I’m really not good at these ‘about me’ things. I never know where to start or what to include. What do people actually want to know?

I guess I’ll just tell you how I got here.

In 1990 I moved to Minneapolis with dreams of being a musician. I soon realized that I needed to pay the bills too, so I got a job in a restaurant. At that point I loved cooking and had even taken cooking classes is school, but, I was focused on being the rock star that no one knew.

Once I realized I had kind of grown out of the rock star phase, I focused on cooking until I did a stage (an unpaid internship test when a cook or chef works briefly for free) where I was told;

“You’re ‘too old’ to work in someone else’s kitchen. Order whatever you want from the menu, enjoy, then you may leave.”

The look of pity on this guy’s face angered me, so I ate $180 off the menu, drank $65 of Merlot, followed by tiramisu and cappuccino, then stumbled home angry, drunk, and full.

A month later, I had sold or thrown away nearly everything I owned, and with my cat “Nubbin”, moved back to the family farm in Nebraska.

Later that spring I bought a Border Collie puppy and named her “Morgan”.

Nubbin lived to be 15 and six months after she passed, a new friend found his way in to our lives, in the form of a kitten I found on the side of a rural road, that someone didn’t want. He was soon named “Oliver”.

I was farming with my uncle but played in a cover band on weekends and worked part time as an IATSE stage hand until Covid hit and I dropped the side gigs, focused on farming, and making YouTube videos about the experience.

2022 was a hard one. One that I didn’t deal with well. A hail storm hit about one third of my crop. That fall during harvest Morgan was diagnosed with cancer, complicated by a severe MRSA-like infection that raged like a prairie fire. My best friend passed at age 11.

Depressed and feeling defeated I came to the realization that I hadn’t left the state of Nebraska for 11 years and needed to do something about that before I got “too old” again. I reignited my love for food with a food channel on YouTube and, more recently, a second one for travel.

…before I’m “too old”!