After wracking my brain for several seconds to come up with
a clever way to begin a blog, I decided to can the cleverness and just start
from the beginning. By “the beginning,”
of course, I mean around the time that I launched into my culinary school journey. The problem with that approach is that I’m
not sure exactly when it started –
obviously God knew even before I was formed in my mother’s womb what I would be
doing one day, but I’m fairly certain that nobody wants me to go back that
far. Instead I’ll begin with the moment
it became a little more obvious to me.
[By the way, coming up
with a name for my blog was a hundred times harder than coming up with an
introduction. To give you an idea of how
bad it was, “If Grandma Moses had taken up Cooking Instead of Painting” was in
the top ten.]
I have enjoyed working with food for as long as I can
remember. I don’t consider myself a
“foodie,” mostly because 1) I don’t even know what that means, and 2) everyone
these days is a self-proclaimed foodie ever since it became almost as popular
as labeling oneself OCD. But I do love
making stuff that tastes really good and watching other people enjoy my
creations even more than I do. At first
I stuck mostly to baking, probably because it’s harder to poison people (accidentally)
with baked goods, but in more recent years I have been trying my hand at
cooking. I like to think that my cooking
skills are improving, or at least I’m no longer finding it necessary to remove
the batteries from the kitchen smoke detector before beginning most meals.
The first day of a new year can be quite exciting – we
contemplate those projects that we’re finally going to complete, those goals
that we’re finally going to accomplish, and those dreams that we’re finally
going to pursue, all with a big 365-day clean slate ahead of us. But then January 2nd rolls around (perhaps
a little later for the more ambitious folks) and it looks very similar to every other day of the prior year – the usual daily chores and responsibilities that
need to be handled and that eight-to-five five-days-a-week
fifty-two-weeks-a-year office job that reminds us that we’ll NEVER accomplish
anything because at the end of the day all we want to do is get home and change
into our pajamas.
After going through this annual cycle for almost 10 years, I
finally decided in January 2013 that it was time for a big change, a REAL
change. My job wasn’t terrible – it came
as a much-needed answer to prayer, as a matter of fact – and I was actually pretty
happy and content, but for me it was no longer satisfying, for lack of a better
term – I could do my job well but it was missing any feeling of accomplishment. I even posted this attempt at an edgy and
mysterious Facebook status:
For the life of me I can’t tell you what else was on that “list,”
because all that I remember now is the desire to go to culinary school,
although at the time I was little aware of just how big of an obsession it
would become.
My first step was to explore websites. A Google search brought up Le Cordon Bleu as
the top culinary school in the world. With such a reputation, it seemed like a
reasonable place to start. After
downloading the school’s catalog and dreamily perusing the pages and seeing all
of the countries to choose from, I pulled up my budget spreadsheet (I’m
addicted to spreadsheets), and created some scenarios that went something like
this: “If I empty out my savings account and don’t buy groceries and don’t eat
out and don’t buy clothes or household items and walk to work, then with
tuition and cost of living in another country and keeping up my mortgage
payments back home, I should have enough saved up to go to LCB in about… 4 years.” Not that I wasn’t trying to come up with
other ideas of how to speed up the process:
That subtle hint for donations turned up zero (useful)
responses, so I resorted to Plan B: Apply for culinary school at GreenvilleTechnical College.
In April I figured out how to fit a class schedule in with
my work schedule, made my first tuition payment, attended orientation, and
about a week before classes began… dropped out.
Greenville Tech has a fine culinary program from what I’ve heard, but as
the first day of classes drew closer a feeling of uneasiness grew stronger and
stronger. The idea of spending 3 or 4
years, summers included, working all day, attending classes at night, and doing
homework in every spare minute of my time made me so crazy that I knew that I
could survive maybe one semester. As soon as I notified the school of my
decision, a great feeling of relief washed over me… all except for the
realization that I was back at square one.
The year was more than a third of the way over and I had made no tangible
progress and I didn’t have a Plan C.
Then came June 15, 2013…
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