By now you know that Bruce Emerson, CEC has taken employment out of state and we wish him luck.  As a result of this good fortune for Bruce ACF Rochester must change the manner in which we hold our meetings. We will no longer be at The Party House each month. We will be visiting the businesses of several of our members. Shadow Lake Golf, Penfield and I have the honor of being the first on this list. That is largely a product of my getting the news early and wanting to make sure we had a place to meet. Duff Rund is working on getting space at Food Link to host the June meeting, We traditionally do not hold a July meeting. August we will be hosted by Board chairman Sam Ferreri, CEC at LiDestri Foods in Fairport. Our September meeting is held at the Location of the Chef of the Year dinner. At this time no bid has been tendered.  The meeting is September 12; the dinner is Sunday September 18. Please get your proposal to me A.S.A.P. we want to do it right for Lisa.

October is the COTY cook off. At this time Earnie Miller has offered the Red Cross's kitchen for this important meeting. We are still in need of a host for November's meeting. Let me know if your place is available.

At the May meeting, as I mentioned in last month's message we will be hosting our open house. This function has three purposes, first to give us a chance to bring along our "significant other" to a night out with our friends at a function catered by the finest chefs in Rochester. This will work only if we each bring a dish to fill the buffet table. The second idea is to give us a less formal setting than our normal meeting to invite fellow culinarians to meet us and find out what the ACF is all about. The third is to have some fun and raise a little cash for the association. We will hold a silent auction. Bring along some object or two and we will sell it to the highest bidder. All proceeds going to ACF Rochester. We have some donations already and will auction off the surplus gifts we bought for 2001: A Culinary Odyssey.

I hope every member makes the effort to attend this meeting and brings at least one potential new member. We all know what membership in the ACF means to us. We need to get that word to more and more of our fellow culinarians. The more members the less we HAVE to ask of each member, but the more we CAN ask…we will be able to take on bigger and better projects in the future. We can do more with Chef and Child, the FHS summer culinary camp, work with food link and perhaps a second charitable event in addition to the Alzheimer's Association Chefs Connection Dinner. The phrase that comes to mind is "there is strength in numbers". I do not doubt that a small number of our members will be more active and will carry the majority of the responsibility for the operation of the chapter's business. It will always be that way. However any culinarian who can help at one of our functions, can sped a day helping teaching children about nutrition or can help at one of the BOCES programs helping the next generation of cooks should be a member of ACF Rochester. Bring them along. The last icebreaker we held at the Convention Center netted us two new members. 

Please look elsewhere in the Stockpot for details regarding the Fairport Central School/ACF Rochester culinary camp. We will be doing two weeks this year and hosting both high school and middle school student. A sign-up sheet will be at the May meeting.

See you May 23, at Shadow Lake
Chef Paul

Here is a little something from the Restaurant Doctor. It gives an insight to a problem that I know I have.

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.
This fascinating phenomenon suggests that you can read something (like the draft of your new menu) even with typos in the text ... but it doesn't excuse those typos. This suggests that you must have someone other than the author proof read final copy to be sure that you produce error-free material. Do the work.