Front Page on Wall Street Journal

For me, except for not yet buying a new oven (36", multimode wall unit), it's never been money; it's been time as dstroy questioned. I'm not wealthy, but I never left one job, that another wasn't offered almost immediately (sometimes  a new opportunity was my reason for leaving.) Only when funding dried up in my last full-time job, nothing was on the horizon. Six months later, I quit looking, declared myself retired, and found "retired' my life-long calling. I do retirement at least as well, and probably better, than most jobs I've held.

I've also been a "foodie" for a very long time. Frankly, though good in so many other ways, my mother was a poor cook: lacking in skills, not always attentive--she burned a lot of foods--and devoid of inventiveness. To be fair, my father was also somewhat narrow in what he'd tolerate. Outside the home, at restaurants, and friends' home he'd try most anything and like most of the trials. At home, meat--always well done--and potatoes were sufficient.

I sauteed my first frogs legs when I was ten or eleven, and baked my first bread--pan-baked, open fire bannock--when I was twelve. I learned to saute or bake or steam or batter-fry self-caught fish in my teens. Before I graduated from high school I was cooking meals for church youth groups of fifteen to thirty members on weekend retreats. I read cookbooks as often as I read novels, and, until I went to college, more frequently than textbooks.

At eighteen my cooking slowed, almost to a standstill. Work, full-time work, away-from-a-home-for-long-periods-of-time work, stay-out-of-the-galley work, reared its ugly head: I joined the Navy.

And found a world of new interests. I won't bore you with details; suffice it to say, when i left the Navy, twenty-six years later, I did't regret a day I'd served. They paid for my college degrees, showed me parts of the world I'd never heard of, let me drive fast ships, and came to know and be proud to be a part of a host of fine and dedicated men and women.

Along the way I acquired a wife and family: a captive audience. And when I had time, home from the sea, I fed them. They were my guinea pigs, my lab rats. They ate everything from abalone to squid, Beef Wellington to liver, curries to four-alarm chili. One of my lab rats, a son, became a chef whom Phyllis Richman, food critic for the Washington Post, gave his cooking three stars, and the restaurant he worked for a dreamed for financial boost wherein one restaurant became three. When we hold reunions, everybody cooks. The kitchens are bedlam, with wonderful noises, laughter, and especially tantilizing smells.

Coincidentally, I continued to bake. Tentative about the squid, my guinea pigs were nonetheless seduced by pies, cakes, cookies, and when I was home for Christmas authentic 19th century figgy pudding, and Grandma's Welsh Cakes. My, now grown, children, parents themselves, still ask for recipes.  I replicated my paternal grandmother's white bread as best I could, and branched out to wholewheat and, by TFL standards, insipid ryes. My three or four attempts at sourdough were disasters.

After leaving the Navy, work in England introduced me to what beer really should taste like; shortly after I began brewing at home. Five or six years ago, The Food Channel brought me authentic "low and slow" BBQ, and I said, "I can do that!". Friday, I smoked eighteen pounds of Boston Butt and six racks of baby-back ribs. That will hold us through the summer. Later this week I'll make fresh sausage. I'm thinking about smoking some of it. Home wine making was a natural extension of brewing. Homemade sauerkraut is my latest challenge; we grew a lot of cabbage over the winter.

A year ago I discovered the TFL; in that year my bread baking, by my estimate, has improved about 1000%  (that's not baker's math). Sourdoughs sometimes take up half the space on the shelf I'm allotted in the freezer.

So, why do I bake, cook, brew, vint, pickle, can, cure, smoke, and ferment? Well, I guess I like to. And now I have the time to.

David G.

I certainly didn't mean to give the impression that I bake bread just because it's cost effective--but as far as obsessions go, it is a lot less costly than, say, golf.