This interesting article was posted as a comment on my blog. So thank you Tony for allowing me to share it.

A career mentor is someone who acts as a counselor, a motivator, and a guiding force in your career. This would be a person with whom you can talk freely and from whom you can expect to receive sound, unbiased career advice. A mentor is usually a person who is experienced, someone in your company or a similar industry who is higher in the hierarchy, or someone whom you have worked with in the past and still share a cordial relationship.
A good mentor will ideally provide you with impartial advice, as well as coach and guide you. Such a person is someone who will not only help you get a call for a coveted interview, but will also help you perform well in such interviews and increase your chances of getting a good job.
Traditionally, mentoring is something that you would not purchase and would not require a monetary exchange. The relationship between a mentor and a person being mentored is far higher than what money can buy.
Finding a Career Mentor

-It is usually futile to expect your manager to be your mentor. A manager and his juniors usually have different interests while working towards a common goal and it is not best to tangle those interests in with a mentorship situation.
-Someone higher up in the company can more suitably qualify as your mentor.
-You can also look for someone within the industry and affiliated with your company or in the similar line of business. However, it is not a good idea to approach your direct competitors.
-The person mentoring you should be someone you are able to admire and for whom you have high value and respect. The person should be very motivating, as well as stimulating. It is desirable that the two of you share some common traits like values, style of working, and a sense of humor with your mentor.
Having a Meaningful Relationship
-Friendship should preferably not be the criteria in a mentor relationship. It should be based on mutual respect, honesty, and reliance.
-A mentor’s concern should be appropriately reciprocated with any help that he or she might require in something where you might be able to help. Even a simple card, or a small Christmas present goes a long way to say that you really appreciate what he/she is doing for you.
-You should always respect the time that your mentor is giving to you. You shouldn’t push the person by calling at unexpected times or being too needy. If things can wait, it should preferably be held until the next meeting.
-Everybody requires different levels of help so you can mutually decide on your meeting times, which may take place every other week, once a month, or on an at-need basis.
Having a good mentor can significantly boost your career prospects and growth. So what are you waiting for – find a mentor now!

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Patricia Rain, the Vanilla Queen

I admire Patricia Rain. I think you will find her story to be wonderfully inspirational. It again shows how one dedicated person can change the world.

Becoming a true Queen isn’t an everyday occurrence. Rather, it is earned through years of dedication and hard work, rather like the fairy tales of old where the heroine endures many tests to prove her worth before being bestowed with the title and keys to her Queendom.

Perhaps my early childhood intoxication with the fragrance and flavor of vanilla was an indication of what was to come, but my conscious journey began in 1985 when I wrote The Vanilla Cookbook, after reading an enticing article about the King of Tonga and a royal decree for his vanilla crop.

The book catapulted me into the position of “vanilla authority,” and eventually to a conference in Puebla, Mexico, where I spoke at a conference on the foods of the Americas. After the conference I took a bus to the Gulf Coast, birthplace of vanilla.

The vanilla farmers of Mexico knew of me from my book, and I was astonished to learn that I was a local celebrity. They asked for help to rescue their struggling vanilla industry. My work, largely voluntary, slowly expanded until I launched The Vanilla.COMpany in 2001, just before 9-11 and the anthrax scare, and just after the dot.com crash.

Holding a bootstrap business together was an enormous challenge. But hold on, we did. Our women-owned and operated, socially conscious company continues to grow in ways we could hardly have anticipated.

Through the extraordinary power of the Internet, I met farmers in such far-flung areas as Madagascar, Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, India, The Americas, and Africa. During the five-year crisis when vanilla was unavailable and prohibitively expensive, I coached farmers new to the industry through the steps of selling their village’s crops, and I became “auntie” to many young men and women who often traveled hours to reach an Internet café.

Vanilla by Patricia Rain

It was gratifying to learn that through my assistance the farmer’s lives improved.  Over the years, I visited the world’s vanilla growing regions, and my interest as an anthropologist ultimately led to writing, Vanilla: The Cultural History of the World’s Favorite Flavor and Fragrance.

