Food writer, award-winning pastry chef, and baker Justin Burke will be the final entry to this year’s CulinaryArts@SPAC series, introducing his first-ever cookbook, ‘Potluck Desserts: Joyful Recipes to Share with Pride, 7 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 4.

“This cookbook is really trying to break the mold of what we perceive as what a cookbook should be,” Burke said during a phone interview last week. “We're seeing that more with the newer cookbooks that are coming out, that the storytelling of food is being included in cookbooks.”

This was planned as an interview for a Sunday Life and Arts story, but Justin Burke was so forthcoming with his thoughts, his stories about his past, baking, and even touching on food insecurity in South Carolina and what he is doing to make a difference.

There was too much for my allotted print space.

Justin Burke was kind enough to let me post our conversation on Tell Me Your Story.

Enjoy.

Joni Bonilla is great with dogs.

She has cared for and trained them. And for the past 10 years, she has paired dogs from shelters with veterans and first responders and provided a free guided training program for post-traumatic stress and mobility service dogs.

If you ask her "How many placements have you made?”

Her answer is simple — “I don’t know.”

Her reasoning is unique, heartwarming, and, at times, heartbreaking.

Daily Gazette reporter Chad Arnold will be changing roles within the Gazette News Group shortly, leaving the daily Schenectady County beat and focusing solely on healthcare within the Capital Region.

This new role is supported by the newly established Community Journalism Fund, managed by The Schenectady Foundation in partnership with The Daily Gazette.

It is just the first plank within the Community Journalism Fund planned on focused, deep-dive journalism into issues that impact the Daily Gazette Family of Newspapers readership.

Chad talked about the opportunity, how he came to find a career in journalism and why he dropped an early plan of being a rock 'n roll journalist to write about things that to him, made a difference.

It was my pleasure to have Chad Arnold, journalist, tell me his story.