Chef Cari Cooks Up a Storm in Her Melville Home

Cari Savinetti never dreamed of being a chef. Her loves were always animals and plants. Her mother never really cooked, so she didn't grow up cooking either.

A strange twist of fate led her on the road to culinary school a year and a half ago when she lost her job at Hicks Nursery. Because she was unemployed and was stuck at home, she started watching Emeril and the Food Network and that got her interested in trying to cook things.

Then one day she got an email in her junk mail folder, "talking about going back to school," Savinetti explained. "One of the things was culinary school so I clicked on it. It sent me to a site and on the list was the Culinary Academy. I didn't even know there was one on Long Island and I sent them an email. They called me up and asked if I wanted to come in and see the school and talk about classes so I went the next day. I loved the place and loved the idea of the program so I joined up."

And she's so glad she did. "It is wonderful and I have learned so many new things and so many techniques I would have never learned if I didn't get the hands-on training."
 
Her favorite thing right now is working with vegetables and spices, especially anything with a Thai or Indian influence. She also enjoys using different starches like quinoa and couscous. 

She doesn't eat red meat or pork so she doesn't like working with animal products. She says she is leaning more toward being "a veggie chef, or at least doing only fish and veggies and maybe some chicken dishes."

She says she was never really into baking either, but now that she knows how to make bread from scratch, she really enjoys it. She says she will no longer buy store-bought bread but loves to make her own. She also tries never to buy anything in a jar--even mayonaise--and will prepare it herself from scratch. 
 
Savinetti says that "prep" is about 80 percent of the cooking process, and while she enjoys the actual cooking part of it better, "it's mostly about the prepping." 

But her favorite thing to do is called"plating" --which she explains as "making the food come alive on the plate and making it look more like art than food."
 
All in all, she loves her new passion and hope it turns into a career. She is finishing the six-month session at the Culinary Institute now, and is looking forward to an internship at a local restaurant, and then getting a job.

Savinetti says, "I love making the dishes and working with the ingredients. Seeing people really enjoy what I've made gives me a really great feeling--knowing that I've made someone else happy as well."