The road to culinary mastery didn’t begin with dreams of Michelin stars and Zagat ratings.  My path was born of necessity on the desolate highway of hunger and emptiness.  Hunger chased me down like a rabid animal, showing the initial signs of lack as a teenager who was now on her own, having left an abusive home.

The hunger began when I was old enough to get my driver’s license but not old enough to drink or vote. I was just seventeen when I left home. Having secured late admission to a local college after my parents revealed they had no money for even one semester of higher education, I was left reeling. Determined as I was to get out of dodge, I marched myself down to the local bank where I had deposited almost all of my high school paychecks, and plead my case. Securing a small student loan, enough to pay for books, tuition, and a small off campus room shared by three other undergrads, I made my way to Trenton State College. There was little money for anything else, including food. My father dropped me off curbside at the Student Center as summer came to a close, handed me a twenty-dollar bill, and said, “good luck”.  That was to be the last penny I ever took from them, and the last time I lived under their roof. I used to think it inconceivable that you could allow a teenage girl to fend for her self with no money, and no plan for safety and survival.  But it all makes perfect sense when you realize the level of dysfunction that was my childhood, and our family.

As the semester progressed and my limited funds began to run as dry as a dusty Arizona riverbed in summer, hunger began to have its way with me. Deep gnawing, insatiable hunger was my constant companion, the kind of emptiness that causes fatigue, weight loss, and fear, lots of fear.  I experienced the “freshman fifteen” all right, but as a loss, the scale moving in the wrong direction. I never pigged out in the campus-dining hall, a pre-paid meal plan allowing many freshmen a gluttonous riot. I was also competing on the varsity level in tennis, and suddenly the lack of nutrition took its toll on my body. I thought I hid it well from my Coach and my friends on the tennis team.  My daily food intake consisted of one piece of bologna nestled between two slices of spongy white bread. That’s all I could afford. One of the members of the tennis team told me that if you work for the college foodservice you got a free meal with your shift.  Eureka! I sensed I had just won the food lottery.  I started working evenings in the college bar, flipping greasy burgers and fries and getting my free meal. Soon I began helping out in the main campus kitchen seeking edible handouts.  I was enamored with all the shiny stainless steel cookware and the industrial ovens, broilers, and tilting skillets large enough to make chili for two hundred. I began cutting all of my classes just to be around this professional kitchen. The Executive Chef for the campus foodservice was a young guy from Philly and quite a jokester.  He was wheeling a huge metal banquet hot box through the kitchen hallway one day, gabbing incessantly as he did, when suddenly his right hand got jammed between the five hundred pound catering hotbox and the cinderblock wall.  The crushing and Tony’s yelling expletives made the hair on the back of my neck stand up, and the greasy cheesesteak I had eaten earlier dance the jig in my churning stomach.  He sustained two broken knuckles in the incident but never went out on disability.  He came to work everyday with his arm in a sling.  Suddenly the starving kid hanging around looking for a handout had a purpose. “Here’s how you hold a knife.  I’m gonna show you how to chop an onion and keep all your freakin’ fingers doing it.” I was hooked, and so began my culinary career. The feel of a quality forged steel chef’s knife in my hand, the glistening stainless steel kitchen equipment, the rattling of the pots and pans, the aromas of a kitchen in full production, and the respect the Chef garnered were intoxicating. He gave me a white apron in 1975, and in reality and metaphorically I’ve never taken it off. I’m a food person, a food devotee, and a starving kid who turned that hunger into a job, then a long career as an Executive Chef for a major international company, then a vocation, then a calling and ministry.

All these years later I am still amazed that God took what appeared to be lack, desolation, and abject hunger and created a highly usable skill set and a yearning in my heart to meet the needs of those around me.  God can use our suffering to bring us to a place of blessing beyond what we could imagine, if only we realize everything that happens to us is for good. Not for destruction or for bad, but for good.  I can’t say I know the why of suffering, and perhaps asking why is the wrong question.  Surrender has brought me to my knees and made me look within and find God there.  To hold onto the light, often hidden in the pain and darkness, and somehow make it through.

These days my culinary skills are put to use as we gather around the old wooden table in our home, for great company, lively conversation, and quite simply for the joy of it. Hospitality born long ago out of hunger’s incessant pang, now serves the needs of our homeless friends as well. There is an unmistakable yearning in my heart, almost an ache, to feed people, but more than that, to reach people.  I know fully that this yearning is the Divine stirring to use my abilities to make a difference.  Whether it’s supplying meals for the neediest among us, or providing culinary excellence for charity fundraisers, food and hospitality are the vehicles to fulfilling my destiny.  Ancient wisdom states, “…take care of God’s needy people and welcome strangers into your home.”  The road to culinary mastery didn’t begin with dreams of Michelin stars, but with suffering caused by a lack of food.  That suffering and hunger born so long ago, is now used to bless others, and is truly hungers opportunity.