The Adventures of Chef Big Dog

Now that our Puppy Up events have winded down for the season, I'm up in CT helping out a friend with her food truck and it's been quite an experience so far.

I've cooked for farmer's markets, festivals, and for hundreds of families and friends I've stayed with throughout our journey but the food truck thing is a whole nother level. 

I'll be sharing my culinary adventures, how and why YBD became CBD, and what's next in 2016 at www.chefbigdog.com   

The Anatomy of Graying

I recently aged 44 and while I've never been one overly preoccupied with age, my chest hair turned gray.  First of all, unlike Geraldo, I spare you a selfie proving it.

But there's a bigger philosophical if not medical question involved here - why does hair gray differently?

I grayed first in my head hair which jokingly I attributed to my first cross county walk.  My beard came next but now it's trickled its way down to my chest which I can only blame the PCH for.

But it's only a few gray hairs which I hope means I still got game.  How and why does hair gray is my question today?

One Photo to Save Them All - Cancer Can't Keep a Good Dog Down

Cancer doesn't have a conscience. It takes precious things from you and leaves a dark aftermath. I figured that out when Malcolm exited this world. For months I stood in a deep pit of sadness with so many unanswered questions. It didn't take long for me to look around and see others sitting in that dirt right beside me.

To honor the great undaunted spirits of our friends taken by cancer, I started a calendar back in 2009. It was a simple and beautiful way to make some sense of these dark experiences, and the goodness just keeps growing. People write to my foundation (Puppy Up) with their stories and pictures every year. Puppy Up publishes the calendar and uses the proceeds to help fund major comparative oncology studies. It's an overlooked but critical area of cancer research that can give us endless information. 

My own Murphy appeared on one cover. If you want to tell us your story and join the fight against cancer in people and companion animals, I've posted the rules below.

Every single story helps, and we appreciate anything you can do.











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Welcome to the 2015 Cancer Can't Keep a Good Dog Down Calendar Contest!This contest gives you a way to honor your canine cancer hero while helping the Puppy Up Foundation raise funds for cancer research to benefit pets and humans.
How Does It Work? 
Register your dog. Simply upload your dog’s story and photo. For best results, use the best high-resolution digital photo you have. Please also be prepared to submit a high resolution digital photo of the same image (minimum of 500kb) upon request for reproduction in the calendar. Then provide a brief summary of your dog's story. The more you show your dog's personality, the more votes you will receive!

Who Can Enter? Anyone with a dog who currently has or has had cancer (living or passed) can enter, including dogs who have entered in previous 2 Million Dogs/Puppy Up calendar contests.

Get started right now. Or for more info, keep reading.

Voting Begins As Soon As You Enter
Your $10 registration becomes the first 10 votes for your dog.

To add more votes, share your dog's page on your favorite social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, and encourage everyone to vote for your dog. (The first vote is $5. All subsequent votes are $1 each.)

The 13 pets with the highest number of votes will win a Dog of the Month slot on the calendar. ALL photo entries will be included in our 2015 Calendar Photo Gallery. 

Your participation helps fund vital cancer research for dogs and humans. 

Begin here and follow the directions. Be sure to write down and remember your user name and password! 

For questions about the contest, please contact Erich Trapp at erich@puppyup.org.

 FAQ

Where Do My Voting Dollars Go? 

Your voting dollars go to fund cutting-edge research in comparative oncology, that branch of research that benefits both companion animals and humans in our fight against cancer.

What Makes a Puppy Up Calendar so Special?

Puppy Up Foundation uses our annual calendar as an educational tool about a critical and often overlooked area of cancer research called comparative oncology. There are important clues in the connections between human and canine cancers, especially since the resulting treatments benefit both species. One of the best ways to call attention to the need for this research is by telling your stories and showing your photos. It also helps transform our losses into information that helps fight the world's deadliest disease.

Why Do I Need This Calendar (when it's published)?

First, every dog entered appears in the calendar. No one gets left behind. We have a whole section of gallery photos dedicated to all of the dogs entered into the contest in addition to our winners who are featured as each month's "model."  We also include regular ‘people’ holidays and special dog holidays like National Puppy Day, Pet Theft Awareness Day, Take Your Dog to Work Day, World Animal Remembrance Month, Pet Cancer Awareness Month, etc.

Each calendar is a one-of-a-kind keepsakes.

Start right here today: look for the Register Here button on the left of the page. Click it and follow the directions.

Have fun and good luck!

Potato: The Deconstruction of Chef Big Dog

Today was the first full service of Tex-Mex Tatties to the public at Aquidineck Farmer's Market and it was really good.  People that were there the previous week when we couldn't serve food returned because the novel concept of a spicy potato pancake piqued their interest.  

And it seemed as though they loved the flavors.  I caught one of our customers licking her plate and I even offered her free tatties for a month so I could take a pic and post it, but she was too fast for me.    

