Passion for Food

As with all art, there has to be a certain amount of passion when you are a chef. Certainly nobody goes into cooking for money or fame, and if they do, they will find themselves in another industry really quick. Everyone wants to create dishes and be "THE" chef, but it takes quite a few years before you even get a shot at that, and in the meantime, you will prepare someone else's dishes over and over again. I had to work a fryer first. Then they gave me the grill. Then I ran sauté. Eventually, my chef would let me cook the family meal (meal for workers during the service break). It wasn't until I worked on my first line for a year before my chef finally let me write a recipe for the nightly special, and that was probably a fast track to get to do your first real chef work, especially for someone that hasn't gone to school.

So it seems if you are really willing to go through all that; and you have a love, knack, and a little luck, you can get to a point where you are doing real chef work. However, there has to be a driving force, a true reason behind the passion. For me it is very simple. I grew up with food; I helped my father cater events from a young age. In fact, my first catering gig was when I was about 12 or 13 and my dad had got called offshore with his normal job, and asked the client if they minded his son do it. I don't know if he told them my age, but probably not. My father, by no means a chef, is an excellent cook on a pit, or fryer, or a boil pot, and he is an awesome organizer. Still to this day, if there is BBQ-ing to be done, my family usually asks him first, then me if he can't do it.

However, I took that solid base of food and event planning to another level. My passion for food increased as I traveled and ate more and more foods. Twenty years ago in Katy, TX there were not a whole lot of options. Cucos, Jill's, Midway BBQ, and that was about it. So it wasn't until later that I started getting diverse food in my diet. As I traveled, ate, experienced culture, I realized that we are all basically the same, and one of the main things that binds us is food. Every culture has food that is stapled into their society, and if you observe the food, you can observe the culture.

Almost every culture has traditions of large slow roasted meats that bring everyone together to do one thing. EAT! In Texas we do BBQ. Nowadays you can expand that (in SE TX at least) to frying turkeys, or boiling crawfish, thanks to our Cajun neighbors. In Hawaii, they roast whole pigs. Coastal places have great seafood dishes, like Norway and sturgeon, or New England and clam chowder, or Baltimore and crabs. Italians have lots of dishes like that depending on what region you're from.

Wherever the culture is from, these traditions remain the same. Not to mention the everyday family meals, that believe it or not, some cultures still have. It is not just the food though. It is the spirit of it all. It's the everyone being together, eating and drinking, laughing, arguing, celebrating, mourning. We eat when there is a special occasion like a birth or wedding. We eat when there is a funeral or when someone is ill we bring them soup. Food always helps to ease the transition no matter what the situation.

This weekend my sister is getting married. We are eating, wait for it, BBQ. We are drinking, wait for it, beer, and lots of it. I am looking forward to this a lot. I won't have seen this much of my family together since my last sister's wedding. I will feed off of this event, not on the food, but on the life surrounding me. We will all forget about the recession, the tsunamis, the fighting in the Mid-East and SE Asia. We will only focus on one thing, having a good time, eating good food, and being with great people. Congrats Mikey!!! This one is for you.