A Different Matter of Taste

This column will be considering area chefs and culinary resources and legends in the next several columns. Occasional restaurant reviews will continue, as will regular features on seasonal foods and recipes, but the time has come to showcase some of the lower-profile individuals and groups among us for whom food is serious business, from those with actual home businesses to church groups to culinary schools to neighbors who are extraordinary cooks. Readers should feel free to forward suggestions for column coverage, with a contact phone number or email address, to The River Reporter.

My first neighborhood excursion took me to a familiar area landmark, the former St. Joseph’s Seminary in Callicoon, where the Delaware Valley Job Corps Center of the U.S. Department of Labor presently operates, among other vocational training opportunities, a Culinary Arts program.

The job corps is proud of the success of this program, and they encourage visitors from the community for Thursday lunch. The job corps also hosts a Community Relations Board Meeting at 12:00 noon on the first Tuesday of each month, to which local business and community people are invited for “a fine dining experience,” in the words of community liaison Peter Ward, served not from the cafeteria line but in the River Café.

Last December, I took the corps up on the offer of its annual Grand Buffet Holiday Lunch, another present to the public. I was impressed not only with the variety of offerings, but also the complexity of seasonings in dishes unexpected for an institutional setting — simmered oxtails, curried goat, a West African seafood specialty…. For this occasion, culinary success resulted from allowing the students to explore their international roots with full discretion in menu and recipe selection.

Culinary Arts Instructor Alice Gus was obviously preoccupied for the day, but Food Service Supervisor Kenneth Keidell outlined the program for me. He cheerfully emphasized the logistics of acquiring a large quantity of USDA-approved goat meat as I sampled a crowded plate of, I admit, the less adventurous tasty offerings. (Children today have Babe as their conscience of vegetarianism; I had Heidi with her bell-tinkling kids in Alpen meadows, much like the surroundings of the Job Corps.)

In addition to such holiday classics as roast turkey and baked ham with the usual trimmings—candied yams, mashed potatoes, stuffing—the buffet also consisted of Caribbean roti chicken, Jamaican brown stew and Senegalese chicken yassa with a depth of not-so-usual-trimmings—Spanish rice, black-eyed peas, collard greens and plantains.

Diners could pick and choose to create a recognizable “theme” plate but most seemed to opt for, in a term to suggest even greater international breadth, the smorgasbord plate of a little bit of everything. Italian lasagna, shrimp cocktail, salad and desserts added to the bounty which several town and business people were taking advantage of despite the early seating hour of 11:00 a.m. The fact that many also opted to fill their plates more than once speaks to the quality of the results of this ambitious Culinary Arts Program.

The job corps administration hopes to further this and other programs with continuing community outreach and, in particular, the corps is seeking local chefs willing to do demonstrations for its culinary students, with ingredients provided by the school, either on campus or in the chef’s venue as a field trip for the students. Interested chefs or bakers should call Donna DuBois at 845/887-5400, ext. 128.

Eat well, mon.