Intro Post

This blog is intended to document my experience as a culinary student. I started out at the Illinois Institute of Art Chicago about a year ago, and I have about a year to go. It’s a career change—I already had a BA from Columbia College in Chicago, and was a graphic designer for about 10 years. I quit my office job this past May so that I could focus on cooking. I just wasn’t passionate enough about design, and I hated the 9 to 5 office routine. My very supportive boyfriend is covering the majority of the bills so that I can work for cheap and free, gathering as much experience as I can in as short a time as I can. He’s a restaurant manager, and my goal is to be at a high enough skill level that we can open our own place by the time I’m 40—only 7.5 years away!

Currently, I work at a cooking store where I assist the cooking classes and I’m also interning at one of the high end restaurants here in Chicago. I’ve decided not to use actual names, so I’ve dubbed the restaurant Quake. I have to keep a journal of the internship, so I will post a lot of that here, but I also plan to add information from my other classes (Wine and Beverage this quarter) and general information about what I’m doing and learning. I don’t expect much of a readership, really, but I’m hoping to create a resource for other beginning cooks, and it seems like a lot of the information that we learn in culinary school isn’t really passed on to the home cook. This could be one of those things that I really want to have time for but don’t, but we’ll just see how it goes.