My Top 5
We ask members of the university community about a few of their favorite things. For this issue, we talked to Chef Stephen Owens, associate professor of culinary arts:
[1] Favorite visual artist: Claude Monet … he has an incredible sense of using light and color together. I like his still lifes of fruit and vegetables. His home in Giverny, France, is beautiful – incredible kitchen for the late 1800s, very technologically advanced.
[2] Favorite band: I’ve always liked the Allman Brothers. Their sense of combining blues and rock and southern
gospel – I like how they meld those different genres of music. I never thought that when I was 50 I would be seeing the same band as when I was 17.
[3] Favorite sporting event: I had an opportunity to go to a World Cup soccer match when they were playing in the United States. Argentina was playing against Nigeria and it really gave me a chance to see the cultural impact that a sport has on a particular country. There were so many Argentinean fans and Nigerian fans and they were all dressed up in costumes and singing and chanting – totally different than a sporting event in the United States. It’s just an incredible cultural awareness for one’s country that happens to be expressed during a particular sporting event. I think it’s remarkable.
[4] Favorite (food) tradition: My mom did a lot of preserving, jams and jellies, which I do myself. I go well beyond what my mom did. I do pickles, relishes, mustards, chutneys, all different combinations of jams and jellies … so that’s probably my favorite tradition. It’s oriented around food. In the spring I bring maple sap into my lab classes and make syrup for the students. Now I spend my summers selling my preserves at the local farmers market.
I like being able to take things that I learned from my mom early, when it came to cooking, even though I wasn’t really interested in cooking at that time. I just like the idea of making your own stuff. I know I can make a better-tasting jam than Smuckers – probably better for you, too!
[5] Favorite place(s) on Earth: Here’s a high and low … two different places. The low is going to be a place called Skaneateles Lake; it’s one of the Finger Lakes in upstate New York, where I grew up. That’s where I spent my summers as a kid. My family rented a big house with 10 other families during the summer, so we had no less than at least 25 kids under the age of 16. We slept outside. No television, computers. The adults had bedrooms. There was a boys’ tent and a girls’ tent out in the back yard. In the lake … is “True Blue,” where you swim down as far as you can. You could get down about 35 or 40 feet before you have to turn around and go back to the surface. The high place is the top of Mount Rainier, 14,410 feet. I climbed with my brother when I was 16. Very intimidating, climbing roped together in freezing weather – crevasses, ice axes, crampons – all in the pitch dark. The views were spectacular.
The Extra Mile | Fall 2009 | 3