About

 

Sunset & Sewanee, the cross-streets where I grew up in Houston, TX, influenced me, my cooking, and my style.  After thirty years as a professional cook, this blog is a way to slow it down… to sit back on my patio with a glass of Macallan 12 and share my love for food and entertaining.  My goal is to help you develop your own style and enjoy passion in your cooking and life.

Houston in the late 60’s and early 70’s was a very different place than it is today.  We rode our bikes, wandered around the city, and knew almost everyone in a four-block radius.  My friends and I would drop in at our local grocery store, the J.M.H., to return salvaged Coke bottles for deposit money, then to Buffalo Pharmacy for an exceptional cheeseburger and handmade chocolate milkshake made by a short-order cook who would show us how he could “remove his thumb” before our amazed 8-year-old eyes.

Ask a question from your butcher, grocer, or pharmacist, and it would be answered by someone who had been trained in that occupation for decades.  You could trust the answer.  West U was a place where everyone in the neighborhood would get together several times a year to celebrate holidays with a cold beer and some homemade summer sausage.   It was a world that had vanished in favor of cell phones, iPads, and grocery store employees who turn over from month to month.  Gone are the soda fountains and the easy conversations with the cook behind the counter.  Now it’s a pre-cooked burger in a bag, tossed in your general direction with a slam of a fast food window.

My grandparents and great-grandparents lived just a mile down the road.   My grandmother’s homemade chili and chocolate pie were some of my first culinary awakenings.  She, along with my mother, gave me respect for cooking techniques.  My grandfather was an avid hunter, fisherman, and gardener.  During the Second World War, Victory Gardens were everywhere, and my grandfather’s house was no exception.  He grew fresh heirloom tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, beets, beans, peas, lettuce, turnips, squash, and peppers, to name a few.  He also had fully mature pecan trees and kumquat bushes, while my parents offered giant Brown Turkey fig trees, pomegranate, black plums, and bananas, as well as fresh herbs and onions of their own.

At any given meal, we might have a delicious mixed salad made with tomatoes so fresh that they were still warm from the sun, followed by Gulf flounder stuffed with shrimp and spinach, baked perfectly with brown butter and fresh lemon.  My grandfather, affectionately known as Pap-Paw to his grandkids, started, like many others in the region, as an oil-well wildcatter.  Although he had retired by the time I came around, he was nevertheless a no-nonsense, suffer-no-fools type of guy. His love and respect for all things outdoors influenced me heavily in my life.  When he allowed one of us to come along fishing, hunting, or foraging for his “supplies,” it was a great honor we eagerly accepted to hold over later our other siblings and cousins who were jealous of the missed experience.

As a small boy, I remember driving for hours up to the Texas hill country to small German and Polish settlements like Fredericksburg, New Braunfels, Lockhart, Brenham, Chappell Hill, and Boerne to purchase sausage, bacon, ham, milk, and cheese, because those places offered simply the best to be had.

In a sense, this is where you and I are going to go. We are going to cross this country to bring you the best ingredients and resources for your culinary adventures.  Almost every chef you see or watch always says it starts with the best ingredients.  That’s true.  In most cases, chefs can’t honestly take credit for what nature has brought to them.  I’ve experienced this in my career, and if you are looking to havetional, something to build memories around for yourself, family, and friends, something except this is the best place to start.