If you like to eat, if food is something you enjoy, well an excellent cook/up-and-coming chef is JOURNEE AMOR BANKS of our own CCHS community. This 17-year-old Ackerman senior has dreams, and they are tasty!
There is an African proverb: “eating a mouthful is better than waiting for a helping.” I can imagine this young lady producing lots of mouthfuls and loads of helpings of her two favorite-to-prepare dishes…shrimp Alfredo (loves making pasta from scratch) and her special apple dumplings with a twist (loves baking). Where are we likely to get these yummy dishes, well, after finishing culinary school in New York (she hopes for a scholarship) or here at the “W”, we can visit her dream restaurant “Amor” (she cooks from the heart) where she will be in the back cooking (as chef) or out and about visiting you and your guests, ”You have to know who is cooking your food” she told me and she wants to know her guests, and “their usual”.
Her dream kitchen will feature a wide menu and folks from all ways of life will be welcome.
Her best friend got her into cooking, into the CCHS two-year culinary program and last year she received her ServSafe Certification, which means she can cook just about anywhere. Where did I find her cooking? Not Subway where she once worked but Koty Earl’s, of course. Her mom asked her one day what she enjoyed about cooking, and she replied, “the time it takes, I love to be patient, create and fix things myself by starting from scratch!”
Journee has many other talents and even holds State-wide offices. Kim at Koty’s bragged on her, sharing that part of our All -Superior CCHS Band, she is the “All -Superior Drum Major” (also a musician in her own right…name your clarinet and drums).
Here’s what she wants us to know and to do, she and another student from MS (among 500 others) just returned from Congress, talking to our Sen. Cyndi Hyde-Smith about expanding the Perkins Funding, that’s for all sorts of vocational schools and programs. It is federal money broken down to the states so that culinary programs like ours might flourish. At the moment we received $20,000 against a student services coordinator’s salary, no money directly into the program.
“We have to raise all our own money, both for the program and travel (like to DC for money requests). We sell fruit, ferns, strawberries, meat sticks, and cookies over the year. We need money from Perkins to increase so we can make culinary available to more students.” You need to let our Senators and Representatives know you want money for vocational classes of all kinds, especially this one.
In Arnold Lobel’s “The Cat and His Visions,” we are reminded that “all’s well that ends with a good meal.”
GO GIRL!
BLESSINGS.
