The first five years of my life were spent in a three story triplex in Roxbury, Massachusetts, a predominately black area of Boston. Although we lived close to Franklin Park, most of my world consisted of city streets, vacant lots and a blacktop school ground in our neighborhood. Then one day, I recall packing up the car and saying goodbye to my cousins who lived on the third floor, and my brother and I went for a very long drive (35 miles) with my parents to our new home in the country. I still remember when we arrived and got out of the car, slightly panic strickened. There was a house directly across the street and that was the only neighbor’s house you could see!

There was a lot of land to explore for two young boys and it included a cart path that went down into the woods and connected to a farmer’s cow pasture and eventually led to the Town River. We learned about electric fences, milking cows, baling hay, fishing, driving tractors and planting gardens on the Foye’s Farm. We continued to clear the land around our home and a vegetable garden was planted and a chicken coop fixed up out back in the shed. Then came the chores. There was no end to clearing more land for more vegetables and fencing areas for more animals. There were many more life lessons learned about sowing and reaping, about which animals were pets (and which ones were not!), and about the cycle of life and the food chain. We fed animals and cleaned stalls before we ate and went off to school, then more chores like weeding, watering, and picking stones out of the garden, followed school, before dinner and homework. And when harvest time came, first strawberries, then peas, beans and squash, cucumbers, corn, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, then melons and carrots, cabbage and pumpkins were ripening one after the next in quantities too large to consume. My mother canned Mason jars of vegetables to store in the basement for winter and packed endless baskets of vegetables to give away to family and friends. We never showed up empty handed! The pigs feasted on the excess and then in late fall, they were also “processed” to stock up the freezer. To this day, I still remember pulling up carrots, wiping the dirt off on my pants and eating them…so good, so sweet…eating warm cherry tomatoes right off the vine, bursting with juice…going out to pick corn, only after the water was boiling…and trying not to eat more strawberries than I put in the basket during the second picking of the day.

My father was extremely disappointed that after I left home and graduated from Harvard, I ended up, three years later, in the kitchen of the Green Valley Country Club, a public golf course in Portsmouth, RI. After a year of teaching myself to cook by reading every cookbook in the Newport Public Library, I worked in several restaurants, occasionally holding two full time jobs. The winters in New England are long and cold and business is slow. In January of 1985, I received a call from a friend who was vacationing in St. Croix, USVI, and asked me if I was interested in working the rest of the winter in the Virgin Islands! Needless to say, I was on a plane and working there within a week. That decision changed my entire career.

For the next three years, I spent the summers in Newport and the winters in the Caribbean. The second winter, I was promoted to Executive Chef of Duggan’s Reef and the next winter, I opened a new restaurant on the North Shore of St. Croix, Suzanne’s at Cane Bay. When I thought I knew all there was to know about cooking, I decided to enroll in the Culinary Arts Program at Johnson and Wales University to prove it. How wrong I was! I realized what food service professionals meant when they said it takes 10 years in the business before you have the right to call yourself a Chef! I graduated in 1990 and drove as far away as I could – destination, Maui, HI. I was hired at the Four Seasons Resort and ran the Employee Dining Room for approximately 450 staff members, and later worked pool side in the Cabana Cafe. A year later, I was on the move again after a trip to New Zealand and Australia. After 45 job interviews in Santa Fe, Taos and Albuquerque, without success, I settled for two full time jobs at prestigious private clubs in Aspen, Colorado for the winter. That spring I was offered a visa to work in Germany for the summer, so the day after the ski lifts closed, I was driving cross country again. The job fell through less than two weeks after my arrival, so I returned to Newport once again to work for the rest of the summer. Another friend suggested that I inquire about working on private yachts and before the leaves changed colors, I was in Ft. Lauderdale, FL working on a 130′ yacht!

The yacht had spent the summer in Europe and I was ready for action. Unfortunately, we spent most of the winter in the shipyard, but I had a job and enjoyed the experience. Meanwhile, a chef I met in Hawaii was working in a fly in fishing camp in Alaska and he offered me a job for the summer… Actually, the two full time jobs I had in Aspen were vacated by him and his wife when they moved to Hawaii! We all worked together at the King Salmon Lodge and I have some great stories to tell you about my “up close and personal” encounters with bears that summer! I spent the following winter in “hibernation”, back in Newport before moving to Martha’s Vineyard to run a private club there for the summer. I really wanted to get back into the yachting scene, so I took a couple of part-time jobs during the next winter and in the spring, I interviewed with the Sultan of Brunei, who was the richest man in the world at that time, to work on one of his yachts.

