Now that Labor Day has officially come and gone, kids everywhere are polishing their apples and heading back to school.

I was immersed in the world of canning for the first time as I indulged with eight other students in Chef Instructor Daniel Rosati’s Canning Workshop II recreational cooking class.

As much as we love classic chocolate chip cookies, there is a lot to be said for decadent, loaded versions like these coconut, dark chocolate treats.

Hurricane Irene may have been a bust for me, but its impact on the food industry wasn’t for me.

When ICE President Rick Smilow and Anne E. McBride wrote "Culinary Careers: How to Get Your Dream Job in Food," they discovered a plethora of food jobs they had never heard of before. Since the book's release, they have been discovering even more interesting culinary career paths. DICED shares some of them with you in a reoccurring feature: “Unique Culinary Careers.”

As I walk around the school, from time to time, a Chef Instructor will point out students or situations of interest in his or her class. That happened in big way this past Thursday when on the 12th floor I went by Chef Anita Jacobson’s section of our extremely popular five-day recreational cooking class, Techniques of Fine Cooking 1. The interesting, strange and highly improbable fact was that in this class of 13 people, three of them came separately from Australia.

ICE’s Culinary Management Instructors are seasoned industry professionals who are still active in the industry, working on their own projects while teaching classes at ICE. With such a wide range of experience between them, we decided to ask Julia Heyer and Vin McCann to take a closer look at some of the trends and culinary businesses we keep hearing so much about. As the season changes, it seems like a good opportunity to spend some time on some of the ones we are seeing out there; hopefully we’ll find a few good ones to argue about!

ICE offers one of the country’s largest recreational cooking programs. With over 1,500 cooking classes and over 22,000 students each year, there is something for every cook looking to learn new techniques in the kitchen. This month, Shiv of the blog Pithy and Cleaver braved a torrential downpour to try a class on Essentials of Indian Cooking.

The annual Great Gathering of Chefs is coming up on September 14.