Favorite Product:  Creminelli SALAME WILD BOAR, WRAPPED

The Creminelli salamis are always in my fridge – at least until my roommates smell them out. These old-school, artisan salami (made in Utah using the ancient Creminelli family recipe) are good. Real good. The wild boar and tartufo flavors are what I believe all cured meats should try to be. You would not be surprised to find them in a rustic hunter’s cabin in the Italian Alps, just as you wouldn’t be surprised to find them in my back pocket on my way home from work every Friday!

I grew up on a small farm and sheep ranch in Northeastern Oregon. My five siblings and I learned to appreciate food from the ground up; a lot of what we ate was grown in our garden, raised in our backyard, or collected from our chicken coop. From my dad’s Mexican farmworker friends I learned how to chew on cornstalks like sugar cane, and from our Hmong refugee friends, I found out about three-day long ‘pig parties,’ thrown to celebrate a birth in the family. Our three pigs, named Ham, Bacon, and Sausage, were slaughtered and buried underground with hot coals to cook them.

As a teenager, I worked in kitchens around Portland where I learned how to sweat it out on the line. After high school I got a job as a swamper – the guy who sets up the tents and carries the heavy stuff on multi-day rafting trips – on the Middle Fork of the Salmon River in Idaho. Every summer for the next ten years I went back, eventually working my way up to river guide extraordinaire. Our company did not believe in the ‘roughing it’ philosophy. In addition to safely piloting upwards of 30 guests down the river while teaching them about history and nature, I also cooked three gourmet meals per day using Dutch ovens and portable propane stoves.

In between summer jobs I traveled to South America, where I did some hairy and scary rafting and fell in love with the Argentine style of cooking: huge grills filled with freshly-butchered grass-fed beef; flaky, steamy drool-inducing empanadas; and tart and tangy chimichurri sauces ladled over slow-cooked organ meats.

I don’t guide anymore, but I do fish, and I hunt a little bit, too. I smoke my own salmon using a pellet smoker, and utilize the vast resources of knowledge here, known as Marcus and Terry (co-workers at Provvista for those of you who don’t know), to help with my experiments in making both elk and pork sausage. Any time I need a condiment or two to go with my dinner, I have lots to choose from in the aisles at work. I love food. It is so delicious. Especially when you kill it (or pick it off the shelf) with your own two hands!

In 1986 my family (all eight of us, including my one-year old brother) went to Kenya for a month. I saw a giraffe.

Rafted the Futaleufu River while I was in southern Chile.

I am also known as LA FLAMA BLANCA.