can get its picture taken. I want to make people think, "Wow, I want a bite of that." I want to sort through dozens of bags of tortilla chips and cartons of raspberries to find the perfect ones (ahh, the glamorous life of a food stylist), make six or ten of the exact same plate, and let someone else take the credit (sorry, everyone, [insert favorite celebrity chef] didn't really make that [insert dish], and s/he definitely didn't prep his or her ingredients).
Second, while I'm not as limited in my food choices as, say, my sister, who lives on hotdogs, grilled cheese (which she can't even make herself), and fruit, I'm not necessarily adventurous when it comes to food either. So hearing my mise instructor say today that, unless we have food allergies, we're required to taste everything was, while not unexpected, still a little scary. I knew what I was getting myself into when I signed up for this, and I want to challenge myself and learn to eat new things, but that doesn't mean I'm counting down the days until I get to eat liver and oysters, or kill lobsters, or bone (read: gut) fish...
So this will be an adventure, to say the least. And I'm betting that culinary school will make for plenty of good stories, which I'm going to try my best to document regularly. I hope you keep reading. I'll probably be feeding some of you soon.
