Trish Lobenfeld, CCP
I have a life-long love of cooking and entertaining. It started with a cardboard kitchen and plastic food as a child and evolved over the years into a profession. My culinary experience includes teaching, recipe development and recipe testing.
My desire is to share this passion with you, teaching you to improve your skills in reading and understanding recipes, measuring ingredients, using cooking techniques properly, seasoning food before cooking and in assessing the sensory characteristics of fresh ingredients and prepared food. The goal is for you to put a well-made meal on the table for family and/or friends to enjoy and for the cook to use refined skills to feel accomplished and relaxed.
In 1994, I attended Peter Kump’s New York Cooking School, now The Institute of Culinary Education. It was apparent within the first week or so that I would never work in a restaurant. I had two young ones at home and the prospect of working nights, weekends, and holidays was an unwelcome one. After graduation, I started an avocational cooking school out of my home, Sweet & Savory. I shortly realized that culinary skills were not enough. Students’ curiosity about the origin of particular ingredients and the significance of some dishes to culture and religion were beyond my knowledge. Not long after, I found myself at New York University’s Department of Nutrition, Food Studies & Public Health enrolled in the graduate Food Studies program.
My association was fortuitous in many ways. As adjunct instructor I taught both the lecture and lab sections of Introduction to Food and Food Science, Food Science and Technology, Food Production and Management. I am also a certified instructor for the National Restaurant Association Education Foundation ServSafe Program and teach food safety and sanitation classes. For two years I worked full-time as coordinator of the department’s food programs with responsibility for all hands-on food courses and curriculum and the physical maintenance of the teaching kitchen.
Other projects included coordinating the department’s continuing ed program, teaching the Certified Dietary Managers program, and coordinating an interdisciplinary annual conference Millennial Stews, in 1999 for the Association for the Study of Food and Society and The Agriculture and Human Values Society.
My professional affiliations include the International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP). I am a Certified Culinary Professional (CCP), a designation awarded to members of IACP who have demonstrated and maintain comprehensive knowledge of the culinary arts and sciences. I also belong to Food and Culinary Professionals, a dietetic practice group of the American Dietetic Association, the American Institute of Wine & Food and the Society of Children’s Book Writers & Illustrators. In 1999 I received the Andre and Simone Soltner Scholarship for Food Education Merit Award.
