A nourishing career change – For Alumni, By Alumni 

Before Ceri Jones (BMus 2003) retrained as a chef, she spent a decade building a career in the music industry. Here, she reflects on making the jump and where her love for cooking has led her so far.  

I graduated from Cardiff in 2003 with a BMus, determined to find a career path in the classical music industry – so how did I end up teaching cookery and writing a cookbook?

I initially did find a path in the music industry. Straight after graduating from Cardiff, I undertook a placement within the administration team at the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment (OAE), which turned into a permanent job. Over the 10 years I worked for OAE, I ran around after professional musicians, project managing concerts and tours. It was the career I’d always wanted and having been heavily involved with music from a young age, I’d never entertained doing anything else.

However, after eight years or so at OAE, I started to get itchy feet. The calendar of concerts and tours had the same pattern from year to year, and there were only so many times you could wrestle with the complexities of obtaining visas for musicians with little to no notice, or gruelling 6am airport check-ins. I had also started to develop my passion for home cooking, started sharing my recipe ideas on a blog, and dreamt about writing a cookbook.

This period also coincided with my Mum becoming terminally ill, just four years after my Dad passed away. I stayed at my job for a lot longer than I should have because I needed stability at a really stressful time. When Mum did pass away, a couple of months after my 30th birthday, it was time to make a change. Once the sale of our family home went through a short while later, I felt financially stable enough to hand my notice in at my job and enrolled on a six-month chef training course. I adored the course – immersing myself in something new felt so nourishing.

While I was training, I helped at a cookery school, which felt like the most enjoyable way to use my new skills. I loved sharing little tips and helping participants gain confidence in themselves. At this point I had no idea what I was going to do with my new chef qualification, but I had hoped that food education would be involved in some way. It’s been 11 years since I made the career switch, and after trying out various freelance bits and pieces, my work now splits into three main areas – working part-time as a Food Educator at the Garden Museum in London, food writing, and a little bit of cheffing.

As a Food Educator, I lead workshops with a wide variety of people from age five and upwards. It’s an incredibly rewarding role, and I love watching people hone the skills they didn’t even know they had. In cooking sessions, we always cover knife skills, learning to love our vegetables, simple cooking techniques, and how to make food taste even better by seasoning it well. Like many people my age, I didn’t have the opportunity of much food education at school and taught myself to cook at university when I’d got bored of pesto pasta. It’s great to be able use my skills and knowledge to fill in this culinary education gap for people who also haven’t had that opportunity.

Earlier this year, after a lot of hard work, I published my first cookbook ‘It Starts with Veg: 100 seasonal suppers and sides’ under Pavilion Books, an imprint of Harper Collins. And by complete coincidence, my Commissioning Editor Lucy Smith is also a Cardiff University alumna! ‘It Starts with Veg’ is a recipe book and vegetable handbook in one. It covers what to do with 40 different vegetables and includes 100 recipes for them – the book you’d find useful if you were trying to eat a wider range of vegetables or were just looking for new inspiration for a carrot!

Writing recipes may seem quite distant from my music degree. But how would I have ever applied myself to the marathon task of writing a book without the experiences gained from the years I dedicated to learning and practising a musical instrument? 11 years after I changed career, I’m still very happy I made the switch – though I’m still working towards earning as much as I used to, which is one downside. I have also come to realise that being creative with cooking and writing is giving me what the orchestra didn’t – I was working in a creative industry, but my job wasn’t creative at all. I now sing and play music purely for fun and resist the temptation to get involved in any organising!

You can learn more about Ceri’s work and cookbook at cerijoneschef.com and find her on Instagram and X at @cerijoneschef.  

 ‘For Alumni, By Alumni’ is our blog series shining a spotlight on the stories you want to tell your peers. Perhaps you’re involved in an amazing community project or your work is innovating and solving problems? Submit your idea.