Mediterranean Women Stay Slim, Too: Eating to Be Sexy, Fit, and Fabulous! Read Free Page B

much always worked in the food service industry. In high school, my first job was at a pizzeria. It seemed a natural fit because I was so used to being around food all the time. I continued to work in restaurants during college, then I got a job at a seafood restaurant in Long Island. The chef had graduated from the Culinary Institute of America (CIA) in Hyde Park, New York, and I can’t tell Where I Come From
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    you how much I wanted to work in that kitchen. But at that restaurant at that time, there weren’t any women in the kitchen.
    The chef wasn’t about to put his reputation on the line by letting untrained me into the inner sanctum of his restaurant, but he told me I should check out the Culinary Institute. If I went to school, he implied, maybe he would hire me. I took this to mean that maybe cooking professionally was something I could do.
    So off I went to the Culinary Institute. From that point on, I just fell in love with cooking. I would become a chef, and I knew it. I became very serious and dedicated in school, putting all my energy into learning as much as I could. My favorite part was working in the restaurant at the end of the program, a sort of apprenticeship. Finally, there I was, working in a restaurant kitchen—not the one I’d originally tried to enter but a restaurant kitchen nevertheless. The learning didn’t end with school.
    Every time I travel or even go to a restaurant, I learn something. That’s one of the reasons I love food so much. The learning is endless. You never get bored.
    I’ve worked in a lot of restaurants since then, in West Virginia, New York City with Larry Forgione, Miami, and in California at Chez Panisse with Alice Waters, where I really matured as a chef, developing an individual style based on seasonality and freshness, using ingredients from local growers.
    This is still a big priority for me personally and for Primo, and it really has become a part of my soul. I took this lesson with me when I worked and cooked in Denver, when I traveled to Europe to cook for private families, and even when I went to Japan to help open a restaurant. By the time I was hired at Old Chatham Sheepherding Company Inn in the beautiful Hudson Valley (New York), I felt I had truly come full circle back to my roots, embracing a true calling.
    Old Chatham Sheepherding Company is the largest sheep dairy farm in America, with more than a thousand sheep. They Mediterranean Women Stay Slim, Too
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    milk the sheep and make wonderful cheese. When I was hired, the farm had an old house on the property, and they wanted to open a bed-and-breakfast. They said they were looking for a chef, but I didn’t want to be limited to cooking breakfast, so I talked them into having a restaurant along with the inn. My partner, Price, and I ran it for four and a half years. I was the chef and Price was the pastry chef. We had an innkeeper, we put in a garden, and we cooked from the garden and had lambs and pigs on the premises for use in the kitchen. We had a big budget and it was a great experience, but we knew all along that what we really wanted was to open our own restaurant. We got all kinds of accolades for the work we did and the food we cooked. But Price and I had our eyes on Maine.
    The beauty of the Maine coast really drew us there. Price’s parents owned property in Rockland. Finding a 125-year-old Victorian house just outside of town on four lovely acres seemed to be a good sign. That was in 1999. The house was stuffy, with layers of wall coverings and heavy carpet. We didn’t have a lot of money, so we decided to do all the renovation ourselves. We stripped the house to its bare bones, then let it breathe—a metaphor for the way I like to prepare food. It took eight months, but the house became fresh. It was open and alive again.
    And we’ve been here ever since. Freshness is our mantra at Primo and the guiding principle behind everything we do. I change Primo’s menu every single day to