Published food writer visits Hudson
By Angela Greiner Contributing Writer

Clara Silverstein, who has a recently published cookbook "The Boston Chef's Table," was a guest speaker Nov. 28 at Hudson High School's Speaker Day. PHOTO/ANGELA GREINER

Hudson - Clara Silverstein, book author and food writer, visited Hudson High School Nov. 28 along with 11 other professionals who were invited to the school as guest presenters for Speaker Day. The professionals, who all volunteered their time, used hands-on activities and question and-answer formats to better educate students on the realistic positive and negative experiences of their careers.

Tammy Murphy, guidance councilor for the Public Policy Service and Education Cluster, hoped that the event would help students get a better appreciation of the diversity of career fields available. The professional presenters ranged in careers from a nurse practitioner working in acute care to a state police officer in charge of fire and explosion investigation.

Murphy explained that the event was planned in response to the students' needs.

"The students, through a questionnaire, choose the type of professionals they were interested in meeting," Murphy said.

Prior to the program, which ran for a little over an hour during the students' regularly scheduled cluster period, the students were given an opportunity to choose which presenter they were interested in seeing.

"I hope this raises the stu- dents' awareness about what kind of careers are out there and generate some excitement about post-secondary opportunities," Murphy said.

Gail Lemer is the School to Career administrator at Hudson High School.

"As a mom of college students," she said, "when you have students who have a sense of what they like and maybe what their skill set is, it makes the college search easier and more successful."

Students who choose to attend Silverstein's workshop were interested in a variety of careers including: cooking, restaurant management, journalism and writing.

In order to best illustrate what goes into critiquing for the newspaper or writing recipes for a cookbook, Silverstein, who was demonstrating how to make a chunky blue cheese dressing, had the students write and describe what she was doing.

Kimberly Needham was one of the students who hopes to attend cooking school.

"I really like cooking, although I found it interesting just how difficult it was to make and write about food," she said.

In addition to walking the students through the endless pool of adjectives used to describe the food by critics Silverstein also warned students of the difficulty of the trade.

Critiquing restaurants is a lot of fun, she said, but you have to know your limits. Initially Silverstein would try to go to a bunch of restaurants all in one neighborhood.

"By the fourth I didn't want to taste anything," she said.

Silverstein, whose cookbook "The Boston Chef's Table" was recently published, said that writing is her first passion. She encouraged students to write a book, but also warned them that it often takes a long time to get a publisher interested.

"As a writer, you might as well take the red stamp of rejection and stamp it on your forehead," she said.