About me

I first started cooking right after college, when nine friends living at a communal house needed a tenth person to round out their biweekly dinner rotation. I loved it, everything from prep to serving a meal to my friends and seeing the look on their faces.

I continued to get interested in cooking over the next few years, largely inspired by a group of friends in San Francisco with whom I would cook and eat. We didn't realize it at the time but the home chef revolution was happening around us...I guess we were part of the early vanguard of young home chefs. We all had copies of the TFL cookbook and we would talk about it like other people talk about porn. I went off the deep end and made obsessive, finicky recipes that took days of prep and cleanup. I got burned out.

Now I try to focus on simplicity, using fresh local ingredients and letting the food be itself. So far, so good.

Cooking Influences

I have to credit three friends as major influences -- Heather and Marlena from back in the "let's cook everything in TFL and Alice Waters" days, and Barb, with whom I cooked some of the more memorable meals of my life. I learned different things from each of them, and in a way they're always with me in the kitchen.