I’ve always been a foodie, I guess. When I was 11, my family took an extended vacation to Europe, where I found out that, even though I couldn’t always pronounce the names of foods, I liked a lot of stuff I’d never tried before. My mom started cooking new stuff at home, and I started learning from her.

In my 20’s, I would get up on Saturday mornings and turn on PBS to watch Jeff Smith and other cooks, and I started to somehow pick up things like knife skills and some cooking techniques. I seemed to have a knack for cooking.

In 2004, my now-teammate, Mark, and I were talking about cooking with natural charcoal. He told me his goal was to someday go on the barbecue circuit. Little did he know that by the next spring, he and I would be entering our first Kansas City Barbecue Society competition. From there, we’ve gotten better and better at barbecuing, and my cooking has continued to improve.

In the fall of 2006, I got the bug to start baking bread, and I’ve enjoyed learning that, too. I try doing artistan style breads. I seem to prefer traditional types of cooking, and hope to learn more and more as I do new stuff.

Also in the fall of 2006, I started writing for a food blog network called Well Fed.  The blogs within the network for which I write (sometimes not often enough) are:

• Get Your Grill On
• Just Baking
• The Cook’s Kitchen
• Wine Sediments
• Well Fed On The Town

I do my best to write original material there instead of copying what I’ve already posted here.  Sometimes the topics are the same, but I write about a different aspect of the same thing.