In gaining the farmers’ trust, my reputation spread globally and I am now known everywhere as the Vanilla Queen, an honor I don’t take lightly. But, in the greatest test of all, I learned that I am really their queen.

In December of 2003, I was diagnosed with advanced metastatic breast cancer.  I was advised to “put my affairs in order and to enjoy my life.”

Word spread quickly around the world, and in the most humbling and transformative experience imaginable, the farmers organized their churches, mosques, temples, villages, and schools to pray for me.  Letters, advice, and prayers poured in from around the world, and continue to do so, incorporated into their daily lives. The upshot of the story is that I am cancer-free.

The farmers and I are now launching an International Tropical Farmers Network created with a determination to teach sustainable agriculture and to empower the producers of the products we love so much.

And this how I went from being an ordinary woman to earning my title as the Vanilla Queen.

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Baking At Home with The Culinary Institute of America

A few years ago all the great bread was baked in France. In the United States artisan bread bakers were a rare breed. Now we can choose among potato bread and sourdough, whole-grain and semolina, pepper bread and bread flecked with sun-dried tomatoes, olives, herbs and seeds.

All these breads are also appearing in boutique bakeries and in bountiful baskets, handed around to guests in restaurants.

Some chefs are baking their own signature breads and bread sticks as long as your arm and as skinny as a California waiter’s ponytail. Irresistibly, the appetite is seduced with a choice of grainy yellow cornbread, muffins, fresh from the oven.

On upscale tables, too, are feather-light, lily-white biscuits, sweet muffins with carrots and cranberries, or raisins and walnuts, along with hot scones flecked with melting morsels of white and dark chocolate. Soft focaccia, buttery brioches, crusty baguettes, crackling croissants, and hearty, healthy seven-grain breads.

Bread has become the icing on the cake.

There are surely many wonderfully satisfying culinary careers but being a bread baker rises to the top of the evolutionary ladder. Many professional culinary schools offer hands-on courses and many offer classes for hobbyists. There are even baking guilds to join such as The Bread Bakers Guild of America and bread baking competitive teams to root for.

Whole Grain Breads by Peter Reinhart

Among the best of the best bread cookbooks are Peter Reinhart’s Whole Grain Breads: New Techniques, Extraordinary Flavor and The Bread Baker’s Apprentice: Mastering the Art of Extraordinary Bread by Peter Reinhart and Ron Manville. The ever-reliable, fanatically-accurate Rose Levy Beranbaum compiled her recipes in The Bread Bible.

As an aside here, I published Rose Beranbaum’s first cookbook, Romantic and Classic Cakes. Her manuscript subsequently evolved into The Cake Bible. At the time, she asked me what I thought of the title.

I was horrified. I told her any religious person would be shocked! — shocked! at the idea of linking the Bible with a cake. Every nonreligious person wouldn’t even think of buying any book that had the word Bible in the title.

Once again this proves how often I am wrong!

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Japanese Sushi Chef Ken Kawasumi with his Sushi Obama creation

The mid-term elections are fast approaching. I’ve been wondering why candidates running for high political office seem to feel it is necessary to eat what the locals eat. I suppose it’s a way of establishing solidarity with the voters.

When politicians fly to Buffalo they make a big deal about eating a wing. They become “ein Buffalo-er,” which is the next best thing to being ein Berliner or a Philadelphian — when they gather together together to scarf down a cheesesteak.

It’s the same deal when we declare our brotherhood by eating a hot pastrami sandwich.

Toss down a couple of belts of hard liquor and the world applauds. There’s nothing like beer to solidify a candidate’s credentials. Wine is another thing altogether.

JFK and Jackie O. received high marks for their elegant state dinners. That was then, though.

Eat French food today and the other side will make a mockery of you. Admitting to enjoying chardonnay and arugula has become shorthand for a lack of patriotism.

French food is only O.K. only when it comes to fries. Fried is probably the best bet for almost everything, especially chicken.  KFC (Kentucky Fried Chicken) is wildly popular throughout the world, or many parts of the world. Forget about quiche.

