I’ve had a passion for cooking for close to 45 years. I spent my early adult life working in local restaurants, where I learned basic skills, before eventually bringing that experience into my own backyard. I’ve now been smoking meat for 20 years.

Smoking isn’t a science to me — it’s an art. It takes practice, trial and error, and time to perfect the process. I’m traditional when it comes to hot smoking — Kingsford Blue Bag charcoal, supplemented with real smoke wood, no gadgets or shortcuts — but I’m not too rigid to try different techniques and develop my own methods along the way. I’ve also experimented with cold smoking with great success, which opened up a whole different side of this hobby — cheese and nuts especially.

My smoker of choice has always been the Weber Smokey Mountain. I ran all three sizes — 14.5″, 18″, and 22″ — for years, until a garage fire took all three along with the garage itself. Read that story here → I rebuilt with two: an 18″ bought new to replace what I lost, and a 22″ I picked up used afterward. I never went back to a 14″ — the 18″ and 22″ cover everything I need.

Recently I’ve brought sous vide into the mix alongside the smoker, using it for everything from steaks to breakfast. But this site is where I document what I actually cook: real recipes, real photos, and real mistakes along the way — I don’t clean up the experiments that didn’t work, because those are part of the process too.