Chef Hat - When I was a kid, one of my favorite activities was learning how to make a chef hat. To me, kids chef hats always looked pretty snappy. Of course, mine was not a real cooks hat. It was a paper chef hat, and not a very good one. Nonetheless, it was part of my passion for cooking. You see, on my fifth birthday, my parents began to teach me how to cook. It was something that I had wanted to do since I was about three years old. My mom was a great cook, as was my dad. They both worked part time, and spent the rest of the time at home with me. They would make some of the most delicious meals that I have ever had to this day. I wanted to be just like them.
My parents both wore chefs hats when I was around because I would always laugh when I saw them. In fact, one of my earliest memories was holding on to my mom’s chef hat and pulling it off her head. She laughed good-naturedly, so I would pull it off her head every single time that I saw it for the next year. You might say I was born to cook. I definitely coveted that chef hat.
As you might expect, I eventually went to cooking school. No one wore a chef at the cooking school except for the head cook. We all wore simple bandannas over our heads. As a matter of fact, chef hats were seen as a sign of rank. You could not wear a real chef hat until you had graduated. Until then, you could wear a chef apron, chef pants, and a chef coat, but no hat.
I can’t tell you how proud I was on the day that I finally got my chef hat. Nothing can describe it. I had been to high school, and I had gone through a couple years of college, but there was nothing that I had learned which I treasured half as much as cooking. For me, finally getting that chef hat was a sign that I had accomplished what I had set out to do. I was now a real cook, and nothing was going to stop me from succeeding. I know a lot of people think that those big white hats are kind of silly, but to me the chef hat is a powerful symbol.
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