ORLANDO, Fla. – Chef Jill Holland found her path later in life when she went into culinary school at age 36.
“It took a lot of soul searching to figure out what I wanted to do when I grew up and now I just need to grow up,” Holland said.
Holland worked in retail, real estate and was even a swim instructor for several years, but she found a love for cooking when she went to a birthday party.
“I went to a friend’s birthday party who was doing, like, an in-home cooking class, and it just really intrigued me,” she said. “A couple of weeks later, her sister had a birthday party with the same person and I, of course, went back, and I’m like, ‘I think I could do this. Yeah, I think I could do this, but I’m gonna need a lot more information.’ So I went back to college and graduated from Valencia in 2011.”
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From there, Holland worked in several kitchens, but she found her true calling when she became an instructor with Second Harvest’s Culinary Training Program.
“Second Harvest actually started a catering company,” Holland said. “I came on to Second Harvest as a part-time instructor, and six months later, I took over the position as head chef (of catering).”
The company, now called Plate Above Catering, offers full-service catering for large and small events with all of the proceeds going back to funding the culinary training program. Second Harvest said it costs about $7,000 to put a student through its intensive training program. The proceeds from Plate Above help to keep the classes completely free for those students.
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“(It) is an amazing program — building up adults who have some sort of hardship in their background,” Holland said. “It could be as — and I use this term very loosely — it could be as simple as being underemployed all the way to the extreme of homelessness — we’ve had students who are living in shelters, living out of their cars, living on a friend’s couch — and everything in between those two scenarios.”
Plate Above offers pick-up and reheat menus for families during holidays, but it can also cover events of nearly any size.
“We’ve catered wedding receptions, we have a rehearsal dinner and a couple of weeks that we’re doing. We’ve done retirement parties, birthday parties, we’ve done some Bar and Bat Mitzvahs,” Holland said.
She added that the company is willing to work with customers to offer up nearly any kind of menu they like.
On the latest episode of Florida Foodie, Holland shared more of long and varied resume. She also sampled some delicious candied bacon, cookies and a frittata for Lisa Bell and Candace Campos.
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