Cooking with Molly

 

            “Both of my parents worked late when I was a kid. My grandma would try to make dinner, but she would steam the vegetables until they were mush, and everything was always overcooked. So I guess my interest in cooking started when I had to cook for myself. I’ve always been pretty independent, and so I just… started cooking. I made mac & cheese at first, but after a while, I got used to doing other things, like baking chicken or sautéing vegetables. I started to be a better cook than my mom. So my interest started with my parents having jobs and not being able to take care of dinner every night.

            I started out in a vocational program when I was a sophomore in high school. My classmates would be in a study hall or in an English class, and I’d be at Nashua North High School learning how to cook. I felt special because of that. Like, I had something that other kids didn’t have, or didn’t have the maturity to understand. I was one step ahead of everyone, getting the stuff I needed to know earlier than them.

            Because of that vocational class in high school, I was able to go into my freshman year of college ahead of almost everybody there. I was ahead in knife cuts, I know how to do sauces, I was one step ahead of everybody else. All my classmates would do the reading before class to get ready for our lesson, and I didn’t need to do that, because I’d already done everything we learned over a hundred times.

            My cooking teacher in the program was named Jeff Quimby, but everyone called him ‘Chef Q’. Q pushed me to be the best I could be, and had kind of singled me out as his protégé in some ways. When I practiced for cooking competitions, he always told me what I needed to do to impress the judges, how I could improve my form or how to do something unexpected that would impress them. He made me feel like this was something I was actually gifted at, and it wasn’t just a hobby or a waste of time. Q kind of proved to me that I had the potential to be a great chef, and he prepared me to be the best chef I could be.

            I ended up going to Johnson & Whales in Charlotte, North Carolina. They had the best nutrition program of any other culinary school in the country at that time, and because nutrition was what I saw as the most likely route for me to take, it was a no brainer.

            Choosing Johnson & Whales was probably the best decision I ever made. I love Charlotte, and I met some of my closest friends in my life since my first semester here. I’m a sophomore now, and I can’t even believe that I still have two more years to enjoy there. Last semester, I was an assistant teacher for the freshman class, and I taught them a lot of the basics that I learned for the first time when I was in high school. And I couldn’t get over the fact that they had no idea how to do any of it. It had been so long since I didn’t know how to do these things that seem so basic to me now, that it’s hard for me to think that there’s anyone who doesn’t know how to break down a chicken or create a simple stock. Like, how can you have lived on this planet for so long and not know how to do that?

            The greatest opportunity I’ve had since starting culinary school was participating in an internship at the Biltmore Estate, which is a five-star luxury hotel in Asheville, North Carolina. Basically, the Biltmore is the gold-standard for hospitality in the US. People travel across the world to visit and stay there, and I was lucky to have the chance to work in the kitchen.

            I worked in the dining room of the Biltmore Inn, ‘dining room’ being the hotel’s label for their staple restaurant. I was assigned PM shift, which meant I helped with dinner. I’d go in at 2 o’clock in the afternoon, do prep work for my first four hours, and I would cook from five to ten, heading home around 11:30 each night.

            While at the dining room, I worked at the pantry station. That was salads and hors d oeuvres. I was designated as a ‘culinary apprentice’. In the kitchen, you have workers categorized into these roles: Cook 3, Cook 2, and Cook 1. I guess you could say I was between a Cook 2 and a Cook 1. Cook 3 means you’re capable of operating any of the designated stations in the kitchen. Cook 2 means you can do a couple, and Cook 1 means you specialize in one thing. I wasn’t worried about being just a Cook 1 though, because everyone knew I was mainly there to learn. It was my first time ever being in a restaurant kitchen, and being able to shadow professionals and learn from them was an experience I’m so thankful to have had the chance to do. I learned from the very best. And when I work at another restaurant, I’ll take what I learned from them and apply it.

            But it was a strange time to be at a place like the Biltmore. It was during Christmas, and COVID was as bad as it ever was, and you’d have parties of people coming in, eating in the dining room completely maskless when they weren’t even eating. I missed my family, it was the first Christmas I couldn’t spend with them. So there were definitely moments of feeling homesick and nervous about getting infected. I can’t afford to get infected. Just the idea of losing your sense of taste and smell forever – I rely on those senses for my career. It was terrifying to me. So it wasn’t all miraculous or exciting. There was a lot of fear at times as well.

            I love doing what I do. I love learning about food, and I love teaching others what I’ve been taught. I’m so grateful that this is my passion, and that I’m 100% confident in what I want to do for the rest of my life. It’s a great feeling to know you’re doing exactly what you’re supposed to. I’m right where I belong."