Throw a barbecue on your million acre ranch and what are you?  Why, you are a man: A REAL MAN!  A red-bloodied American man.

Declare your favorite food to be caribou stew or moose burger and you pass muster in certain necks of certain woods. Right on!

You are pretty safe if you can eat whatever is offered to eat with your hands, or if worst comes to worst, a plastic fork is sometimes allowed (or forgiven).

Mention you are a vegetarian and you’ll be confessing to ‘wimpitude’. (Hitler was a vegetarian.)

Pastor Rick Warren recently pondered whether an atheist, even a non-practicing atheist, could become the Commander in Chief. He didn’t reflect about whether a vegetarian had a prayer.

If I was a campaign adviser I’d suggest that my client stay clear of all cheese except Velveeta or when campaigning in Wisconsin.

It’s odd that desserts don’t carry any weight in this public display of togetherness chomping.

While some foods are considered cool, others pose a problem. For instance, sushi would have been taboo in years past. Now sushi is sold at Wal-Mart, in supermarkets and food courts everywhere.

Sushi is the new pizza. It’s become a kind of upscale fish finger.

The galloping popularity of sushi opens up splendid new career opportunities for chefs. Sushi culinary schools have opened in California, and we can confidently expect to see more MASA restaurant derivatives. MASA in New York occupies a place in the restaurant stratosphere where dinner for two can cost as much as $1,000 before tax and gratuities.

Fish is gold.

Fish ‘n rice clearly occupy a far more exalted status than fish ‘n chips, so this seems like a fine time to sashay into sushi and sashimi.

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The first was a brown egg in an egg cup.  The top had been removed and inside was a miniature souffle.

The second egg was not an egg at all but was also nestled into an egg cup.

The chef had molded an outer part of white vanilla ice cream and inside, “the yoke” was a passion fruit sorbet.

The third egg was also a pretend one.  It was a “fried” egg in which the white was formed from white chocolate and “yolk” was an apricot mousse.

I can foresee the time when someone who throws an egg at a politician will be arrested and charged with assault with a deadly weapon

There is a precedent for everything.  There was another time, long ago when eating an omelet became a death sentence.  It happened in France, during the Revolution when the former President of the Consitutent Assembly was on the run.  Gripped by pangs of hunger, exhausted and scared, he threw caution to the wind and decided to stop at an inn for a meal.  Unwisely he asked the cook to make him a 12-egg omelet.  Times were bad then all over France, so it took no great genius to realize that this was the fugitive president.  The cooks  betrayed him and the mob hanged him.  Hence the dilhemma; you are hanged if you do and hand you are hanged if you don’t — eat eggs, that is.

As for eggy food jobs, how about these:

Barbara Dale-Avant, an employee of Atlantic Food Inc.’s cooked-egg division, in Hemingway, South Carolina, holds the record for number of hard-boiled eggs peeled per minute.  Her best total was 48, which means that she dawdled away exactly 1 1/4 seconds on each egg.  And her boss, Wilbur Ivey, is not a man to tolerate bits of shell among the eggs, which are shipped to East Coast restaurants.  To get these perfect results, he is willing to allow 3 seconds per egg, but that’s only when peelers are first starting to peel on the job.

“A real clumsy person couldn’t do this,” remarked one of Avant’s peelers, somewhat unnecessarily.  Another confided that the members of the six-woman team (who together once peeled 10,000 eggs in an eight-hour shift,) sometimes throw eggs at each other, recreationally, although Mr. Ivey does not entirely approve.  On the other hand, he is clearly no spoilsport, as he is credited with devising the initiation rite for new egg-peeler: he slips a raw egg into a recruit’s first batch.

Howard Hillman made omelettes.  He made omelettes at conventions, at parties, and wherever two or three or many more people were gathered together all over the country.  There was a time when Howard Hillman was making omelettes everywhere you went.  He made tomato and cheese omelettes, mushroom omelettes, banana and nut omelettes, omelettes of every kind, large and small, with or without crowd participation.  Howard Hillman became the Omelette Emperor of the Western Hemisphere.  He had a skill that many others possess. The difference between Howard Hillman and everyone else is that he took his talent and marketed the dickens out of  his talent.