Four chefs were invited to interview for the position and we spent a week in Singapore at the Raffles Hotel, wined and dined, given an allowance for shopping and cooking classes on Indonesian cooking. Then, we spent a week in Brunei touring the country and the palace to give us time to see if we could assimilate into the Muslim culture there. I didn’t get the job, but it was an unbelievable experience and I knew I wanted to go back some day.

I was camping in Idaho and went into town to check in with my “headhunter” to see if there were any jobs available. The captain of the first yacht I worked on was looking to hire me for a job in Malaysia! There was only one problem…it was Monday and he needed me there by the weekend! I jumped into my truck and drove all night to get to Colorado where I left my truck with some friends and left on Thursday morning for Southeast Asia. After flying for 24 hours (first class) and a 3 hour cab ride, I arrived at the boat to find that I was cooking for the Prime Minister on Sunday! Saturday morning, I took another 3 hour cab ride back to Kuala Lumpur to shop, not knowing the language, and unfamiliar currency. The market was three stories high, one floor for Malay, one floor for Indian, and one floor for Chinese foods and I couldn’t identify more than 80% of the ingredients!! I found a Malay cookbook with pictures and I bought a cab full of food by pointing at recipes in the cookbook to the vendors.

After a year in Malaysia, we spent 6 weeks at sea before arriving in Germany for a complete overhaul of the ship (except the galley!) I cooked for the crew in Bremen, Germany, Barcelona, Spain and Southampton, England over the next 10 months, before we began chartering for the summer in the Mediterranean between Nice, Italy and Gibraltar. At that point, I was ready for solid ground.

In 1999, I met a couple from Denver, who designed and owned a number of yachts, and had an interesting dilemma. They believed there was a disparity between the service they experienced on their yacht and the service they experienced in their home. Their solution was to staff their home with crew members who wanted onshore jobs, and they asked me to manage their home and staff. (The difference was that crew members had fewer distractions and were usually single.) As the Estate Manager, my duties were usually far removed from the kitchen, and after three years, I was ready to cook again. Be careful what you ask for…

I returned to Newport right after 9/11 to purchase Vaillancourt’s Meat Market, a convenience store/butcher shop/deli and I worked every day for 4 years! We provisioned yachts in the summer and served prepared foods at lunch and dinner 6 days a week, with a staff of 14 employees. Truth be known, as much as I loved the food and cooking, I knew very little about running a business, and making a profit was the most important goal. If you have similar dreams of owning your own food business, please read “The E Myth”, by Michael Gerber first, because cooking great food, does not necessarily equate to running a successful food business. Lesson learned.

I decided that cooking was the most important thing in my life, so I returned to being a yacht chef after completing the process of re-certifying myself for duty. This involves taking courses in sea survival, medical emergency, basic fire fighting and personal safety, because every member of the crew must be trained and prepared in the event of an emergency on the ship. Well, on my way to the shipyard, I was visiting with a family friend and she offered me a job working in her home on Star Island in Miami.

So, I remained on terra firma and took the job. I cooked every day and we entertained pretty regularly, but I missed owning a business and I missed teaching. I believe that once you learn how to perform a skill, you learn more by teaching, than by doing what you already know how to do, day in and day out. So, after another three year commitment, I have arrived here on the Internet, to work for you. There are many things I still want to know about food and maybe you do too. Do you want to feel confident about hosting a party in your home? Would you like to know more about how to buy and prepare meat and know when it is done to your liking? Or perhaps there is a dessert you had in a restaurant that you would like to make or simply bake some cupcakes for the kids at school. Many of my friends and family are struggling with health and weight issues these days, and I’m hearing a lot about the raw food diet and the role fresh fruit and vegetables play in bringing your body to a more harmonious state.

If you want to improve your life, your relationships and your environment through food, then you have come to the right place! Let’s share some stories and some experiences about food and help each other live better lives as a result. We are what we eat!