From the Academies kitchen

The final dispatch from Julia Cameron, who has been a fabulous Record intern through the school year. She'll graduate from Bergen County Academies' culinary program next month, then head to Villanova:

As the school year comes closer to its end, I cannot believe how quickly it went by and that this is my final blog entry.

We've been very busy in culinary class lately. We all passed our senior SOCAT exams before the April vacation. It went much smoother than I thought it would, and I was proud of my successes during the test. It felt like we were in a Food Network cooking challenge, so it was actually fun.

Since then, we've had several parties to prepare for, including the induction of the new freshman class, for which we made desserts.

As we head into the end of the year, we still have one test left--our ProStart Year 2 exam. In a few weeks, we will have the Senior Luncheon. It is an ongoing tradition in which the underclassmen prepare a goodbye luncheon for us seniors. Only a few of the members of the senior class have plans to study culinary or hospitality in college. However, I know that the skills I've learned from the culinary academy will be a great asset to my future.

I've enjoyed writing about food this year and look forward to continuing that in the future. But we've also definitely learned much more than just cooking and baking from our culinary classes. Our chef instructors, Chef B and Chef J, are really interested in our lives outside of their classroom as well, and have provided all of us with the necessary tools to face the real world. I'm looking forward to heading off to college and keeping food as an important part of my life.