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I am the matchmaker.

I want to know what each student loves (not what he or she likes) to do.

With a little bit of luck, I can suggest ways in which they can marry their hobby or unique skills with their culinary knowledge as they seek a long and fruitful career.

I’m astonished to discover how many budding chefs yearn to own a truck. A truck that serves every kind of food from cupcakes and rice pudding to Korean barbecue.

Today I talked about the calendar. The US Tennis Open is coming up. So is the World Series. A sports fan may want to cook at the private dining room of a sports franchise or become a private chef for an athlete.

Dancing with the Stars employs a personal chef for each competition. Personal chef jobs are on the rise. It is one of the best jobs for an entrepreneur who can start a business without requiring a capital investment.

I spoke about jobs in art and design; photographer, food stylist, kitchen designer, and special event cake designer. Create a wedding cake in oil and acrylic paint to frame and preserve for ever and ever (or as long as the marriage lasts.) become a chef in a museum, create a food exhibit, become a lecturer on the topic of food in fine art? Become a recipe developer for Panera or Starbucks (or Dunkin D’s.)

Tasting is a good and well paying job. Taste ice cream, coffee, tea, olive oil. Chew gum. No kidding. Nestle is one of the companies that employs chewing gum tasters. There are real jobs that require super taster to… well…taste…all day. .

How about becoming an ethicist, a futurist or a trend tracker?

Or work on Wall Street analyzing food companies?

Or work for a food foundation or as a humanitarian or lobbyist or inspector to trace the source of contaminated food.

Here are just a few ideas for working in the food media: investigative journalist, vegetarian columnist, historian, folklorist (why do so many Jews go out for Chinese dinner on Sundays?)  The late Professor Alan Dundes examined this question with his students who also study the allure of violent sports, holiday traditions and even the mystique of the vampire.

Said Dundes: “As a psychoanalytic folklorist, my professional goals are to make sense of nonsense, find a rationale for the irrational and seek to make the unconscious conscious.”

How about taking up a career as a food memoir writer, biographer, commentator, geographer (do you know what a food geographer does?) trade magazine reporter, supermarket observer, radio host, (I’d like this job myself,) essayist, restaurant reviewer, food book reviewer (not only cookbooks but also food books dealing with politics, profiles of food companies etc.), catalog writer, TV star, ingredient shopper for TV star, TV producer, obituary writer for former food celebrities. Preparer of last meals in the federal penitentiary leading to a possible book contract for Meals to Die For.

I had only three minutes to describe my food jobs class so I didn’t have time to even mention careers in education, farming, science and technology or rare, unusual and extraordinary culinary careers so instead, I’ll get around to them in this blog. Please come back soon.

And.

Have a nice day (as they say at the bank!)

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I just read this communication from Specialty Food News: NASFT DOWNERS GROVE, Ill., Aug. 18:

Lemon Tree Grocer will host a ribbon cutting ceremony on Friday, August 20th at 3:00 p.m. to celebrate its grand opening.  Lemon Tree Grocer officially opened for business on August 13, 2010.  Located at 5101 Mochel Drive, the new neighborhood “food emporium” features a full service sandwich and salad bar, fresh, flown-in seafood, one of the last “journeyman” butcher counters, hand-made sushi and a full menu of chef – prepared meals. Lemon Tree also features an extensive artisan cheese selection and a barista serving coffee and espresso. The produce is an assortment of locally grown goods along with exotic, international offerings.

This is what is called in the U.K. “bloody marvelous” press writing.

Talk about punching every hot button. The company creates an event complete with ribbon cutting. (The release didn’t mention the idea of inviting Snookie or any other big shot celeb. Pity it is the only touch that remained untouched.)

Lemon Tree is a great name for a food emporium.

Emporium is a good word, so is “neighborhood.”

