Job: Chef, Aramark

Salary: I honestly don't know what I make now. [My schedule is changing.] That's the thing with culinary. You can start off making $9 or $10 an hour working prep and go up to the big chefs on the Food Network making six figures. A head chef probably makes between $30,000 and $50,000 a year.

Education:I have a Culinary Arts degree from Odessa College in Texas. My mom always cooked and baked wedding cakes, did some small catering for people. I watched Julia Child as a kid when she was first on PBS. She had such a joy for what she was doing, the fact that she could make mistakes and just get over it. The old episodes in black and white are an absolute hoot.

How did you begin cooking?My favorite thing was always to practice new recipes on people. I'd have dinner parties just to try out new recipes. I had been in electronics for many years, worked in the military, as a government contractor and in aerospace electronics. When my husband and I moved to west Texas, there weren't really any jobs out there in electronics. I had always wanted to go to culinary school. So I did an associate's degree in six months. I interned in a brew pub as head chef. We made in-house sauerkraut and sauerbraten, and they brewed all their own beers. I then worked for a woman who was selling her catering business. I bought her business and called it "A Matter of Taste." After three years, I moved out of Texas and worked for a summer season in a restaurant on Nantucket. I was looking for some work further south for the off-season. I found a head chef position at a diving resort on Little Cayman [in the Caribbean]. After a while, my family started saying things like "we aren't getting any younger, you know." So I moved back to Minnesota. ... Now I work for Aramark. They do business dining service; they have cafés in a number of businesses, schools and hospitals. Right now I'm at 3M.

What keeps you excited to cook everyday?I get excited about recipes, the different things you can do to food. You have to enjoy playing with sharp things and fire. When you're cooking, you end up doing all sorts of fun stuff and meeting fun people, sometimes famous people. It's exciting. At the fishing and diving resort, when they'd catch a large yellowfin tuna, they would radio in. I'd meet them down on the dock and you could have sushi on the bar in minutes.

Any disastrous kitchen moments?One time I had a catering luncheon to set up and I got called in for jury duty. I had to hire other people to run this, and they let people serve themselves on the buffet line. By the time I got there, they were running out of soup, out of salad, everything.

HILARY BRUECK