In the beginning

Being the first born, I was an overfed, hyperemotional child with an overbearing mother and a strict-but mostly-absent father. I was coddled and told I was a special snowflake. As a result, I bought into the "everyone is special, everyone is a winner, everyone gets a trophy mantra of the 80's and 90's. I loved science - except the difficult and tedious stuff, like math, charting and control groups. I was interested in how to make things do what I want them to. I fancied myself a mad scientist. It turns out I was really a mad engineer. Add 20 years and that is still what I'm doing. My current flavor of this approach is in the telcom and networking fields. Do I enjoy what I do? Not as much as I used to. There is more fight in this field than what there was in the "good old days" of 1997 to 2000. Is it too late to start a new career? Conventional wisdom and the cliche'd "self help" scene say no. But I have no tolerance for starting at the bottom and clawing my way up again. I started cooking about 4 years ago. No, wait, I take that back. I started caring about cooking and food about 4 years ago. Much of it started with a surgical recovery period that involved sitting on a couch for ten days. Endless hours of Percocet enriched foodTV and travel channel planted a seed of interest. I was intrigued by the network of chefs in the country and cultish following of a few "true" chefs. The masters and the gurus. I was fascinated by what appeared to be the alchemy of food, the conjunction of substances creating a concert of flavor, but I didn't understand why. Then I found the Mr. Wizard of the culinary. While also appealing to my personal man love of Don Hebert, Alton Brown taught me the basics, gave me a starting place, something I could latch onto as ultimate truth verses opinion or that hippie dippy "a-little-of-this-a-little of that cooking. I now had the closest thing to hard fact I could find.