Sandwiches are really hot. Sandwich Consumer Report tells us that 96% of polled consumers bought a sandwich in the last week. I can only guess full service sandwiches are extra, extra good.

Salad Bar. There’s nothing like a nice salad to put a little pep in your step.

Seafood. “Flown in.” Flying fish! And Fresh to boot. Fresh is a reassuring word. (I’m always puzzled by customers who ask: “Is the fish fresh?”)

Butcher. Butchers are the new hotties in the food world. Wegman’s, Whole Foods and other food emporia like to display naked meat. Customers leap to the conclusion there is a real, life butcher hovering with cleaver ready and eager to respond to questions. I don’t know about the word “journeyman.” Does this mean he’s wearing a straw hat and a bow tie?

Sushi. Everyone’s favorite food. And hand-made. Wow! No robots here churning out sushi and sashimi by the thousands of pieces. By the way, have you noticed we don’t eat the food of unfriendly nations? We’d never have touched sushi right after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. No caviar from Iran either. The government has banned it.

Chef-prepared meals. A telegenic iron man or woman chef we hope.

The rousing chorus of extensive artisan cheese selection and a barista serving coffee and espresso, locally grown goods along with exotic, international offerings produces such a buzz of literary exultation, we can only imagine excited crowds are already beating a path to The Lemon Tree with open hearts and willing wallets.

This is the way to write a press release for sure.

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Culinary tourism.

Tourism is a huge and rapidly expanding industry and culinary tourism is becoming a niche market that is experiencing impressive growth.

Anyone with a love of food can get started by simply getting to know the neighborhood.

Plan a tour of  a cheesecake factory, an ice cream plant, a ranch or farm and a farmer’s market, two or three ethnic groceries and a specialty food store.

Explore local wineries and plan a wine tasting. Visit a brew pub. Attend a class at a cooking school. Organize a talk with a culinary historian, cookbook author or television star.

Visit an artisanal baker and a cheese maker. Maybe there is a a chocolate maker or a smokehouse nearby? The yellow pages directory can provide you with many more ideas. Think about organizing a fishing trip. Make reservations for breakfast, lunch and dinner at restaurants you know and love.

I’m sure you will have many more ideas.

Here are few rules though:

Never surprise the businesses you plan to visit. Schedule a specific hour well ahead and make every effort to avoid their busiest time. A homemade food gift from you to the destination owner will surely be greatly appreciated.

Have frank conversations with vendors about whether they can expect payment, or if their compensation might be in form of goodies sold to tour participants.

Consider how many tourists you can handle at a time.

Settle all the details regarding the number of clients you can handle, transportation, accommodations and payment for meals. For a two day tour, you may enter into an agreement with a bed & breakfast owner.

Decide how to market the tour.

Give your company an appealing name and one that is easy to remember.  Don’t be cute and inscrutable. Food Lovers Market Tour is a better name than Have Thyme?

Build and constantly update your web site. Tweet and post your information on other social networks.

Join culinary organizations and local clubs where you can network.

Seek advice from others about fees to charge.

Consider hiring a marketing professional as a consultant.

Prospective clients may also be identified by talking to real estate brokers and kitchen designers about recent home buyers. Talk to religious groups about new arrivals to the neighborhood.

A convention and visitors bureau may be willing to distribute your sales materials. So too may beauty parlors and doctors and dentist offices where patients are often left waiting with nothing to do but read old magazines.

Keep a dedicated telephone number for your business.

Determine other marketing venues i.e. wwwShawguides.com, state tourism department.

Good luck. Start planning today.

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The Ghost Writer (2010)

This brings me, of course, to the topic of ghost writing, a career which is the opposite of a mother’s stern warning to her children — that they be seen but not heard. A ghost has the duty to be neither seen nor heard.

Andrew Friedman is one of the rare exceptions. In 2005, New York magazine reported: “Alfred Portale, Laurent Tourondel, Michael Lomonaco, and Bill Telepan all published cookbooks this fall. The common denominator? Co-writer Andrew Friedman, wannabe screenwriter turned restaurant publicist, turned prolific channeler of the inner culinary voice.”

