Feeding My Passion

This evening, I’m going to be teaching a cooking class at the St. Joseph Public Library, Cooking with Herbs. It’s another thing Chef Tom has asked me to do since he’s going to be very, very busy today with a wedding rehearsal dinner and a charity event both at Port 412 tonight. He was actually asked to do the class by the chef at the The Pump House, also in downtown St. Joe, which is just a block away from us, but their chef is going to be super busy as well, so he asked Tom. And now I have this hot potato. Just kidding.

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Servers and cooks have difficult jobs. I’ve hosted at Brewster’s in New Buffalo, Mich., which is a very busy restaurant, so I’ve dealt with the public and the servers a lot. But I haven’t really ever been a server, so I won’t pretend to know and understand more than I do. I’ve spent much more time in the kitchen, and I know that one of the things that drives me and every other cook I know nuts is when hot food sits dying in the “window,” ready to be picked up but cooling off, or just sitting there under the lamp.

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Chef Tom is very busy these days, over committed actually, so he’s asked me to do some of his things, mainly the public-appearance sort of things. He usually teaches a cooking segment for 98.3 The Coast, which is based in Benton Harbor. Every Tuesday, DJ Robin Van Dyke does a live broadcast from Perennial Accents in downtown St. Joe, just a couple blocks from Port 412. It’s a beautiful kitchen and homewares store, and they have a nice demonstration kitchen where Tom and Robin do the cooking segment from.

While I taught cooking classes before, about 4 so far I think, being live on air, and with someone making a video recording, made me a bit nervous. Read more »

Chef Tom and I went to the Round Barn Winery’s Red, White & BBQ event Saturday and Sunday and had a great time, though on Saturday it was overcast most of the day and even rained for a while. It only cleared up just at the end, in time for the fireworks, but we left early to get back to Port 412, where we watched them from the upper deck. At Round Barn, we grilled burgers and some of the aforementioned bazillion shrimp on skewers. Tom had made a great coleslaw dressing, and we had a huge grill that was working much better now that they’d modified it.

Tom is a brilliant grill cook, so he manned the grill of course, so I was the prep guy. Read more »

Chef Tom and I are going to be cooking at the Round Barn Winery’s Red, White & BBQ event Saturday and Sunday in Berrien Springs Baroda, MI. It should be a lot of fun, and it’s been a lot of prep. Tonight, during dinner service, I, just little ole me, threaded 99 pounds of 21/30 count shrimp for the weekend. If you do the math, that’s about 2500 shrimp. Not suprisingly, I smell vaguely of shrimp.

I need to be back at Port 412 at 9a tomorrow to finish prepping and get everything loaded up so we can get to the event, set up, and start cooking around 1p or so. The larger of the two grills we’re using might be a challenge, stay tuned.

In addition to making wine, Round Barn is a micro brewery, and I’m really looking forward to trying their beers, which I’ve seen in the stores and at bars, but I haven’t tried any of them yet.

It’s 4th of July weekend folks, our busiest weekend of the year, we’re putting on our game faces!

Mixing fire and sleep deprivation is generally a bad idea, so I’m off to bed.

Due to my not working at Port 412 yet, I wasn’t really in the loop when it came to the management team’s day together. Brandon wanted to play golf, Tom’s vote was for fishing, John, the owner, thought we’d be going to his cabin and talk shop and have some fun. So what do you think we did?

If you guessed “None of the above,” you’re absolutely right!

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I got back from my trip into Chicago exhausted and stuffed to the gills. The traffic was at times terrible both on the highway and in the city, which is to say, at least for Chicago, quite normal I guess. And it was very frustrating that the first place I wanted to go to, TAC Quick, was closed, despite the sign on the door indicating they were open Monday-Saturday. It was Tuesday and I was a bit miffed. Read more »