I've written two non-fiction books. One is about how I nearly threw my life away over thirty years in professional kitchens. The other is about what I learned to cook while I was doing it.
Both are being rewritten. The first editions are on Amazon now; the new ones are better, and they're coming.
HOW NOT TO DO IT — A Memoir
I spent forty years cooking. Country clubs in Ohio, a legendary little restaurant on Sanibel Island, resorts in Jackson Hole and the Tetons, a family restaurant, a pizza chain, and a good many kitchens I was asked to leave.
I also collected five DUI arrests in three states, ran from the courts in one of them, slept in a homeless shelter while employed at one of the most exclusive resorts in the American West, and spent thirty years proving I could not stop drinking.
The shape of it never changed. I climb too high. I catch on fire. And then I crash and burn.
I got sober on January 1, 2022. I was forty-nine years old. Everything before that is instruction in how not to do it.
The first edition came out in three volumes. That was a mistake, and it was a marketing decision rather than an honest one. The rewrite is one book, the way it should have been.
Second edition — coming soon.
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HOW I DID IT — The Cookbook
Four decades in professional kitchens leaves you with a lot of recipes and a great deal of opinion about them.
This is the other half of the story — the turtle soup, the mother sauces, the seafood I learned on Sanibel, the elk and bison from the mountain years, the pinto beans, and the chocolate-covered peach bomb with a honeycomb that shatters when you tap it.
There's more here than fits in one volume, so it's becoming a series.
Volume One available now. Revised edition coming soon.
Chapter 1 excerpt:
In that moment, it dawns on him that the boy hasn’t used the reverser.
He has gone in to clear it by hand and dropped a wrench or a knife from the bench down there. They will be at it pulling the shear bar till dark. He is annoyed with his son.
That is the last thing Emmett Sauer ever feels about Dell that doesn’t cost him something.
But then the note levels and runs clean. He finds himself turning around without quite meaning to. Not for the noise, but because it doesn’t make sense.
The tractor is idling with its door hanging open. A glove lies palm up by the tractor’s left tire. Everything seems fine.
He does not run, but he quickly puts his hand on the harvester’s disconnect and kills it.
It takes eleven seconds for the cutterhead to wind down.
He stands his ground with his hand on the switch the whole time.
Once the quiet comes, there is only the wind.
A mile away, down at the home place, Alvin Prahl is still at it with the loader, packing the pile.
The spout is aimed at the wagon.
The wagon is three-quarters full.