_edited_p.png)
I've written two 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.
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.