Taken Cooking is a family affair
Tomorrow What Hemingway’s Ghost made me do!
It’s always fun to write the introduction. What I try to do is set up what is to come in the book. However, this time I’m going to introduce you to the three major players who help put this little book together: mom (Laura Bell Aikens), Joi A. (I call her “stick”) Aikens, and Stacey (one of the newest closest people in my life) Antine. Let’s start with mom. She really doesn’t need an introduction. If you have followed my career from local TVAtlanta, throughout the Southeast, and my days with KGO in San Francisco and KABC in Los Angeles to my days with the Home Show and Good Morning America on ABC, and more recently, The Food Network, you know mom. Mama is the world’s best cook, and she is so full of love. That’s where I get it from her, and from God. She taught me to cook, she and dad taught me to work, and she also taught me to give and to not expect anything in return. Give for the pleasure of that act. Give for giving’s sake. Give to help, because your act of giving may help someone else come up. I love you, Mama. Now Chef Joi Aikens, my niece. I’m so proud of you this kid. Well, she’s a woman now, but she’ll always be a kid to me. I call her “stick” because as a little girl and even into high school she was so small. Joi graduated from the University of Georgia with a degree in communications in 1998, but was unhappy with the job situation around Atlanta. So she and I were talking one day in mom’s front yard. I said to her, “I have the greatest job in the world, and not just because I’m on TV. I love everything about the culinary world. It’s creative, it’s expensive, I get to teach, and I’m always learning. Not to mention the wonderful people that I’ve met and the exotic places I’ve had a chance to travel to and experience.” And I also said to her, “I make a great living.” 
So, I offered to pay for her to go to culinary school. Now, for those of you who don’t know, I ’m a self-taught chef well, really “mama taught,” with some supplementary lessons from cooks, farmers, and chefs all over the world. Anyhoo, my vision was that this beautiful, smart, University of Georgia grad my niece with formal training in the culinary arts, would be able to take my athome, downhome style of cooking into the world of dining out. And I gotta tell you, she really has been able to do that. Joi graduated from the Art Institute of Atlanta in 2001, and she is now a certified Culinarian (a.k.a. she’s a chef!). Over the past three years, I have prepared menus all over the country, and little Chef Joi has executed them to perfection. We’ve done dinners in Louisville, Florida, Texas, California, and there are so many more to come. I have no fear in putting a menu together because my baby can make it happen. Stacey Antineat the time of this printing, we have known each other for about two months. Now, like I said earlier, she is one of the newest people in my life, but she has become one of the closest. We talk no less than three times a day, but really it’s about eight. No big deal, you say? Well, Stacey lives and works in New York City, and I live in California. How did we come into each other’s lives? God did it!
I was in New York City to do the “Living it Up with Ali and Jack” TV show, when I got a call from my manager, Jeff Siegel. He said, “I have this person that I want you to meet. She has some ideas.” First I said to him, “Man, I don’t have time for another person that thinks, just because I’m on TV, I can take their wild idea and make it into a big TV hit.” After Jeff stopped laughing, he informed me that she doesn’t want to be on TV, that she’s a businessperson, and he suggested I spend some time with her. The week before Valentine’s Day, we met for coffee at the hotel I was staying at in New York. Stacey is Director, Corporate Communications for a healthcare company in New York. Stacey holds a master’s of science in food, nutrition, and dietetics from New York University and completed her dietetic internship at Beth Israel Medical Center, New York City. She combines her passion for nutrition and health with over 15 years of public relations experience creating educational campaigns for children and adults on behalf of Kellogg USA, The Dannon Company, The Minute Maid Company, Hoffmann La Roche, Pfizer, Nutrition 21, Inc., and SmithKline Beecham. She also holds an appointment on the advisory board for Tufts University School of Nutrition Communications graduate program. She speaks regularly at industry conferences regarding food and health concerns and is a member of the American Dietetic Association. She is a woman of vision who has a passion for life, for family, for faith, and for work. We were supposed to have a 15minute meeting. An hour later, we were talking about how to cancel some of our upcoming appointments to spend more time getting to know each other. She has this energy like someone else I know (ME). SHE GETS THE JOB DONE. In the two months that we’ve known each other, she has taught me things about nutrition that I didn’t know. I hope I’ve taught her things about cooking (in fact, I know I have). In our short time together, we’ve worked and played in San Diego, Los Angeles, Atlanta, as well as New York. I hope you will look forward to the information that Stacey is going to share with you in this volume, as much I am enjoying getting to know her and having the privilege of introducing her to you. Now that you know the players, I guess I should tell you a little bit about this collection of recipes and information I hope you’re about to enjoy. Some of the recipes are old, many are new, but all tried and true. I hope you enjoy Mama’s cookin’, Joi’s execution, Stacey’s knowledge, and my passion. As always, you can write to me through my website, www.curtisaikens.net. Tell me what you think.
Guide to The Harvest
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