Holly Fox used to be a customer of the Community Kitchen Academy. When she found herself without a home a few years ago, she would receive free meals from the food truck the academy operates out of.
Now, she’s serving them. On Wednesday afternoon, she handed out dozens of platters full of her homemade crinkle cookies, lemon slushies and blueberry shortcake in Burlington’s Feeding Chittenden parking lot.
Fox is a soon-to-be graduate of the academy, where she’s trained for seven weeks to learn all kinds of culinary and professional skills. The program has helped her land a job at Dunkin’ Donuts, and she has aspirations to become a pastry chef at a local restaurant or open her own bakery.
Fox said she’s proud of how far she’s come. “So are my family and my friends,” she said.
The Community Kitchen Academy — a culinary job-training program founded in 2009 — is about to graduate its 35th class of participants. The program is offered by Feeding Chittenden, a local hunger-relief organization operated by the Champlain Valley Office for Economic Opportunity.
Unlike other culinary programs, the academy allows the students to give away the meals they make as their final project — they’re given, for free, to members of the community.
The program is mainly targeted toward people who have had trouble keeping jobs in the past, said Adelaide Szczesiul, an Americorps Vista communications and development worker for Feeding Chittenden. But she said many people from different backgrounds have used the program.
Chef Jim Logan, who is the academy’s main teacher, said different organizations in the state will sponsor students’ tuition so many don’t have to pay for the training they receive.
Logan has worked at restaurants all over the country. He said his students not only learn culinary techniques, but they’re also provided professional training so they can succeed at the businesses they eventually work for.
“We go over the basic methods. Soups, sauces, making pastas, rice, grains, potatoes. So every day is something new,” Logan said. “We don’t just talk about it. We make it, and we make a large batch of it.”
Logan said his students are specifically taught how to cater meals for large groups of people so they can feel at ease working in a restaurant environment. They have to feel comfortable being able to whip up 60 meals in a short amount of time — which is why the food truck setting is a helpful place for them to learn, he said.
“You can watch TV and learn to cook,” Logan said. “But there’s a difference between doing it on a larger scale and a small scale. And doing it with other people around, to learn communication and teamwork.”
Logan said the program wasn’t slowed down too much by Covid-19. During the height of the pandemic, staff members were busy working with Feeding Chittenden and Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity to make and distribute more than 400 meals a day for people experiencing homelessness, who were living in local motels and isolating to discourage the spread of the coronavirus.
The food the students work with is entirely donated from local grocery stores and farms. It would otherwise go unused.
Fox, who said she has a major sweet tooth that informs her love for pastry, hand-curated her dessert platter so the bitter taste of the lemon slushy would coordinate well with the sweetness of her blueberry tart.
She said almost everyone she serves appreciates her work. The service makes her want to continue feeding the Burlington community.
“To me,” Fox said, “it gets what I know how to fix out to people to taste.”
