What is your major and year in school?
This is my second year in the culinary arts program.
What made you choose culinary arts?
I just really love to cook, personally. Making people happy and seeing the smile on their face always makes you feel good, but it also brings people together like family. So that’s what I started out doing, just cooking for my mom because she’s working a bajillion jobs and she was tired all the time, and then she would have to come home after working two or three jobs and cook for four kids. She was struggling. So once I got old enough, I started asking to learn certain things so that I could start taking over certain days so she didn’t have to.
What brought you to LBCC?
It’s the closest culinary program to where I was living originally, which is the Toledo area, so not a very big town. There’s not a lot of options for us out there unless you want seasonal work. And I wanted something stable, something that was going to bring me not necessarily just prosperity – I’m not only looking to get money – but I wanted to help people in the community, too.
I have an idea for a low-waste kitchen, so instead of throwing away things that we aren’t planning to use, we would be taking them and giving them away for free. So at the end of the night, we would open up the restaurant and sort of have a soup kitchen and just let people have what we can’t sell anyway.
Does your major focus on a specific area of culinary arts?
It’s very broad, but I think that’s what helps us so much, because you get two of our chefs who are more or less inclined to the pastry side of things or baking and so they really shine, and they’ll help us during those. chef Logan Lindner and chef Audrey Anderson, they’re amazing. We love them and they just know so much about the field in general, but really the baking aspect is where they shine with their knowledge. But if you have an issue in baking, then you can go to chef Josh Green or chef Michael Willis or chef Stacy Lebar. They are also well-rounded in all verses of cooking with meat and all kinds of aspects of sauces and pastas or whatever else; they’ve got you. So it’s really just a broad spectrum.
Did you have a mentor who influenced you to go into this field?
I wouldn’t say to go into it. I’ve always known that cooking is what I wanted to do ever since I started, but I had a little bit of an issue when I first came to school. I am not necessarily a perfectionist, but I definitely want my food to be a little bit more on the perfect side, and that’s just not how it is, especially when you’re learning. You have to forgive yourself and make mistakes and just accept it and move on, learn from it. So I had a really hard time when I first started.
Chef Stacy, she kind of took my hand and she’s like, you can do this. Just believe what you’ve learned, just have confidence. It’s okay. And if you were meant to win every challenge that we put in front of you, it wouldn’t be a school, it’d be a competition. So I definitely think that chef Stacy and chef Audrey have helped me just push through my barriers that I set up myself, but I don’t think anybody pushed me to start.
Could you tell me what a typical day looks like for you within the culinary program?
I wake up at 6 a.m. – or earlier if need be – and just get right to work. It really is one of those things where you can’t dilly dally. You have to try to be fast and efficient at the same time. You can’t be rushing through everything or looking over certain details. It’s very task oriented and it’s very A, B, C, and D – you have to do it in steps. I wake up, I go in, and I’ll look over my list of things that I’ve prepped the night before. I’ll go through and look and see what needs to be done the next day so that I know. And then I just start knocking things off my list as much as I can on that day. I’m in butchery right now, and I have been since we started school back up, so that’s all I really know right now – just meat.
Generally your day in the kitchen is going to look like maybe baking a whole cake and then decorating it top to bottom with a really nice buttercream, or maybe adding some pretty flowers that you made out of fondant. But it really does depend on where you are. It could be something different every day, or it could just be meat – currently where I am – but it’s okay. You have to learn, and I get that. It’s okay. I am thankful and I’m more than grateful for the opportunity to be in our culinary program with such wonderful people too. All of the chefs, they’re really great.
Do the chefs guide you through how to make things each day, or do you learn on your own as you go?
