| My friends just call me "K." I grew up on the South Side of Chicago, in an area called Pilsen which is now the heart of the Mexican community.Then, it was where all the Czechs and Slavs and Lithuanians lived. My great grandparents were from Bohemia. This explains my appreciation for duck, dumplings and sauerkraut, a dish profoudly good and blue collar all at the same time; a molecular gastronome's worst nightmare. I like all the rest too, the 20 other cuisines that give Chicago its world class food chops. I live near the heart of the Indian community, a stone's throw from Korea Town, and know just about every great undiscovered gem, every diamond-in-the-rough-hole-in-the-wall within 10 miles of the Loop. I have two great kids at home and four on their own. I've sailed a boat close enough to Cuba to have a visit from their navy. My wife talked us into St Peter's once for Easter Mass, even though we didn't speak any Italian and had no tickets. I've spent half a day hunting down a tapestry shop in Venice for a magazine shoot, in the rain: the most beautiful place I've ever been. We ended up in the back of a pickup truck one night in the mountains of Northern Mexico, with more stars in the sky than I ever dreamed possible.I drink Mescal once in awhile but don't eat the worm. In 1974 I did 127 on a motorcycle. Once we made a last minute run in a car with no muffler, pedal to the floor, violinist riding shotgun, to get vodka for the Moscow Chamber Orchestra. I'm kind of afraid of heights now, after a bad experience shooting from the top of a building. Acts of kindess make me very emotional.The lizard wine in Singapore has a medicinal taste, but isn't too bad; the snake is awful. Sometimes I make pictures with an 80 year old camera. The first pictures I made were of a Guinea Pig when I was 13. They were a little blurry, but might pass for defocused technique now. When I was 16, a friend and I hitchiked to Canada on a bet, and met a girl named Suzy with a ring in her nose. I knew I was going to marry my wife about eight hours after I met her. I won a pool game once in a bar against a handsome Brit, and we sailed up the coast of Thailand with him the following day. My family is everything to me. Cooking great food for them is my second passion. The first one is being a photographer. And if you'd like, just call me "K." |
