WELCOME TO GOODWOOKIE PRODUCTIONS

Hello,

My name is Don Walker.

 

I've been cooking professionally since I was fifteen, when my mother told me to "get a damn job" because I was eating everything in the house.

 

That was 1987. I haven't really stopped since.

 

I've owned a family restaurant and worked at country clubs, resorts, a fine dining room on an island, and a campground kitchen. I've been an executive chef and a dishwasher, sometimes in the same year. I learned the classical brigade from a certified master's protégé in Ohio, and I learned seafood from a crew of lunatics on Sanibel. I've cooked for people with more money than sense and for people with nothing at all.

 

For most of those years, I was an alcoholic. I got sober on January 1, 2022.

 

In the summer of 2020, I lost a job, a house, and most of what I owned in the same week. Then I drove to a breeder in southeastern Idaho and picked up an eight-week-old golden retriever the litter had labeled Blue. I renamed him Chewy. Taking on a life at that moment was not a defensible decision by any reasonable measure, and it's the best one I've ever made.

 

These days we live in Loudon, Tennessee. I cook at a campground, keep a garden, do voiceover work, and write.

 

Chewy supervises.