Food Was Always Around

Growing up in a family of thirteen kids, food was never just food. It was part of everyday life.

Some of my earliest memories involve cooking with my mom in our kitchen in Fort Lauderdale. We had an old blender with frayed wires that would occasionally shock us while using it. Somehow we kept making desserts anyway.

My dad also had a connection to food long before I did. He worked with his Dad in his butcher shop and grocery stores. He worked in food service in the Army, spent time cooking on a boat, and later took cooking classes at the local community college. Since he worked in the food industry, he’d sometimes bring us to food shows around South Florida where I got to try products before they were released to the public. As a kid, that felt pretty exciting.

I also grew up watching PBS cooking shows like Julia Child, Yan Can Cook, and The Frugal Gourmet. Watching people create meals from scratch fascinated me early on.

One memory that still makes me laugh happened in seventh grade when I gave a cooking demonstration for my class. I decided to make cookies from scratch and dropped an egg all over the floor during the presentation. At the time it felt like a disaster. Looking back, I realized that’s just part of cooking. Things go wrong. You improvise and keep going.

In high school, several of my siblings and I worked at a seafood restaurant in Fort Lauderdale called 15th Street Fisheries, or “The Fish” as everyone called it. That place completely changed how I viewed food. 

Before that, seafood to me mostly meant Long John Silver’s or Captain D’s. The Fisheries introduced me to fresh seafood, quality ingredients, and the energy of a real restaurant kitchen.

I started as a food runner, bringing dishes to tables, preparing salads, cutting Key Lime Pie, cracking stone crabs, and doing whatever else needed to get done. We’d feed fish scraps and French fries to the giant tarpon and pelicans at the restaurant on the Intracoastal.

It was a legendary place to work and it also felt great to be around high quality food and work with friends and family in the biz! The owner, Mike Hurst, was a visionary who truly cared for his staff. He even paid us for good grades on our report cards and gave unique bonuses each year. To this day, I still take my family and friends back to the Fish to have great food, views, and experience the unique Fort Lauderdale atmosphere. 

Over the years, I worked in restaurants throughout high school and college. I worked everywhere from fine dining, pizza, steakhouses to wing restaurants. Some jobs taught me recipes. Some taught me patience. Some just taught me how hard restaurant work really is.

Eventually, cooking became less about work and more about creativity. Once I transitioned out of the professional kitchen, my passion shifted home. I even applied for The Next Food Network Star. I never heard back, but that wasn’t about to stop me from creating memorable meals for people I love. 

I started experimenting, trying new techniques, and cooking for family and friends whenever I had the chance. At one point, inspired by Alton Brown, I even built my own smoker out of a terra cotta pot and a hot plate. That DIY rig lasted a year before I upgraded to propane, then went through a few electric smokers, and finally graduated to pellet smokers and open pit barbeque.

Now I have an outdoor kitchen with many ways to cook and prepare food. My latest addition was a pizza oven which I am still trying to master. 

Today, food completely consumes me. In fact, my wife frequently asks me to stop talking about food while we are eating. Halfway through dinner, I’ll usually start discussing how I would’ve cooked something differently or what ingredient I would’ve added.

Some things never change.

Food has always been more than just eating to me. It’s memories, conversation, family, creativity, tradition, and experience all tied together.

And that’s a big part of why I wanted food to have a home inside Only One Life.