BLOOMFIELD — Sherlyn Bowersox, better known as Sher, loves to cook and to feed people. She gets to do both as cook at the Bloomfield Senior Center, a job she has enjoyed for the past 18 months or so.

Relatively new to the community, she came to Bloomfield from Galesburg, Ill., when she married Ira Bowersox. A bubbly energetic lady, she was soon looking for a job.

“I applied at a lot of places, and had about given up finding a job when the Senior Center called asking did I still want the job,” Bowersox said. “I said yes! They (people who come regularly) are my family now.”

It’s a family she enthusiastically joins for afternoon card games, helps to entertain with Karaoke or by playing the organ for sing alongs or helps with the annual bake sale fund raiser.

“I have been cooking since I was six years old,” she said. “My grandma taught me,” beginning with scrambled eggs and French toast. “I have always liked to cook.”

That’s a good thing. The oldest girl in her family, she “had to cook for my brothers and sister because my mother worked,” she said. Her siblings include three older brothers, a younger sister and brother.

“I like to feed people as long as there is food in the house,” she said as she deftly slid a dish of Cherry Gobble-up into the oven. That was easy to believe. Within minutes of arriving for this interview I, along with her husband, were chowing down on fresh from the oven zucchini bread and coffee.

“You can always add some green beans [to the menu] or put more potatoes in the pot. Doesn’t hurt if there are three or four different vegetables” in a meal to help stretch it; a trick she must have learned from Grandma.

“I always envied both of my grandmas. No matter how much unexpected company showed up they could put a meal on the table.”

She washed up the utensils used in preparing the dessert, before continuing with the next recipe, commenting that “Grandma always said a messy cook is a good cook; but I clean as I go,” never letting clutter accumulate in her immaculate kitchen.

She enjoys collecting and reading cook books; also creating new recipes. “I like to take this from one recipe that looks good and that from another, for something new,” such as her own tasty Italian flavored version of colorful stir fry, Flavorful Garden Mix’.

She shared one of Grandma’s time saving secrets as she combined the stir fry ingredients.

“Grandma taught me how to measure in the palm of my hand,” she said. She shook a little crushed parsley into the cupped palm of her hand before dumping it into the vegetable mixture. “That’s about a teaspoon. Comes out about right every time if you measure” (with a measuring spoon.) And “this is about 1/2 teaspoon” she said, showing a smaller amount of a different herb in her cupped palm.

Bowersox is quick, efficient and can improvise if need be. As the only cook at the Senior Center, she cooks and serves an average of 36 meals per day. Then there is the unexpected, like 78 patrons on Valentine’s Day. She was by herself, but managed.

“People are requested to make reservations the day ahead, but not many do,” she said. She understands that often “they don’t know how they will feel the next day. Maybe they won’t feel like coming.”