After competing in the John L. Hennessy Awards for food service, a 908th services member now gets to attend further training in the culinary world.
Staff Sgt. Octavius Ausbon, services, 908th Force Support Squadron, was notified of his individual award during the June Unit Training Assembly by Maj. Gen. Stayce Harris, commander, 22nd Air Force, who also gave him a commander’s coin for the achievement.
Ausbon will attend a weeklong forum at the Culinary Institute of America’s Greystone Campus in St. Helena, Calif. He was nominated as a top performer during the Hennessy Competition, where he said he did anything and everything that the team needed.
“I did everything I could to help make sure we won as a team,” he said. During the competition he was in charge of making sure the cooking and sanitation units were working properly, but he also helped assemble the tent and put down the floor in the tent.
“When I was nominated out of my unit, I was humbled by it, but I really wanted us to win as a whole,” he said. “I feel good about it, but I would feel great if we would have won as a team.”
While at the forum in Napa Valley, Ausbon said he hopes to “learn some new methods and styles of cooking and site see a bit” by getting over to San Francisco with hopes of photographing the Golden Gate Bridge. But he also wants to add onto his current range of soul food and the Chinese he’s been making.
“While I’m out there I’m going to be taking some culinary classes,” said Ausbon, a native of Pine Hill, who chose services as his Reservist career when he joined in 2011. “I had always wanted to become a better cook, and always wanted to one day own my own restaurant, so I thought that services would help open up that avenue.”
The perfect meal, he said, would be fried chicken, collard greens, cracklin’ cornbread, and yams “to top it off. I think that’s a good Southern meal right there.”
Ausbon graduated from Alabama Southern Community College with his associate degree, and will attend Troy University, Troy, Ala., in the fall to finish a bachelor’s degree in broadcast journalism. He is first generation Air Force.