Welcome! Introduce yourself.

[isilzha]

Glad you've joined us CapeCodder.

[chefboyrdavid]

Welcome to our great home!

[PicBuddy]

Wow, this chain has a lot of messages and it's fun going back and learning more about the people you see on here. Here's my short story;

Started cooking as a kid, I believe my first culinary completion was pancakes, which my Mom showed me how to make, upon my request, as the story goes. So in 6th grade my best friend and I enrolled in 4-H cooking classes the 1st year they were offered. We were the only two students and did that for three years. Our teacher was an older lady from Switzerland who loved to cook and she had an excellent very modern kitchen that she built to teach kids how to cook. And if memory serves me correctly in 1982 my Peanut Butter cookies took a blue ribbon at the Stanislaus County Fair in California. We took in some good natured ribbing from the other students as cooking back then was considered a little feminine and people thought it was funny that the only two 'cooks' in 4H were guys.

Have now spent 20+ years in Texas, 18 in Houston, so I am a Cali-Texan. Live in Central Texas with my wonderful wife from Japan. We met through the Cultural Science Department at the University of Passau in Bavaria Germany. We love to travel and cook and she's a full time student working on a Phd to go along with her Master's from Tokyo University. We have an 18 year old cat that is like our son. I found him as a tiny kitten on a free text chat BBS in Pasadena Texas in 1989.

I started watching I think what was called the Food Channel, I would say around 1999. Watched probably all 169 episodes of Hot Off The Grill with Bobby Flay. In fact watched it so much that my brother started to watch it with me, I guess every day. And we remodeled our home to include a new kitchen, I would have to blame on Bobby's show. I even went to Bobby's Mesa Grill in NYC last year, as that had always been a goal.

And I found this forum by a google search, probably due to one of the stupidest reasons ever ... Somehow while watching Iron Chef and/or Iron Chef America, which we never miss, we somehow got sucked into The Next Food Network Star. The volume was off, my wife walked into the computer den and asked why there is a Romulan woman on Food channel... I was equally perplexed. So we turned up the volume to see what was going on, and over the course of episode 2, we determined that it was not some sort of a joke as we initially thought. It actually took a while for us to figure out that it was some sort of -reality- contest that had nothing to do with Star Trek. And we just wanted to see how many other people that may have happened to. No kidding.

So anyway, this is a fun place to check for messages and thanks to whomever set it up and pays the server fees. It is a little addicting.

[Pluff Mudder]

Welcome to Martha from the Cape.

[CapeCodder]

Thanks everyone for the welcome! Hello right back at ya'

[ibcheft]

Welcome, so glad to have more folks and to get to know people through a common passion of cooking and eating food. Strange how if you would have told me 40 years ago I would be talking to people from all over the world about a cooking show on TV, I would of fell right out of the tree. Yes our world has grown larger or smaller depending on your point of view, but it has also created a place for agreement and disagreement without hostility or disrespect to the two parties. Anyways welcome to the forum.

[bakerman]

Sometimes I wonder what I did before the internet. It is such a useful tool. I find it cool that I can connect and befriend people from all over, and those people understand my addiction to food network!

MAC

[MiseEnPlace]

Its like our own little support group

Welcome to our newbies!!!

[BerryBaby]

To me, we are just one big family!:img52:

[MiseEnPlace]

One big happy family