I decided to make a career change at the age of 30 to the culinary arts. So I enrolled in an evening cooking class at our local vocational school to see if my dream translated well to the real world.

I loved every minute of it! I landed my first job with the help of a glowing recommendation from my chef instructor, and began working at a lake front resort in upstate Vermont in June.

It was a just a summer gig and I had no idea what I would be doing come October when my job ended. Still it was an easy choice for me and I left my full-time office job with benefits, and accepted the entry-level benefit-free kitchen job with no qualms and a giddy anticipation of what was to come.

It didn't take long for reality to set-in. You see, I went from a cushy desk job to being on my feet all day, making use of muscles I didn't even know I had. I was in pretty good shape at the time. Still by the end of my first week I went home in physical agony every day, and just cried because my body hurt so much. (I took a lot of Advil that summer!) I never let it show though, and after about a month I got used to my new activity level.

I loved the new environment I was now a part of. It was so amazing to walk into the huge refrigerators that were stuffed full of the very best foods available. The freshest produce, the choicest meats and cheeses, and then there were the mouth watering baked goods made from scratch every day. My previous job didn't pay that well, and let's just my food budget didn't include many gourmet meals.

My job was as assistant to the AM Sous Chef. Sounds fancy but my main job was making box lunches for from 50 to 200 people, 6 days a week. That and vegetable prep. I must have sliced 500 pounds of lunch meats and blanched as many pounds of veggies that summer!

Later that season I learned that there is a chef's network that links the summer and winter resorts. So I was just a couple of interviews away from my next job. I accepted a pantry position at a winter resort in Ft. Lauderdale, FL. I breathed a sigh of relief, knowing that my culinary career would last longer than five months after all.

To Culinary School or Not to Culinary School?

I worked for four years, going from my job as a sandwich and prep cook, to Garde Manger, then baker and eventually Assistant Pastry Chef. It was then that I needed to make a decision. If I wanted to advance to Pastry Chef, I needed specialized training.

Shopping for the Best Culinary School

There are so many fine culinary schools to choose from. I began looking at the different schools and locations, pricing and courses offered. I toured the New England Culinary Institute (NECI) in Montpelier Vermont, where I'm from. It's nestled in the state capital of Montpelier which like many towns there manages to be charming and elegant at the same time. With their 10 to 1 student to teacher ratio, I knew I would get a top notch education at NECI.

Still, wanting to be certain, I continued looking. I visited the Culinary Institute of America (CIA) in Hyde Park NY, which is one of the very best culinary schools in the country. I requested information from several others including Le Cordon Bleu, Johnson and Wales and the French Culinary Institute.

And then the unthinkable happened....

I met this guy. Who turned out to be "the" guy. He was a chef and we worked together for a couple of years, schlepping back and forth from Vermont to Florida. I discovered this is a lot easier to do when you're single and not trying to keep pace with another car on I95!

This was before everyone on the planet had cell phones. So we devised a system where if we lost sight of each other, we would each pull into the nearest rest stop and call his parents so we could reconnect!

After two years of this, we decided it was time to settle down. So sadly, my search for a culinary school ended as did my culinary career. We returned to New England where he went into his family's business, while I became a stay at home mom. I do still cook and bake every day, but only for four now instead of hundreds.

I look back on my culinary career as some of the very best years of my life. When asked, I recommend getting an entry level kitchen position to try cooking professionally on for size. If you love it madly, then invest in your career and go on to culinary school.