Rediscovering My Passion
From wanting to be a painter at age seven to a marine biologist at age fifteen I have chased many careers throughout my lifetime. Now I know those were the wrong choice, because I have since gotten back into wanting to be a chef. I had my first cooking class in my junior year of high school. Even though I did not know it then, Culinary Arts would be my career choice. Somehow and someway I was looking forward to it, but I did not know why. I am not sure what path my life would have taken if not for the cooking class. Looking back, I am grateful that I got back into the world of cooking. Culinary Arts is what I live for and what I hope and wish my life will revolve around in the near future, other than my current and future family as well.
Little kids are always doing different and random activities throughout the hours of the day. I was almost like every little kid in the world. The one thing that distinguished little me, and, say, little John was experimenting with food. What I called cooking as a little kid my mother would call ruining perfectly good food, and she still does to this day. Random afternoons while my mother was not in the kitchen I would raid the fridge and get either random liquids or random food. What I would do is take, let us say, Sprite and mustard, ketchup, or whatever I could find and mix random amounts and drink it. Sometimes I would hate the concoction and throw it away. Other days I would get lucky and get a delicious tasting result. Often when I tried to recreate the delicious beverage I would fail miserably. I had another way of randomly mixing food together that does not seem like it would taste good. With food I could not just randomly mix ingredients together and wish for the best. No, with food I had to mix a certain percent of one ingredient and a certain percent of another ingredient.
“Gera, what are you doing?” my mother would ask.
“Mixing stuff”
“You are going to eat all of it whether you like it or not.”
“Ok.” I would willingly say.
Conversations almost always were the same for every batch of randomness I would mix up. Now that I think back on it, I do not know how I did not go crazy.
My culinary side was present even in my painter phase. My drawings would sometimes include people eating stuff, food, food in the background, or me eating food. Whenever we visited the mall or big block store chains I would always ask to go to the food court first, or to the food section if we went to store chains that day. My favorite memory involving food in my childhood is in my painter phase. That day I wanted to draw a mansion with every one of my family members and a lot of dogs. When I could not think of where to start I decided to ask my mom to cook something delicious for dinner that day.
“Hey, Mom, I cannot draw anything. Can you cook me something good?”
“I will cook Camarones a la Diabla for dinner today. Does that sound good or what?” she said.
“Oh, that sounds delicious. Can I help?” I asked with enthusiasm.
“Of course, can you get me the rice?”
That day I experienced my first spicy food at age eight. I do not know why I did not connect the word diabla, meaning devil in feminine form in Spanish, with food so spicy that you will cry out paintings by the hour after consuming it. It seemed that the mysteriously spicy shrimp was just what my artist side needed, because the following two weeks I made the best paintings and drawings of my childhood.
Even though I got reintroduced into the world of culinary in my junior year by mere accident, I fell in love with it my senior year. At the end of my junior year I had to choose between a schedule with ROP, or a schedule with Regional/International Cuisine for my senior year. ROP, or Regional Occupational Program, is a way of getting seniors in high school ready for the workforce. “ROP in California currently supports culinary arts, healthcare, information technology, agriculture, business, construction, and auto technology” (Wikipedia). Regional and International Cuisine explores the different foods of the United States as well the foods from around the world. The choice was not very difficult for me; I chose the latter class. I loved every day of my culinary class in my senior year.
Choosing the Regional and International Cuisine class helped me win the annual Pacifica Iron Chef. There were eight teams of two, each consisting of a teacher and a student, and each team having to make up a dish in an hour revolving around the main ingredient, which was chocolate that year. When my culinary teacher Mrs. Howe announced that the judges, professional chefs from Ventura County, chose my old history teacher Mr. Garcia and I as the winners I could not believe what I heard. I wondered how I won if it was my first joining the competition. Realizing that it was my last year of high school and that I won the competition in my first try furthered my love for Culinary Arts. After receiving my medallion and my certificate I learned from Mr. Garcia that the past year he won second place and the year before that he won third place. I was very happy that one of my most favorite teachers from high school was able to win first place with my help. Now in college I take every opportunity involving the Arts I get. Last year I was able to visit the beautiful Cal Poly Pomona. Even though the university in not a culinary university, the culinary department is by far the most impressive. With their own Certified Executive Chef, their own vineyard and wine cellar, and their own fruit and vegetable garden, you could say that Cal Poly Pomona is an impressive learning facility. Apart from that I was also able to visit two food shows in Ventura. One of the food shows was by Jordano’s and the other by Sysco. Both food shows were very delicious.
In conclusion, even though I deviated from my original path of becoming a chef, I later rediscovered my passion for cooking. I do not regret getting into it so late in high school, because I would have not experienced my amusing painter phase from my childhood. I love Culinary Arts and even though I may or may not express it much from my emotions, feelings, and actions, I will always live the life of a chef.
