Hey! I'm a semi-retired cellist and long-time home cook. I started being interested in cooking as a small child in rural Texas watching my grandmother cook. Beef came from a neighbor, and she would trim the fat and toss the raw trimmings to her grandkids like a mother bird giving her chicks worms, and we loved it! She kept a pewter jar of rendered bacon fat (in unairconditioned Texas heat!) by the stove to do her cooking with. Later, I watched Julia Child when she first began her show, and later still, Graham Kerr. I started cooking regularly when I was
@15. In the summer of 1976 I was living in a trailer home on a ranch that was 4 miles from the nearest paved road outside of Santa Fe and spent the summer learning something about Chinese cooking. There was an excellent mom and pop chinese food shop on the Plaza in those days that had pretty much all you could want, and my landlord had a large garden that I could raid at will that had bok choi and napa cabbage (among other niceties). As many musicians also love to cook, I have always done fairly elaborate meals together with friends, and I spent 25 years touring the world playing chamber music and exploring every nook and cranny of local cuisines everywhere I went. I built my first sous vide machine in 2011, for which I used a bucket heater (that I also used for dewatering used vegetable oil for fuel for my veggie oil diesel Volvo), a PID, and a plastic cooler. My first sous vide meal was an Australian grass fed beef tenderloin
that I made for and with my son on a visit home from college. I have a group of cooking buddies who get together fairly regularly to enjoy some good food and wine, sometimes including Mark Ladner, the executive chef of Del Posto here in NYC. When one of our number recently accepted a new job in another state, Mark had us as guests for one of the most spectacular meals of my life at Del Posto. I very much enjoy reading what everybody here is up to, and getting new recipes and techniques from all the good folk here at CS. You guys are awesome!
