Steve Amols found his way back to the
business he grew up in. His parents owned a retail grocery business in San
Antonio for 75 years. Steve worked in the business when he was a young boy, but
the family sold the business after his grandfather died. Steve found a career in
sales, but when the opportunity came to share his knowledge of cheeses and give
people the pleasure he got from food, he chose to work in the grocery business
again.
Darra
Goldstein, Professor of Russian, cookbook author, founder and editor of
Gastronomica, a Journal of Culture and Food started cooking five course meals
for her parents while in high school after she moved from Chicago to College
Station, Texas. A Russian scholar who loves food, she found a way to join her
passions for the Russian culture and the food of the region after her cookbook The
Georgian Feast won the Julia Child Award for Best Cookbook of the year.
Glenn
Mack left Arkansas to study Russian Language and Literature at the
University of Texas at Austin, knowing that with his choice of a major, the
chance of his return to Arkansas would be slim.
Study of Russian took him to the Soviet Union in 1988, and in 1989 with a
combination of good luck and good timing he got a job with Time, Inc.’s Moscow
Bureau. Over a period of seven
years he rose to head of Time’s photographic bureau in Moscow, and witnesses,
first hand, the break up of the Soviet Union.
In 1995 he left Moscow with his Russian-born wife to go to the Ukraine
where some of her family lived. There he fulfilled a dream by studying cooking.
When he and his wife returned to the United States, he and a partner
founded the Culinary Academy of Austin, a cooking school, which teaches not only
how to prepare foods, but also the culture of food. He is now a Ph.D. candidate
at the University of Texas in Austin, in history.
Mary
Lanzi Martini-chef Mary Martini
loves to cook. Even after
working five and six days a week at Central Market’s cooking school, she
can’t stay away from the kitchen. Mary
grew up in the restaurant business, but she took the path into the business
world, working for Dupont, before she found her way back to her true love,
cooking, learning about cooking, and teaching others how to cook meals that
please the eye and the tongue.
Elisabeth
Rozin loves eating,
cooking, and writing about food. She lectures about food and is a
consultant to the food industry. She applies flavor principles she
worked out in her first book
to create authentic ethnic cuisine anyone can copy and enjoy.
