A Corporate Throwdown: Cooking at The Chopping Block in Chicago, 2006
I’m a native of Lexington, KY. A father, a cook and a writer. That pretty well sums it up.
Early last year a group of friends got together for dinner. Eventually it turned into a routine and the Shenandoah Supper Club was born. The blog gets its title from this group which is named after our neighborhood.
In addition to this site, I am also a sometime contributor to Dave DeWitt’s Fiery-Foods website. Fellow chile-heads will recognize Dave as the man the New York Times once dubbed “The Pope of Peppers”. Past Fiery-Foods blog posts include (click on the title for a link to the article):
All of the photography on the site is original.
The author can be reached at nthonaker@mac.com, or via Facebook (www.facebook.com/nthonaker) and Foodbuzz.com.
Captured cooking by a caricature artist
Cooking As Passion
If you spend any time at all in the kitchen, you eventually find yourself making the transition from “a preparer of meals” to a “cook”. The difference, I think, is found in two things: passion and audience. Plenty of people have hobbies or like to dabble in various things. “Oh, it’s just something I do in my spare time” they might say if you were to bring it up in conversation. They are shy, or even sometimes embarrassed by discussing it. But when simple enthusiasm blossoms into true passion for an art, you can see the change on a person’s face. They carry their passion with them and seek out others with whom to share it. When the passion is food or cooking, that’s when friends begin to join family around the dinner table. When friends of friends are added to the mix, you are no longer just preparing food in a kitchen. The presence of others changes the whole dynamic of cooking. If your house is anything like mine, company tends to linger in the kitchen giving the process of preparing a meal a definite energy. A cook feeds off that energy every bit as much as the meal itself. And the food always seem to benefit from it.
For more check out the blog’s inannaugural post:
It began with dinner…
October 5, 2008 by nthonaker
A hot and tired tailgate cook visiting with friends, post "Best Food" award presentation, 2008
The author behind the grill, High Hope Steeplechase 2009 (winner, Best Food)
