This page is dedicated to my ongoing love and passion for cooking, for my clients, friend and family.
Some of my earliest memories are sitting on the kitchen counter watching my mother cook, eager to help when ever she would let me. My mother is a German immigrant, my father’s parents from Poland and we lived in a Polish community in New Jersey. My father was an avid hunter and fisherman.
I was taught at a very young age to clean fish, pluck ducks and pheasants. I collected feathers, rabbit and pheasant feet. During hunting season, it was very common to see a deer hanging in many garages. During the summer, I loved to go crabbing at the Jersey Shore. If we didn’t go crabbing, we would spend the day at the beach, eat fresh clams and bring home a giant lobster. My Polish grandparents had a dairy farm with lots of land. They planted an enormous garden every year and our whole family spent lots of time picking beans and strawberries.
Our freezer was the size of a shoe box so, everything we ate was fresh. My German grandmother was an incredible cook and made an elaborate dinner every Sunday. I still dream about her leg of lamb and perfectly cooked green beans and boiled potatoes with butter and parsley. She always had a tin with her home made brownies or the thinnest crispy ginger snaps.
With all the hunting and fishing, we did not eat like most other people. While the other kids in school were eating their peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, I had liverwurst and onions on the most delicious rye bread from the bakery two blocks from my home. The aroma coming from that bakery was insane. How many times I sat outside the door waiting for them to open! On hot summer nights when they had their back door open, my sister and I would poke our heads in and usually got a treat.
I announced at the age of 6 that I was going to be a chef. At the age of 13, I talked my way into a cooking class at a local adult night school. Two years later, as I entered high school, I attended my regular high school half a day and a vocational school for commercial foods the other half of the day.
I continued my education after high school so I applied to the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park. Within a few months of graduating from the CIA, I moved to L.A. I worked in several restaurants before deciding to become a private chef.
Cooking, for me is a way to express love and it makes people happy. Food brings people together. I look forward to continuing to share the joy and passion I have for cooking so you can share in the connections that happen around the table of your new kitchen for years to come.