Can you do the work of a Culinary?

Cooking is not an active career so you can't.

These are active careers: Doctor, Scientist, Police (Get to work Expansion) and Actor/Actress (Get Famous expansion).

There a lot of creative ways to imitate a career. If you have get to work you could create a storefront. Cook your food and set it for sell. Then you could either play get to work as the store owner and sell the food. Or you could play another household and go to the store and buy prepared meals. I find this a much more realistic way to play since not all sims will be at cooking level 10 but many have the money to purchase good meals for their families. 

If you own a restaurant you will not be cooking. You will be managing employees and schmoozing customers. - FYI. 

@SirArikuna You can join the culinary career and at the top level you are a 'Celebrity Chef'. I have had a number of sims who did that career path, but I only pushed one to the top level before doing other things with the traits. I actually have a number of sims at 10 on gourmet cooking and baking and I use them (and the chef) to cook for their own retail store (they sell through the 'Lice Cold Freezers' in the store), though only a few are in the culinary career. They cannot cook at a restaurant they own, unfortunately (as @stbnchristine mentioned) - except to have the household eat from while at the restaurant working (I do this sometimes in my game). In the Culinary career they can choose halfway through to be a mixologist or to go the path of chef. As I said, the top tier of that branch is 'Celebrity Chef'. Please refer to this article for more details, if you are interested in that career.: http://www.carls-sims-4-guide.com/careers/culinary/

A trick that helps me with cooking and stores... Put a warming rack and lice cold refrigerator in your home.  If you cook food from home to sell at the store you can put it in the warmer or lice fridge and then your sim or other household members won't eat it.  Put food in your inventory right before you leave to go to the store,

Some ideas are bakery, gourmet food store, cafe which sells sweets and sandwiches.  I even have a store which only sells vegan food.

@stbnchristine Haha... yes, I do the same thing! And dishes stay fresh longer in the freezer - plus the freezers are connected if you have more than one on the lot, like with refrigerators. When my sims are cooking in the store or at home  for the purpose of selling at the store I snatch the dish up up and drag it to the freezer before they grab a serving and spoil it for selling... Discovered why it works this way last week (I used to think I needed to block access to the freezer to make sure the household didn't take the items to eat... nope). You know how when you add food to the freezer in your retail store you don't have to mark it for sale, it does it automatically? If you drag something from the freezer in your home (if you add a "Lice Cold Freezer" in your home), it marks it as for sale and if you drag it out to the counter at your home you cannot choose 'grab a serving'... but you'll see a price tag. I wanted to use the food they had made for a demo/testing of a room, so in order to make that food  (which I had stuck in the freezer at home) usable to serve in the room I stuck it in one of their personal inventory, had that guy go to the store the family owned, and there (on the retail lot, not at home) it would offer the option 'set not for sale' ... which returned the option to grab a serving. So I fixed all the food to allow 'grab a serving' on the store counter, dragged them back into his inventory, then took him to the lot with the room, added a refrigerator there and dragged them into it to store them, then pulled the food out to serve at the dinner in the room the 'next day' in the game. Love those freezers, though!

@stbnchristine I don't use the warming racks. Can I ask you... Can customers purchase directly from the warming racks like they can from the freezers? Also, do items added to the warming rack not get marked for sale automatically and still work for serving instead (like at that party or in a store) until/unless you selected them and chose 'mark for sale'? Also, do items last longer in the freezer than the warming rack (for some reason I thought I remembered that this was the case and part of why I just went with the freezers in the beginning)?

@SheriGR Both the warmer and freezer set them immediately to be sold.  Both have the same amount of time they are fresh.  I just tested this with Chicken Saltimbocca.  I don't remember exactly which items, but there are several items which will go in the warmer and not in the freezer and vice versa.  Mainly baking items and stuff from the cupcake maker.  I use both at the store and at home They look so well together and fit the concept of what my chefs would use.

@stbnchristine Good to know about the pricing (as one place I just checked said items are free taken from the warmer) and length of freshness. I have actually not found any items that would not go into the freezer, and apparently they fixed the bug just recently so that the spinach and herbs will go into it also. Yay! I have not played one of my stores in  about 3-4 weeks, so I am looking forward to this new tweak. Thank you! 🙂

@SheriGR I know you were going to play with the Lice Cold Freezer soon.  Would you mind confirming if the spinach and other herbs are still going into the freezer?  Crinrict still had trouble with it today.  Please go here and help update/close the bug issue:  https://answers.ea.com/t5/Bug-Reports/NEEDS-INPUT-GTW-Herbs-amp-Spinach-can-t-be-added-to-Lice-Cold/m-p/7292601#M80947

@stbnchristine I'm sorry to say that just earlier today I coincidentally was working on a build and testing it and thought I would try popping my herbs into the 'Lice Cold Freezer' just because I could now (I had been sent an update from the forum bug report on the freezer about a week ago where someone mentioned that her spinach and herbs now went int to the freezer) ... <breath... sorry> BUT ....it didn't work. They would not go into the freezer. I'm assuming after my experience and reading your post that either: 1. This person was wrong, or; 2. There was a brief window in which it worked that has now closed. Either way, darn. 

@SheriGR Wow!  That person who said it was working is me.  And it is still working.  I'm attaching a screen shot of herbs in the Lice Cold Freezer inventory. The tiny little parsley I pulled out is set for sell and I am able to purchase these items from the freezer at my grocery store.  In all fairness the pointer does now show a red circle with a slash through it but the item store/sells/buys just fine.