Another showed up bright and early for breakfast and returned for more for lunch.  And by the end of the day, several of our menu items and sauces were sold out.  

All and all, not a bad debut even though a naughty tempest named Andrea tried to thwart our launch this week combined with all of the other obstacles we had, I wouldn't say we succeeded today so much as we shined through.

And we're just getting started....

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CBD's Notes 1:  Thanks to Chef Lucky for the hard work and devotion she's given to the vision and to all of the outpouring of support from the 2 Dogs Family.  

CBD's Notes 2: Following the farmer's market today, I was celebrating at the Newport Vineyard with a glass of their 'In the Buff' Chardonnay when a waitress recognized me and said, 'Hey, I know you.'. 

'You do?', I asked thinking of Animal Planet.  Uh, no.  

'Yeah', she said, ''You're the potato guy'.  

I suppose I'm building a reputation around here for the Tex-Mex tatties but I don't know whether I've devolved from the 'dog guy' that so many radio and TV shows and newspapers referred to me as on our cross country walk into a potato guy.  Potato.  

Chef Big Dog is in the House

Almost.

I have had the extreme honor and privilege for cooking for the many, many gracious host families on our adventures and it pleases me to be able to give back even more so with the launching of Chef Big Dog.  

Beginning June 8th, I'll be serving up Tex-Mex Tatties at the Aquidineck Farmer's Market every Saturday Until October from 9AM until 1PM at the Newport Vineyard.  

Ten percent of the proceeds will be donated to 2 Million Dogs for the furtherance of the mission to understand why our companion animals are getting the same types of cancer people are.  Even though 100% of my life will always be devoted to this cause in one flavor or another.l  

I've tried to fuse my heritage with my birthplace and I've taken the fried Irish potato patty, or tattie, and married it with Mexican peppers, spices, and flavors.  Our menu is nearby.  

If you're in the area, we'd love you to stop by and support us.  It's time to Puppy Up and Chow Down!

Chef Big Dog

I come from a family of great cooks... on my mom's side anyway.  Her sister, Betty, and brother, Jamie, both have exceptional culinary skills and in their own right, could've been successful restaurateurs.   It makes me proud to announce, on Mother's Day, the launching of my culinary venture, Tex-Mex Tatties by Chef Big Dog.  

The evolution of this is in of itself an interesting and quite unexpected journey.  

I was early into the walk, in Texarkana to be precise, staying with a very warm and gracious family, the Lawrences.  They were hosting a meet and greet for some friends and neighbors and I offered to help out by making tapas.  As I walked by the living area, I overheard two guests talking one of which made the observation, "You know for a homeless guy, that guy can cook".  

And thus the idea for the homeless chef was born.  I loved cooking for the families I stayed with on the walk.    Entering a kitchen for the first time, looking in the pantry and fridge and then coming up with a meal concept on the fly.  It was my way of thanking them for putting us up and putting up with us plus it served a dual purpose of eating great Tex-Mex because once you leave my native state, the chances of finding authentic cuisine diminishes every mile.  

The problem was no one liked the homeless chef moniker even though it was kinda true and, I thought, ironical.  In the finale of Chapter 6 of the Rock I wrote about cooking for Malcolm and that's when I learned a love for it.  And discovered I had some native skills, too, albeit thoroughly unrefined.  

It was throughout the walk that I honed my recipes and techniques although I had no idea for what purpose at the time other than cooking up some fine food for the great people I met on the road.  After the final mile in Boston, we kicked around the idea of publishing a cookbook on recipes from the road but Murphy's care was my priority and I was already working on the book about the walk.    

But the question of 'What comes next?' is never an easy answer for a person like me.  I was blessed with a hyper-creative mind and on most days I'm inundated with an almost intolerable amount of ideas and I'm notorious for calling and texting my close confidantes at all hours when I'm climbing walls.  

It was outta nowhere that the concept for Tex-Mex Tatties came to me.  From many months now, I've been focused on walking across Japan as part of a longer-term plan and I'd been thinking about a way to finance it.  Get a table at a farmer's market, I thought, and make tapas to keep it simple since I have a ton of other projects on my plate.  

I'm a dunderhead and a tad self-deluded to think I can keep anything I do small and easy because if I'm going to devote my time to something I always start out with the intent to do something special.  I'm just bent that way. 

Valerie Kodman, my partner in this venture, and I have been working tirelessly on launching this concept since all of this happened so suddenly and we're almost ready to take it live to a farmer's market here in the Newport RI area.  I've been refining the menu and this Saturday, we're having a final Beta taste testing at her place in Madison CT.  

If you're in the area, you're welcome to join us for this historic occasion.  Just email Valerie at chef@chefbigdog.com  

For more info, we have a page on Tumblr. But I'll also be posting here until we're fully up and running.  

If you read the finale of Chapter 6, Chef Biatch became The Homeless Chef who became Chef Big Dog.  Life is a funny thing isn't it?