Chefs will teach you foundational basics. They will be with you the first time that you’re normally trying out a recipe or doing something like that within your first year. And then after about half of your first year, they’ll kind of start letting you go more. They’ll be like, okay, well, you already know the basic recipe, or you already know the basic methods, so why don’t you try to spin something on it? Maybe instead of a normal white bread loaf you could do a cranberry, cinnamon, and apple; or they will push you in the direction of trying something new, but they will not let you do it until you’re ready. They know when you’re ready. They let you fly, but they definitely hold your hand first and let you feel comfortable with it, which I appreciate. I had to break down a whole entire salmon today, and I have never in my life held a whole fish before, let alone a 20 pound salmon. So I definitely would’ve been in the weeds, had chef Josh not come up and been like, “Would you like a tutorial?” Yes, please. I don’t want to mess up this $50 fish.
It definitely helps that they do that, too. So they’re not just like, “Well, here’s a piece of paper, go ahead and do it.” It’s that one-on-one, hands-on training that really matters. And I think that we definitely have an abundance of that at the culinary program. It’s amazing.
Are you currently working at the Santiam Café on campus?
The Santiam restaurant is actually a part of our rotations. So I did work on the Santiam line for a little bit, but since rotations are every two weeks, you kind of get swapped out of it. So you’ll do restaurant work for maybe about four weeks or five weeks, somewhere around there. Then you’ll transition to a new area. So you get to be on the line serving food in a restaurant, getting that practical feel for it for quite a bit, I’d say.
Could you tell me about the Dry Curious event that the culinary department recently hosted?
Yeah, it was actually me and Poppy. For Dry January, we crafted mocktails to show that sometimes the alcohol is just an extra, it’s not necessarily what you need to have a good time. Sometimes all you need in order to have a good time is just good friends and conversation. We talked about the roots of addiction and the roots of substance abuse and how high it is in our industry, like our profession. Apparently it’s very, very common for chefs and people like us who work long hours. These people are grasping for greatness, and yet in order to achieve it, they rely on some kind of substance. We were talking about how to not fall into that as we grow into our career, such as growing up in a sense of understanding that peer pressure isn’t as big of a deal as you think it’s going to be.
You don’t have to drink with your friends in order to go and hang out with them. Or maybe realizing that you were that friend and no longer peer pressuring your friends to drink with you, realizing that you could drink solo or maybe you don’t have to drink at all. Your friends don’t have to drink. We were basically just trying to open the door for conversation about what Dry January could mean for different people. And if you’re looking to celebrate Dry January, there are a couple recipes. You could try something to open the door.
What has been one of the most valuable lessons you’ve learned through the program?
I think the biggest lesson that I’ve learned is to just fail. Just fail. Sometimes you really just have to take that loss. You have to take that failure and just sit with it for a while, buy it a coffee, let it stay. It’s okay. It’s alright. It’s not a big deal. And then you can move on. Just don’t hold on to anything for too long.
What are your plans for after you graduate from LBCC?
I don’t have any definitive plans yet. I just have a lot of ideas and a lot of doors. So we’ll see which one’s open and we’ll see what happens after I graduate. But hopefully restaurants, hopefully cooking would be cool. That’s it. That’s all I want.
Is there anything else you’d want people to know about the culinary program?
It may seem scary at first, but the only way to get over the fact that it is scary is to do it. And there are people here that are always willing to help you achieve your goals. That’s the thing: They strive to make sure that you achieve what you set out to do, whether that’s graduating, whether that’s being the greatest baker in all of Albany if that’s what you want, they will help you and they will stop at nothing to help you achieve that.
So just rely on your teachers, rely on Chef Stacy and Josh. They know what they’re doing. They know what they’re talking about, and they care about you. Even if you’ve only been here a year or a month, they do. They care about you. They’re genuine people. I appreciate that so much.
It’s such a hard environment to go into and just trust, but you really can trust these teachers. They’re there for you. Any moment, every waking day. I’ve emailed Chef Josh at 6 in the morning and he’s emailed me back 10 minutes later. Where else are you going to get that kind of stability from a teacher? It’s a stable field and I highly recommend it for people that want to strive for something greater.
This article appeared in the February 2025 edition of The Commuter.
