I’m sure many chefs get asked the question all the time of how they found their way into the kitchen. There are a few of the usual stories that get shared but it’s not always the cookie-cutter story of helping mom or grandma.

For me, it’s half typical and half not. At a pretty young age, I was helping my mom make bread- I think I was six years old. It was the Betty Crocker Cookbook and I recall using a standard white bread. A side story is that this bread got an unlikely nickname as “the bread with the hole in the top.” To explain, my mom was apparently in a hurry one time she made it and didn’t form the dough firmly enough when placing it into the loaf pan, leaving a pocket of air where the dough was folded. This resulted in a hole in each slice of bread, and thus the name. Despite its technical shortfall, it was very tasty bread. In addition to that recipe, we also made a recipe from the book for a potato dough called “Refrigerator Roll Dough.” I still use this recipe from time to time, as I find it very easy to work with and it’s very forgiving with its overnight proof in the refrigerator. After a couple of years of helping her, by the time I was nine or ten, I made the bread myself for Thanksgiving. The following year, I was probably too ambitious for my own good and failed at attempting to make croissants. There were tears and some butter angrily thrown into the trash can when I couldn’t get it to cooperate, but making bread with Mom is otherwise one of my fonder childhood memories. I also helped Mom with making pies, which were sometimes simple with store-bought pie shells, but not always- Mom got pretty serious about pie sometimes. She also made a yearly batch of what she referred to as “killer chili,” which is based around a more traditional “Chile con Carne” and not this ground beef and beans nonsense that gets sold in a can. Mom made chili that took a couple of days and $100, and that’s when $100 was actually worth something.