It wasn’t the noise or the mess or the workmen tramping through the house that got to Colombe Jacobsen-Derstine when the New York City brownstone she’d just bought was being renovated last year. It was the month and a half without kitchen access.
For many people, takeout dinners and nights at friends’ houses would be a welcome departure. For Jacobsen-Derstine, 39, who has been a chef for much of the two decades since she starred as goalie Julie (the Cat) Gaffney in the Mighty Ducks franchise and as Becky Fraker in Rookie of the Year, it was more than that.
As she was getting started, a friend suggested she marry cooking and acting by auditioning for The Next Food Network Star. (“I didn’t know what reality shows were,” she says with a laugh. “If I had known, I probably wouldn’t have submitted a tape!”) She won the first challenge before being eliminated midway through Season 3. The behind-the-scenes experience was jarring—“In a movie you’re there to make each other look good,” she says. “On a reality show you’re with a bunch of people whose success depends on your failure”—but the show taught her to be flexible with recipes.
These days Jacobsen-Derstine puts her theories about food into practice for her husband, Jeffrey Lefleur, and their five-year-old son and three-year-old daughter. She teaches in elementary schools in Harlem, gardening with the children and educating them about a different ingredient each week, which the schools’ chefs then use in the kids’ lunches. She’s also in the process of launching a series of short Web videos. There’s not much hockey in her life at the moment, although after six weeks of private tutoring from Blackhawks right wing Grant Mulvey for Ducks, she can still skate well. She played the role of Hailey in 2002’s Men in Black II, and still does voice-overs for Oxygen Network.
(SI.com)
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