I am a chef. Approximately 15 years ago I quit my job as an accounts payable clerk with a law firm based in the Sydney CBD, took a 3 week holiday to Vietnam and Laos and then returned to work with food. Initially I worked as a cook at a small bowling club and worked as a catering assistant. I learnt little things along the way. Progress was slow. The club had a smallish turnover but the chef was a great guy and I learnt from him. The job as a catering assistant involved making sandwiches for office meetings and whilst it was good to be in a kitchen, it wasn't what I dreamt of when I quit my job as an accounts payable. After a couple of years of this I realised that there wasn't going to be an easy path to becoming a chef so I decided to study commercial cookery at Tafe to improve my cooking skills and clear the path to becoming a chef.
I think, looking back that my early dreams were of running a cafe or food business, maybe even a market stall to make my mark in the food world. It seemed though, that the more I learnt, the more I realised that I had so much more to learn before I could get out there and successfully go it alone. In fact, I would say that it is only in the last couple of years that I feel that my cooking is starting to progress to where I want it to be. Maybe that is just the way life is, you work away picking up little incites along the way. Some of those incites are just little day in, day out parts of working in a kitchen, some are more light bulb moments. Some are moving you forward by millimetres and very occasionally you make a leap. The base, the foundations come in millimetres and hopefully they provide the platform to eventually take the leaps. I am beginning to feel, just now, that the big steps are just around the corner.
I am hoping that this space will give the reader a look inside the lower, less glamorous end of the food world and give some ideas that can be taken into the home kitchen. I continue to study food and cooking at home these days, in a non classroom environment through reading, watching on both television and the Internet. We live in a technological age which has given all of us access that 30 years ago was previously impossible. An example of this is the Harvard Science and Cooking Lectures that are available on YouTube. I have never even stepped foot in the USA but have access to a lecture series that contains thoughts from some of the world's greatest thinkers on food. Too often we use technology to voice negative opinions but there is so much good to come from it as well. I wouldn't describe it as a new year’s resolution but certainly a goal for the year ahead is to build my knowledge of all things food and hopefully give readers some snippets of what I learn.
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