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l Melissa's Adventure
HELP! I’M MISSING MY CULINARY GENES!
I refuse to take all the blame for a lack of culinary skills.
It’s in my genes. I come from a long line of really
bad cooks. My daughter says they were all “culinarily
challenged,’’ if that’s a word.
Sunday dinners at my grandmother’s house were raw hamburger
meat plunged into a casserole and shoved in the oven. It wasn’t
meatloaf because there was never any loaf. It was all hamburger
and animal fat, but it was served in an elegant silver service.
In the refrigerator, it turned to pearly white grease.
My ancestors didn’t do much cooking because city dwellers
usually had plenty of help around the house until the Depression
hit. I was born during the Depression and grew up during World
War II. Food was rationed then. Our cuisine came from the
neighborhood grocery store. We had no garden.
I honestly never knew food was supposed to taste good until
I went to summer camp when I was 12. I am not joking. My mother
did try. After the war, she actually took French cooking lessons
and came home with monstrosities like broiled bananas wrapped
in ham with peanut butter sauce. My father always had to work
late whenever she took cooking classes.
Needless to say, I didn’t take cooking lessons from
my mother or grandmother. I never tried cooking until I was
married and it was forced upon me. I will say, when I did
cook, I did it from “scratch” — no prepared
or packaged anything, no cake mix, no Hamburger Helper. I’m
such a purist, I even cooked without a cookbook.
For my oldest son’s 12th birthday, I baked a birthday
cake and decorated it with blue icing. The trouble was, I
poured on the icing when the cake was still a little too hot
and the whole center caved in, like a crater. It looked like
my kid’s science project.
My first Thanksgiving turkey was quite a success —
that is, until I tried to cut it and found a whole sack of
turkey parts inside.
A bunch of my young relatives are vegetarians. They can’t
stand to see the body of a dead animal or fowl on the table.
My sons call beef “dead cow.” On one Thanksgiving,
my aunt, who is also “culinarily challenged,’’
decided to not only cook a turkey, but to make something nice
for the vegetarians, as well. That’s when the artist
in her came out.
She spent hours putting together steamed vegetables and sculpting
them into the form of a dead turkey. With those vegetable
legs sticking straight up, it looked obscenely grotesque.
But nothing is a waste if we learn something from it.
I learned that even dogs won’t eat vegetarian turkey.
— Melissa Clement
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Learn to cook with Chef Richard
Richard Kugelmann has always had a passion for cooking, but he
never planned to be a chef. After earning a degree in business administration
at Methodist College, he worked for a few years in Florida as a
banker.
Then, while on a visit home, he was in the kitchen with his mother,
Helene, who is a first-class cook. That’s when it struck him.
He wanted to be a chef for the rest of his life. He immediately
enrolled in Central Piedmont College in Charlotte. There he earned
an associate’s degree in culinary arts, and has been cooking
for a career and for fun ever since.
In 2002, he and a partner started South City Grille and Bar on
Raeford Road. The food was good, the location bad, he says. It won
rave reviews including “Best Place to Dine’’ in
a Readers’ Choice contest, but soon closed. In 2004, he helped
open Coda’s: An American Bistro, on McPherson Church Road.
Again, his dishes called “Nouveau Southern Cuisine”
were memorable, but the business failed.
Today, he shares his skill and knowledge teaching Culinary Technology
at Fayetteville Technical Community College.
The program requires five semesters of study in order to earn an
associate’s degree in applied science. Graduates may qualify
for entry-level positions, such as line cooks, station chefs and
assistant pasty chefs. With experience, graduates might advance
to positions such as sous chef, executive chef and food services
manager. One-semester certificate courses also are offered in baking
and pastry chef.
For more information, call Kay Gilbert at (910) 678-8207, or the
department office at (910) 678-8295.
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