JEANNE JONES: FIRST OVERS / LEFTOVERS / LIFE LESSONS

·42 min·2 clips

Jeannie Jones says she has worked with people who "call themselves chefs" but "can't cook."

1. Fell Into Food Podcast talks with Jeannie Jones about A Jeannie in the Kitchen and her path through restaurants and catering. 2. Host Chef Jeff Fell interviews Jeannie Jones, a food blogger and former restaurant worker, because she began in food at 15 and later retired from the industry. 3. The episode asks how a working cook built a blog around "first overs" and leftovers after decades in kitchens. 4. Jeannie says she started working because her parents were blue-collar workers and she needed to help pay "the bills and their bills and my bills." 5. She says she kept returning to restaurants even though she originally wanted a "real job" outside the kitchen. 6. Her mother found a magazine article about culinary school, and Jeannie later said she was interested in attending. 7. She describes starting at Los Angeles Culinary Institute under Chef Raymond Hoffmeister before moving with other students to Southern California School of Culinary Arts. 8. Jeannie says she worked in the office and in the kitchens to help open the school and cover her education. 9. She says the arrangement was simple: if she worked for free, the school would pay for her tuition. 10. She says catering shaped her most because every day and every menu were different. 11. She describes corporate catering at Guggenheimer and says a client told her the menu was "really bored," so she rebuilt it. 12. Jeannie says that menu change helped take the account from the red into the black within her first quarter. 13. She says many people "call themselves chefs" without being able to cook, and she gives a resume-fraud example. 14. In that story, a chef could not identify basic stroganoff and kept arguing that it was closer to goulash. 15. Jeannie says she has over 700 cookbooks and keeps a Mediterranean volume nearby for reference. 16. She says she cannot follow a recipe "to save my life" and instead tweaks ingredients like zest, citrus, and ratios. 17. Jeannie says the blog is a mixture of life and recipes, including travel, scuba diving, and her husband. 18. She says the writing comes naturally because she has a BA in English literature and worked in public relations. 19. Anyone interested in restaurant life, catering, or practical cooking will get useful details from this conversation. 20. People looking for polished video production or a tightly scripted food show may skip this one.

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