A ten quart stock pot given to me as a Christmas present in the mid 70's triggered what I wish had happened long, long before. At the time my life was, to use the then-modern terminology, the pits; I had allowed myself to almost hit the bottom of the gutter.

I had been working in sales for most of the fifteen years that I had lived in the San Francisco Bay area and gone through putting on the whole show of a successful businessman: the finest clothes, lavish entertaining, the Mercedes sedan, the airplane, the handmade Austrian grand piano, you know. And I was living exactly where you have to be very good at putting on the show, because there is a lot of competition: Marin County (of "we want it all now" fame).

When this particular Christmas arrived, I was so deep in debt that I was considering bankruptcy (which I did file only a few months later). The woman with whom I had been living for about two years had moved out just two months before, and I was sharing my rented house with the three children from my first marriage, two dogs and a cat. That holiday season, for my New Year's party I served fried chicken gizzards and wine supplied by my friends; the party ended shortly after midnight, as all my guests, both of them, went home, one of them mumbling something like "thank you for the worst New Year's party I have ever been to".

My new, gleaming stock pot was more beautiful than anything else in the house, and I decided to put it to good use. Somehow I scrounged up the money to buy a book on French cuisine and started preparing recipes from it; after all, business was a little slow, which gave me plenty of time to do something I enjoyed much more than work.

Like most salesmen who are not making it, I used to attend all sales meetings and seminars I could gain entry to; there you usually find many other people in the same situation (the really successful ones are out there making sales), who will sympathize with you and keep you company while you waste away another day. Not all my time in that occupation was quite as non-productive, but through all the years I spent in the business, I consistently took coffee breaks and lunch hours that were longer than a drunk's leave-taking.

During one of these meetings, someone gave a pitch about a "new, revolutionary" seminar on communications guaranteed to make your prospects beat you to death with their checkbooks. And in the following several weeks I heard so many raves about this miracle, that I decided it would be the solution, and made my mind up to take it, even though its cost was equivalent to about two thirds of my rent, which at the time was about three months in arrears.

To my surprise, it was the best sales program I ever attended because it made me realize that I was in the wrong business. Please do not misinterpret my comments; I am not attacking the sales profession; I am only admitting that I was stupid enough to persist in something that was not for me, and I was doing it for the wrong reasons.

By this time, I had gone through most of my French cook book plus two or three others, my three children had decided they could find a better place to live and gone their separate ways, I had been evicted, declared bankrupt, and was renting a studio for about one third of the cost of the house. It was a good time to make a change for the better, and I decided that what I really wanted to do, at least for the time being, was to be a cook.

This was a momentous decision. You see, I was the eldest son in a well to do family in Colombia, grew up surrounded by good music, gourmet foods and lots of books, all of which I enjoyed immensely. But my parents had decided that their eldest son was going to be an executive and run the family business; and there was no way I was going to be allowed to be in a lowly, undignified position, such as that of a musician or a cook. The closest I ever came to cooking anything in my youth was to go in the kitchen and watch our live-in cook prepare our meals; and I don't remember how I ever talked my father into allowing me to take piano lessons, but by that time I was in my Senior year in a private military school in New York state. Even without all these circumstances in your background, it is quite a step to leave your occupation when you are in your mid-thirties, have four children and two ex-wives, and are completely broke.

Anyway, it seemed that the best way to make a connection that would assist me in entering my newly chosen occupation would be to spread the word among all my friends and acquaintances, and, when possible, invite certain people to my house for a meal and let them find out what a fabulous chef I had become. I was friendly with a Swiss couple who owned and operated a small but successful continental restaurant, and I thought impressing two graduates from the famous hotel and restaurant school in Lausanne with my expertise would be helpful in getting a recommendation to a prospective employer, so I invited them for dinner, and they agreed to come on their only evening off one week.

The menu was, naturally, impressive. I do not recall exactly what the names of the dishes were, but it was composed of a soup (made, of course in my beautiful, "new" stock pot), a seafood course with Champagne sauce, duck with some kind of green peppercorn sauce, a green salad, and the coup de grace, a Grand Marnier soufflé. Everything had gone smoothly, we were almost finished with the salad, I was elated about my friends' reactions so far, the soufflés were in the oven.

When they came out, I knew I had done something wrong because they were the most beautiful soufflés I had ever seen, I mean EVER. They were gorgeous, golden colored, and with the powdered sugar sprinkled on top and the lace doilies under the imported individual molds, they would have qualified for the front cover of Gourmet magazine. The first mouthful and immediate triple "aaaargh" explained it: when beating the egg whites just before folding the rest of the preparation into them, I had added salt instead of sugar! What can I say.

My guests were very gracious.

And for several years after that dinner, these two people were still very helpful at any time I needed to consult with them on anything related to the cooking and serving of food and, once in a while I had lunch or dinner at their newer, huge, beautiful and quite successful restaurant located in one of the busiest, most popular tourist areas of San Francisco.

To be continued...
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