Goodbye 2020. More Fun in ’21!

I wanted you to know me better even though we can’t congregate right now. Hopefully SIP will ease soon. This darkness has got to fade. This is a look back at my culinary beginnings. This was my yesterday. Shortly I will post my “today” and future direction. In the meantime, I hope you will subscribe to my Parker’s Picks (PKPX) mail list for the best seafood and oysters of the week.

I first started cooking at 12. By 14, I was planning the menu for family meals, shopping and delivering for my parents. It began as self-defense. My Mom was an independent businesswoman, starting in 1942 when there was hardly such a thing. She rarely had the time to actual sit down for a meal, much less prepare one. My Dad’s loved to slow fry things in peanut oil. It was his idea of high cuisine (the spoils of his huntin’ not withstanding).  I had a different notion even back then.

As you might have guessed from the introduction, there are many stories to share. Pick a sentence in most stories that I’ll mention here and there’s at least one back story. But I do go on.

I decided the best way to develop my skill was to work in the restaurants that I liked. Though my first responsible job outside my Mom’s shop was as a stock boy for Winn-Dixie, the rest we all restaurant centric. Throughout high school and college, I worked at different restaurants over summer or part-time during the term. After college, two notable experiences in Sarasota, FL before I moved to California (with everything I owned in the back of my 1950 Chevy pickup). Upon arrival in California, the next dozen years I worked for a single restaurant, The Good Earth.

A more oyster bar-centric look will follow soon.

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