@dr ken
I'm an amateur home chef, husband, and father to two girls and a cat. Love reading anything about cooking, and tend to be somewhat adventurous, often making up recipes 20 minutes before company arrives. I can't count the number of folks that have asked me to start up a restaurant, but then it would get to be work instead of fun. I have a talent for looking at five recipes for the same dish, and taking the best features of each to create something better than any of the originals. Mostly I use cooking as a means to wind down after a day at work, so I prepare virtually all the meals at home - my wife has cooked maybe a dozen meals in the last five years. Biggest revelation in my cooking history was the chap at Williams-Sonoma who took 5 minutes to show me how to properly chop with a santuko knife; that lesson has cut my prep time for most recipes by 2/3, enabling far more interesting recipes than I ever had patience for. Thanks, dude! I'm probably best known over the years for my Atomic Chili, which relies on a select blend of up to 15 varieties of hot peppers to achieve an astonishing and frightfully long-lived heat profile. The head chef/owner of our local Thai eatery told me once that I was the only non-Thai she'd ever met that could eat food as hot as she liked it. Despite taking the heat thing to extremes sometimes, I love subtle foods as well, appreciating the difference in various olive oils, or the effect of a pinch of fresh nutmeg on a roast fish. Anyway, look forward to reading many more of your recipes, and messing around with them to make them my own. Thanks for your inspiration, and happy cooking! - Ken