Podcast- About Me

The speaker has been in the food industry for around 50 years, starting with raising livestock on their family farm. They then worked in an Italian deli and a butcher shop, learning various aspects of meat preparation. They have also worked in restaurants, wholesale distribution, and recipe writing. They have extensive experience in the meat and seafood industry, including designing programs for sustainable seafood and private label products. They have traveled to various countries to find great food for customers. They have also worked on programs for better animal husbandry and have a passion for collecting cookbooks. Hey good morning everybody and welcome to the cookbook review. It was brought to my attention that I didn't have a section in here or a little bit of a of a soundbite to explain to you who I am and my knowledge within the food world. So here we go. So I've been in the food industry for oh gosh 50 years 49 50 years right around in that area when my parents bought a ranch a little farm ranch if you will in the outskirts of LA and we started raising food for our own consumption and part of that was livestock. We started with chickens and goats and sheep and lamb and you know we had a pig a year and a cow a year and all that kind of fun stuff and so that really kind of got me into the food world and I was about eight years old right around there when that all started seven eight years old and we we started raising all the livestock for food and my siblings were in the 4-H club and they decided to you know get show animals. So we started doing that and then that turned into raising you know the food for or the animals for our food consumption and then that got me onto the track of into the retail food world. I started working at an Italian deli when I was about 13 14 years old. Started you know learning how to make sausages, sliced lunch meats, prosciutto, capricolo, cracking olives and marinating them. Then I left there and then I went into a family-owned butcher shop where I was tasked with just coming in to clean up at night and within a short amount of time I was given the task of helping the meat manager bone out some meat to get ready for grind for hamburger and stuff like that and he liked the way that I held a knife so he then started teaching me how to cut meat. So I started cutting meat for a couple years and then unfortunately he passed away and I was 17 years old at the time still in high school and the owner of the market made me the meat manager. So I would get out of school in the about 1130 in the morning and then I'd go to work and where I'd cut meat and do orders and all that kind of stuff and that started me with recipe writing and I started writing a cookbook when I was about 16 17 years old right around in there and so then that got me thinking that I needed to learn more aspects of the meat and seafood industry so I've worked in pretty much all aspects of it. I've done you know like I said raising of livestock, animal husbandry, I've been in the slaughter aspect of it where I did custom slaughtering, custom programs for supermarkets, working with ranchers and fishermen and aquaculture to design programs for the markets for natural food stores to meet their strengths and standards. I've worked in restaurants, wholesale distribution, logistics and you know like I said writing I've written well over a hundred she's probably closer to 200 recipes now going from seafood, pork, lamb, veal, beef, all that kind of pretty much every kind of protein that there is and I've designed programs with the Marine Stewardship Council who is a entity who's involved or their whole sole purpose is for seafood sustainability so if there's fish for the future and I've written programs with them to roll out for other markets to follow and for tracking purposes and to make sure that what people are saying about the sustainability aspect is accurate and so I help to also build programs for private label programs with producers for the supermarkets and natural food stores, exclusive items that could only be sold for certain markets and recipes that have been written for those I had to work with the producers for you know sometimes several months just to get the flavor profiles right before we could roll them out for the customers. In addition to that I've been very fortunate in the job that I had I was able to travel pretty much the world looking for a great food for our customers to enjoy. I've traveled you know extensively to Hawaii and put together a poke program for the markets out there. I've traveled to Canada, Norway, Iceland, Germany, New Zealand. When I was traveling to New Zealand I was one of the first meat producers or worked with some farmers over there to import grass-fed beef into the United States that was not boneless so it had to have the bones in it and I had to work with the agriculture ministry and to our ministries of agriculture, sorry I said that backwards, to design these programs through all aspects from basically the the birth of the cattle all the way through the slaughter and how it was handled during slaughter and to get the product to the US. I've worked with Dr. Temple Grandin, other animal rights activists, to design programs for better animal husbandry and to make sure that the animals raised for food consumption are treated the best way that they possibly could be. So that's pretty much it on that and you know I started cooking when I was about six or seven years old with my mom and my grandma and started by the time I was about 10 or 11 I was cooking full meals for the family you know both my parents work and so I was given that task and I loved it and I started collecting cookbooks at about the age of seven or eight maybe nine my uncle bought me a cookbook actually a two-book set called the joy of cooking for Christmas one year and that pretty much started my collection of cookbooks where I've got probably close to a hundred and fifty cookbooks right now I've given some away and some are just magnificent some are you know they're okay but for the most part I love cookbooks I'd rather sit down and read a cookbook and other than you know sitting down and reading a novel and so I love cookbooks and so I hope this gives you an insight of my background and if you have any questions give me a holler thank you