About the Monkey - She's So Heavy

That's me, looking at my beautiful mother and sister back in Fort Wayne, Indiana. They, along with one of my other sisters were the real cooks in the family.  And my dad of course, the mastermind behind it all. I wasn't born with talent per say, I just have a strong love of food and desire to taste things that make my mouth sing and dance.  Enough so that it will keep me trying until the day I die.

My mother and father started a Mexican-American restaurant when I was nine in the unoccupied Indiana Hotel in town on West Jefferson Blvd.  Most things were closed on that block like the two huge movie theaters right next door at the time.  This was in the early 70's.  That was our first venture.  Then from there they opened two other locations but ended up doing well and retiring from another location coincidentally positioned much further down on West Jefferson past Swinney Park.  It was a boatload of hard work and sacrifices for them and they gave my older sister, lttle brother and I a better life money-wise then my older siblings experienced.

Growing up, whatever else was going on, food and music was always very much at the epicenter. Fortunately or unfortunately, however you want to look at it, so was alcohol, drugs and too much free time.  Eventually directly following my 21st birthday, I moved to California to become something with my high school pal B.  I never had solid plans, just rough ideas.  And even though I landed in Los Angeles it was just a pit stop to Fresno to live in my aunt's garage in the most intense heat I'd ever experienced to date.

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Music had always molded and shaped life so far so it was fitting that I fell into music retail.  The best environment I would ever work in and would last for the next 20 odd years.  I worked in Fresno, Menlo Park, Redwood City, San Francisco, Berkeley and Oakland, California before moving to New York and working in Times Square, Union Square, Long Island and traveling to Boston, Miami and Los Angeles, and Chicago.  Amazing experiences and people, a time I will never forget even though at the time I bet I would have said I was miserable.  Now, forced to survive in the world of straight retail, I pine for the those glory days where coworkers could talk 3 hours about their love of the Bee Gees or why Arvo Part is a genius.

Through much of this time, food was very important, I was sampling and trying the works of other cooks and never my own concoctions.  Then I met P another midwesterner in search of something that was said to be found in the larger more interesting cities.  We met in San Francisco and moved to New York.  Since I now had two mouths to feed I began learning to cook slowly and realizing how fun it was and even sometimes more so than our other artistic ventures, like filming or playing guitar, drawing, photography, writing and any other so called talent I tried to claim thus far.

I continue to experiment and grow as well as understand how to cook lighter while not losing flavors.  Lydia Bastianich is in line with Jimmy Page in my book of heroes.