When I'm not cooking or baking, I am thinking or reading about cooking or baking. I have been cooking since I was 11 years old when my mother was isolated, hospitalized, for 3 months with typhoid fever. After discharge she convalesced away from home another six weeks. Since I was always hungry, infuriating all adults, I taught myself to cook "under fire". My father put it aptly when he told me; "most eat to live- you live to eat!" I soon became the day-to-day family cook. As a result, my interest in food and cooking has grown and matured over the years. One of my many careers was selling analytical equipment to food processing companies, grain and feed elevators and flour mills. This experience expanded and intensified my interest in food. I have become an avid scratch baker and pizzaiolo. I bake weekly and use a Nutrimill to mill all of the organic whole grain flours I use. The white flours I use are organic, unbleached, and unbromated. Most of the breads I make are naturally leavened, i.e. from sourdough or levain.
I maintain a growing, evolving 2230+ recipe database on an Apple computer using Bento database software. I am a collector by nature, and among my collections is one containing over 200 cookbooks. I am a cookbook junkie and I read cookbooks like others read novels.
- What is the strangest food you have ever eaten?
- sea urchin in Chile
- What do you cook when home alone?
- pasta, pasta, pasta
- Your most treasured kitchen possession:
- Vitamix Pro 500
- The ideal number of guests for a dinner party is:
- 4
