As the Executive Chef of Sonora Grill, I have been very fortunate to have the great honor of simultaneously working as the Executive Chef at Rickenbacker’s restaurant at the Ogden Airport. In between dining trips to Sonora Grill, I strongly suggest you go try us out at Rickenbackers. It’s very good. We’re very proud of it.

We have a very talented assistant at Rickenbacker’s, Chef Ryan Sleeter, and I have another young talent, Chef Courtney Larsen, doing the good work at Sonora Grill. My heart really goes out to these poor guys…it’s great to be number one, but it’s tough to be number two.

People have often asked, “How can you just cook, mix up all these ingredients and just come up with dishes of food and be confident enough to serve it?”
I guess there are about a million answers to that question. But if you open up your refrigerator and you happen to have… let’s say, a bag of lettuce mix, some blue cheese, a can of olives, roasted red peppers, grilled yellow zucchini, sunflower sprouts, grilled radicchio, shaved fennel, sherry vinegar/extra virgin olive oil dressing… that’s got springtime salad written all over it… I can recognize any type of dish just from a few ingredients. Why? Because when I was young, it was drilled into my head by an unrelentingly meticulous chef who spared no insult to get me to make nice salads. I had to do it well or lose my job. Eat or die, right?

Know what I really like on a salad? For lack of a better title lets call it:

Pink Peppercorn Salad Sprinkle

2 Tbsp. pink peppercorns
2 Tbsp. sesame seeds
1 tsp. Kosher salt

Put all of these ingredients in a dry saute pan over medium low heat, toast them for 5 minutes, shaking the pan periodically.
Remove it from the heat. When the ingredients have cooled down, put them in your spice grinder. Grind it. Sprinkle on your salad. It’s delicious.

Now, what’s up with pink peppercorns? Look online, you can probably find everything you really need to know on wikipedia. You should be able to purchase them at Sur La Table in the mall or ordering online.

As for a spice grinder? Get a coffee grinder, Braun, Krups, Cuisinart, whichever brand; you can get them for $19.99 at any department store. Go to Ross Dress for Less and you can get a strange colored one from last season for even less.

Then go home and cook. Get a slice of nice bread to go with your salad, put olive oil on it, rub it with a bit of minced fresh garlic and grill it over a wood fire and turn it over… lots of nice kosher salt and fresh ground black pepper… I never got by on my good looks. I had to work hard… I’m not really elitist. I was simply hungry, you know, literally and figuratively. And the bread with the garlic… it’s pretty tasty too…

I had an appetite and needed to eat constantly so I found a third job at a vegetarian Mediterranean restaurant in Berkeley…working my mind away for the chef in return for what I principally owed her, which was that she hired me when I had no real skill, tons of attitude, which I grew out of, for the most part. In retrospect, I am grateful to that particular chef for giving me the education.

She showed me how to cook bulgur AKA cracked wheat and turn it into a delicious salad with the addition of a ton of fresh Italian parsley and extra virgin olive oil, tomatoes, etc…and how to make couscous salad, and she showed me how to make marinated feta cheese with thyme and lemon zest and fresh orange juice. I made panzanella, which is an incredible bread salad with fresh tomatoes and basil. Chef also roasted and peeled eggplants for baba ghanouj and also made hummus.

Hummus is my favorite food in the world. It’s made with garbanzos, a lot of raw garlic, tahini (which is sesame
seed butter), and fresh lemon juice, Kosher salt, more of the olive oil…tons of explosive flavor and there isn’t anything like it on the planet. I worked with wholesome ingredients for the first time, in an open and clean public restaurant environment and I got into it like for example the kosher salt, sea salt in different colors, grape leaves, fresh basil, fresh Italian parsley, dill, cilantro, chives, fennel, radicchio, fresh marjoram anda oregano, heirloom tomatoes…cucumbers, ricotta salata, Opal basil, saffron, olives of all varieties, cracked green, lemon cured, Greek oil cured, kalamata, picholine, and your standard California black olives and those green ones with the red pimento, you know, for your martini…the flavors just captivated me.

We’d like to think that we achieve flavors at Sonora Grill and at Rickenbacker’s at the Ogden airport that grab your attention and hold it for a while and inspire you to come back for more.

Just returned from doing a little R&D. Or was it R&R? Probably the perfect combination of both. Whatever it is, it’s definitely my favorite part of the restaurant business.

Our first stop in Vegas?

More later.

I got another decent job as an egg cook Sunday mornings at a pub called the Kensington Circus in a town called Kensington that connected to Berkeley by Solano Ave. It’s on the circle next to this boutique bread shop in this little nook that held promise to become an interesting neighborhood. I was driving my 76 Honda 550 around and I went in there and lucked into the job. I don’t know why I wanted it. I just found myself applying for the job and I got it. I didn’t want to be a chef but I couldn’t help it.

The Kensington Circus served mostly as an investment for a family of three punk Brit kids who were extendedly vacationing on BS Visas in California and just needed something to do with themselves. They didn’t know as much about food as they presumed to know but they were sure of one thing…the beer. They had several good draft beers from the British Isles…and that’s all I’m going to say about that.

We served dinner every night in the dining room from a terribly unfortunate menu containing several famous selections that might have been decent, were they not so poorly executed. For instance,
you got your Fish and Chips, which are one of my personal favorites to this day, and you got your Bangers and Mash, which is meat sausages with peas and mashed potatoes and then you got this other dish that’s something called Bubble and Squeak with a Wow Wow Sauce…which is meat with peas fried in a pan with mashed potatoes until thehomogenous panful began to actually bubble and squeak from the pan frying of it. Then you flip it over in the sauté pan in the air; you catch it…then you top it with Worcestershire and you’re good as gold….Evidently, when you’re drinking and you can’t say Worcestershire sauce, you just call it Wow Wow Sauce…

You got, of course, your Cottage Pie…good dish, it’s English food…could have tossed the menu out the window, really, tell the people hey we got mashed potatoes and frozen peas and some meat…who needs something you have to read…when we got beers and pub chips AKA French fries…