Michael Ruhlman

Michael Ruhlman is another celebrated ghost. His radiant, joyful writing coupled with his extensive knowledge of all things culinary, has earned him wide acclaim and effusive praise from Thomas Keller with whom he has essentially co-authored Ad Hoc and other publications and with Brian Polcyn, the Michigan charcuterie chef.

Michael writes both fiction and non-fiction, including Ratio and most recently, The Elements of Cooking: Translating The Chef’s Craft For Every Kitchen, an opinionated food glossary modeled after Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style.

I mention Michael’s credentials because he an atypical ‘ghost’. He is both seen and read (and frequently heard on the lecture circuit too).

Most ghosts, like most speech writers, are like a body at a wake: the corpse is needed for the ceremony but is not expected to say anything (much)!

In fact, speech writers and ghost writers have a lot in common. Not only must they be able to write quickly and accurately, but they also must be able to gather words together with the same rhythm and in the same idiom as the speaker or “author”.

This is not always an easy task. Just as eye witnesses to an accident will report the details quite differently and from their own bias, a ghost may prepare a draft of a cookbook, an autobiography or a press release from their own perspective rather than through the rose-colored spectacles demanded by the author.

David Joachim has written an immensely valuable description of the collaborative process in my FOOD JOBS book. It is too detailed to reprint here but here is a tiny portion of it:

“Cookbook collaborations work in a variety of ways. On one side of the spectrum, co-authors share similar interests and work hand in glove throughout the entire project. On the other side, a chef or expert provides the content and the writer puts that content into an appropriate form. Most collaborations fall somewhere in between these two extremes.”

David is THE expert in this field. He has written about healthy cooking for more than 15 years, and authored or collaborated on more than 25 cookbooks, including The Food Substitutions Bible and the New York Times bestseller, A Man, a Can, a Plan series, which has sold more than 1 million copies.

Jane Dystel, president of Dystel and Goderich Literary Management, who represents the work of dozens of successful chefs and writers, advises prospective ghosts/collaborators: “Plan to invest a day or so on the preliminaries; talking, sharing a meal together, reviewing each others work. Before taking one more step, get a signed agreement. There must be a collaboration agreement before one word of the book — or even the proposal — is written.”

A ghost is customarily required to audition with the author before an agreement is made and will certainly need to submit writing samples to make sure he or she is capturing the “voice” of the chef or author, who takes all the credit for the work in question.

A cookbook doctor (or book doctor) practices within the same arena as a ghost. The task here is to bring a fresh eye and detailed knowledge to a manuscript, and turn a sick or slightly unwell body of work into a publishable book.

May I also suggest you check FOOD JOBS, which contains contributed and credited essays from dozens of culinary experts and the website, Working With a Ghostwriter to Write a Book: What Authors Can Expect During the Ghostwriting Process as to whether this food job may be right for you.

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The Cookbook Collector

I’m neglecting everything to read the new novel, The Cookbook Collector, by Allegra Goodman.

I’m only half-way through as I have read some lines and some sections more than once.

I saved this extract to share with you:

“Irrationally, he imagined her. Sadly, he despaired of having her. But this was not a question of pursuit. His fantasies were nurturing, not predatory. If he could have Jess, he would feed her. Laughable antique, confusingly paternal, he longed to nourish her with clementines, and pears in season, fresh whole-wheat bread and butter, wild strawberries, comte cheese, fresh figs and oily Marcona almonds, tender yellow beets.  He would sear red meat, if she would let him, and grill spring lamb. Cut the thorns off artichokes and dip the leaves in fresh aioli, poach her fish — thick Dover sole in wine and shallots — julienne potatoes, and roast a whole chicken with lemon slices under the skin. He would serve a salad of heirloom tomatoes and fresh mozzarella and just-picked basil…”

Aha. Memories of Thomas Wolfe. I’m sure you will relish these exquisitely composed words as much as I am.

Jess, the character mentioned here, is a vegan!

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