“Will you do consulting for me?” It's a question we ICE chefs and faculty hear almost weekly from students and alumni (not to mention others outside of ICE hoping to go into the food business). After all, we are the teachers, mentors and experts who should know all the tips, tricks and likely pitfalls of launching a business—and most of the time we do. Like a great-on-paper first date, we are easy to fall for. However, before asking for our "hand in marriage", consider a lesson or two in consultant match-making.

Throughout my time at ICE, I knew there would be “ah ha” moments when I learned something new about food. But I didn't expect that the first time this happened, it would come in the form of a tomato.

Les Dames d ‘Escoffier New York (LDNY) is an international organization of accomplished women professionals in the food, nutrition, wine, and hospitality industry. Each year LDNY’s annual scholarship program provides encouragement and support to some of the city's most talented young women—tomorrow’s leaders in the industry.

Yogurt is an everyday refrigerator staple, something we buy at the grocery store without a second thought. But what if the next time you scraped the bottom of the yogurt cup, you didn’t have to run out to the store? What if you took that last spoonful of yogurt, mixed it into a few cups of milk, set it in a warm place for a few hours and forgot about it. Well, when you came back to check on it, it would have turned into yogurt, that’s what.

Whether we train with them daily in our teaching kitchens or simply enjoy the fruit of their creative labor, it's safe to say we're all fans of our in-house Chef-Instructors. But what do we really know about these culinary champions and their experiences before ICE? "Meet the Chefs" is an effort to discover the stories of the experts who keep our education on the cutting edge.

The first module in the Culinary Arts program at ICE takes you through all of the basics of vegetable, herb and cheese identification, fabricating meats and seafood, and making stocks. We then moved on to learn the five “mother sauces”; béchamel, velouté, espagnole, hollandaise, and tomato sauce. These five are the basis of all classical sauces and each serves as the head of it’s own family of secondary sauces, which are used in many contemporary cuisines.

In addition to my standard share, every week my CSA offers “extras” for free. Often, these are herbs or chile peppers, but a few weeks ago they were giving away garlic scapes. The green, curling tops of garlic plants, scapes are usually trimmed off the plant in mid-summer, helping to produce a larger garlic bulb at harvest. Once destined for the compost pile, recent years have seen a growing interest in this seasonal product, and many chefs now use them in recipes as an alternative to garlic cloves.

I had the honor last month of conducting an intensive, three-day course on frozen desserts in the pastry kitchens at ICE, the latest in a long-running series known as the Center for Advanced Pastry Studies. The program - CAPS, for short - was initiated several years ago by pastry and baking instructor Michelle Tampakis, and the long list of illustrious pastry chefs who have brought their expertise to ICE in the past includes heavy hitters like Olivier Bajard, Laurent Branlard, Stephane Glacier, En-Ming Hsu, Michael Joy, Elisa Strauss, and Stephane Treand.

Aspiring to work in food television from a very young age, Eden hosts two shows on the Cooking Channel: " Eden Eats" and " Log On And Eat with Eden."

Andy Ricker, Chef-owner of a half dozen restaurants in Portland and New York (Pok Pok, Phat Thai, Whiskey Soda Bar, Noi, SenYai) provided a number of insights on ethnic food and the restaurant business in this week's edition of Meet The Culinary Entrepreneurs.