[Editor’s Note: In this series, Peekskill Herald profiles the “after life” of what certain individuals who graduated from Peekskill High School currently are doing.]

Helene Clarkin-Chaisson, Peekskill High School class of 1982, a chef, food consultant and researcher, has built a culinary career on both coasts that has landed her in a national contest for the country’s favorite rising star chef.  

The daughter of two Peekskill teachers, Clarkin-Chaisson, is headed towards the Favorite Chef finals, a competition that features the winner in the Taste of Home magazine, cooking on a Food Network channel and winning $25,000 in prize money. 

“When you come from a large family in a small town like Peekskill, this should be an example to young people that when you live your passion and put your mind to it, you can do anything,” says Clarkin-Chaisson. “Growing up in Peekskill taught me determination, resilience, and to work towards my goals.”

The resident of Moore, S.C., who has worked all over the country, including an Iowa turkey farm, says that every job over the past 30 years was a step up in laying the groundwork for where she is today. She is determined to use the contest’s prize money to retrofit an Airstream travel trailer into a mobile classroom to teach children cooking.  

She wants to draw on her experience in teaching children to cook in afterschool and summer camp programs she developed in California called Let’s All Cook. 

The entrepreneurial Clarkin-Chaisson, whose career has included gigs as a restaurant sous chef and head chef, caterer, food consultant, meal developer and researcher for companies like Paul Prudhomme, Completely Fresh Foods, ACH Foods, and others, is most content when she’s making people healthy through food. 

Recently she began teaching recreational culinary arts at Greenville Technical College in a partnership program with the University of South Carolina’s culinary medicine program. Medical providers, she explains, take her class to learn the role that nutrition plays in good health. “Food is medicine” has become her tagline in the Favorite Chef competition. 

While culinary arts is her passion, it was a second career for Clarkin-Chaisson, who worked at IBM for almost eight years in Tarrytown right out of high school. 

Seeking wider horizons than Peekskill, she quit her job, packed her car and drove to California with her high school best friend, Dawn Civerchia, who now lives in New Jersey. Initially, she worked at Hughes Aircraft, using administrative skills learned at IBM. But her passion wasn’t fulfilled and she returned home to talk to her parents, Vincent and Rosemary, about attending culinary school. 

She had first considered going to Johnson and Wales University in Providence, R.I., but her dad advised her to enroll at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park. “He said to me, ‘We have the best of the best right here in the Hudson Valley.’ Going to culinary school was the best decision I ever made. It made me resilient and determined and built character.” 

That was in 1996 and the beginning of a savory and sweet culinary passion that started, she says, at age 8, making cookies with her grandmother Mary Boucher.  “She always made Tollhouse chocolate chip cookies, and I’d stand on a stool and she’d let me mix them.”

She was also influenced by her dad, who launched a bread-making business from home after retiring from teaching at PHS in 1986. “My dad — a teacher his whole life — started making French baguettes and driving 125 loaves to sell at a Manhattan farmer’s market each week. His resilience and determination influenced me.”  

After enduring a winter of 40 inches of snow in Peekskill, Clarkin-Chaisson returned to Redondo Beach, California, getting her first culinary job at a family-owned restaurant doing prep. Not one to be content in an entry-level role, she left and began working for a CIA alumnus who was catering the events at an elite women’s club, the Wilshire Ebell.

While the catering company got requests for small dinner parties, the owner extended those leads to Clarkin-Chaisson, who started her own catering business, Tasteful Creations. “I wanted to do catering because I loved the fact that I could work with clients one on one, and when an event was over it was over. I could move on to the next,” she says. 

Tasteful Creations enjoyed an almost 50 percent repeat business. “I have a client who still flies me out to do his Christmas party after 28 years.” The business featured healthy and customized Middle Eastern and Mediterranean food.  

It was during this time that she catered a party for the famous English artist, the late David Hockney who was visiting Los Angeles. The two became friends and he emphatically urged her to pursue her passion. “This was a pinnacle of my career. He had the creativity of an artist and he told me to not give up my food artistry, passion, and dreams.”

Since self-employed catering was such an all-consuming business, Clarkin-Chaisson began to have a burning desire for more work-life balance and found a job at Completely Fresh Foods in California, which made prepared and ready-to-go meals for companies like Trader Joe’s and Costco. She was learning how to create meals that could be manufactured and worked there for 16 years as a product development and research chef.

Clarkin-Chaisson is proud of her career path, which has included roles at West Liberty Food, an Iowa turkey farm where she was senor product leader; developed antibiotic-free deli lunch meat for grocery chain Kroger; developed spices for a British conglomerate that made spice blends; and many more. 

She has lived in the midwest, New Orleans, and both coasts, and has traveled all over the world and loved every minute of it.

Today, she enjoys her teaching assignment at Greenville Tech, being a food consultant, and pursuing her own line of healthy dog food, Healthy Harley, which she developed when her own dog developed seizures. 

True to her tagline that “Food is Medicine,” Clarkin-Chaisson wanted to help her Australian shepherd heal and not just take medication. 

She enjoys the Greenville area, where her and husband, Donald, have lived since 2023, and hosting her many nieces and nephews when they want to see South Carolina.  

She asks that her Peekskill friends and supporters vote for her in the Favorite Chef contest by going to https://favchef.com/2026/helene-chaisson  She was advancing early on as the No. 1 contender in her group. Quarter final votes begin on July 13. The winner will be picked in September. 

“If I can be that one inspiration to a child, to give them the tools to carry through life with them then I will have come full circle.”