Tomorrow is graduation.  If you had asked me 15 months ago about my future as a culinary arts graduate, I would have told you about how my goal was to work towards community education in foodservice.  To educate our neighbors, friends and youth about responsible food purchasing, healthy food purchasing, and making the kind of cooking our previous generations used to do common in our modern kitchens again.  To motivate people to use simple, healthy, seasonal ingredients to create delicious meals for their families, or even to take whatever is lying around the pantry to come up with combinations that they might not have tried before.  And, most of all, to get children to think of vegetables as “cool.”

I am so pleased to share that I now work at Stock Café, the restaurant within the Local Foods grocery store.  For those of you that haven’t heard of Local Foods, they are just one part of a family of businesses that are built to promote sustainable food distribution practices.  Local Foods works with small, local farms to get the best products that the Midwest has to offer.  They distribute to many restaurants in the city, as well as the Local Foods grocery store.  The Butcher and Larder, one of the city’s best butchers, is within the store as well.  At Stock Café, we bring many of the moving parts of Local Foods to fruition by turning those products into delicious small plates, sandwiches, baked goods, and large plates.

One of my favorite parts of working at Stock is that we get to feed the community of customers that we serve within the store.  We are an open kitchen, which gives us the opportunity to talk and relate to our customers.  I love how often our customers ask us how to make the plates that we do, or tell us that they never thought of different ways to use certain ingredients.  One thing that I am very proud to have put on the menu was a “PB&K” sandwich, which was a house-made peanut butter and kimchi sandwich.  I thought it would be a long shot, but now we get requests to put it back on the menu!

Some might say that I have lofty goals of opening a restaurant that doubles as an education center, but I know that I am well on my way.  I would not be where I am now without the amazing chef instructors at Kendall, and of course, the Kendall College Trust scholarship that I received.  I am very humbled and grateful for everything that Kendall has provided to me over this year!