I believe it was the following summer when, in the middle of a 400-cover Saturday night, the chef whom I was working under flipped  and walked out of the restaurant, leaving me at the age of 15 with a row of tickets and a packed dining room.

The owner came in and took off his coat and tie, threw on an apron, and we worked through the evening. At the end of it all he shook my hand and said great job. With my adreneline racing at the speed of sound, I realized that this is what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I stayed at the East Point Inn for over 30 years with that same owner and we became the closest of friends and remain so today. It was that man and and my friends in the ACF that guided me on my way through my beloved career.

- Chef Chris Neary, executive chef at J Kings Food Service Professionals, president of the American Culinary Federation, Long Island Chapter
A:I was modeling successfuly in Italy when I stumbled upon my culinary career. When I had off days I spent time at my great-grandparents' vineyard studying the wine-making process, cheese making, and bread baking. I began spending more and more time there and fell in love with food. After tasting and getting to work with Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese in Parma Italy and San Marzano tomatoes freshly picked in Naples and olive oil made from
hand-picked olives . . . I began to realize that this was the career for me and began to spend more and more time in culinary school in Italy. I was now working with beautiful objects (like in fashion modeling) but they were beautiful things created by nature -- like . . .  beautiful red tomatoes or fresh red strawberries. And then there were the artistic processes for creating the cheeses and wines and olive oils, balsamic vinegars, breads. Cooking and foods became my way to express my creativity and my passion. But my aha moment came when I realized that cooking and my  culinary
career connected me to my past and my present in so many ways.

I am also the author of the bestselling recipe novel The Basic Art of
Italian Cooking.

-Maria Liberati, author, The Basic Art of Italian Cooking

A:It started when I was 29 and on top of the world. I had just finished grad school and my career was soaring, I had met the man of my dreams on a chairlift and was planning a wedding, we were buying our first house (a Victorian fixer-upper), and in general I felt like the world was going my way. Then, 2 weeks before my 30th birthday, I woke up blind in one eye. In short order, I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.

I immediately began to research ways I could be proactive about my disease and hopefully avoid ending up in a wheelchair, like more than three-quarters of all MS patients do. With my journalist’s background, I learned that a diet of whole foods would be the best thing I could do for myself. But the fatigue of MS made it unrealistic to spend hours preparing food each day, not to mention the clean-up afterward.

So I invented a new method of cooking one-pot meals that allowed me to layer whole foods into a Dutch oven and flash cook it to produce delicious and nutritious dinners that weren’t stews, casseroles, or stir-fries. Then I wrote a book about it and tour around the country teaching people how to eat healthily and use my technique to achieve their eating goals.

-Elizabeth Yarnell, author, Glorious One-Pot Meals: A New Quick & Healthy Approach to Dutch Oven Cooking