It’s a Tuesday in May, and there’s a chunk of elk backstrap sitting on my cutting board in our kitchen outside Casper. Kimi is reading on the couch. The window over the sink looks south toward the Casper Mountain, and the light is doing that thing it does in Wyoming in late spring — gold and clean, like somebody wiped it down before serving. I’ve got garlic going in butter, a cast iron pan heating, and I’m thinking about salt. Not in a chef-y way. Just thinking about how much, and when, and whether the meat is room temperature yet.
Fifteen years ago, I couldn’t have told you what room temperature meat was, or why it mattered. Fifteen years ago, dinner was whatever came out of a microwave or a drive-thru window, and I wouldn’t have thought twice about it.
This is the story of how I got from there to here.
St. Louis: Food as Background Noise
I grew up near St. Louis in a house where food was fuel. Nobody in my family was a bad cook — there just wasn’t much cooking happening. Meals were functional. Cereal. Sandwiches. Hamburger Helper on a good night. Toasted ravioli if we were feeling fancy, but from a box, fried in a pan, eaten in front of the TV.
I don’t say that with any resentment. My parents were busy and tired and doing their best. But I left home at 21 with no real sense that food could be anything other than something you did three times a day so you wouldn’t get hungry again. I didn’t have favorite dishes. I didn’t have a grandmother who pulled me into the kitchen and taught me how to make biscuits. Food was background noise, and I had louder things to listen to.
The Military Pivot
I joined the military in 2011. I won’t dress it up — I joined for the same reasons a lot of twenty-year-olds do: I needed direction, I needed a paycheck, I needed to get out of my hometown. What I didn’t know was that the military was about to march me through four cities that would each, in their own way, ambush my taste buds.
Living somewhere different is the fastest way to learn that the way you grew up eating isn’t the only way to eat. And when you’re moving every two or three years, you either start paying attention to the food around you or you spend your entire enlistment eating chain restaurants and missing out.
I started paying attention.
San Antonio: The Taco Revelation
San Antonio is where it cracked open for me. I was twenty-two and stationed there and a buddy dragged me to a taqueria one Saturday morning — one of those places where the menu is taped to the wall in Spanish, the salsa comes in squeeze bottles, and the woman at the counter looks at you like she’s deciding whether you’re worth the trouble.
I ordered barbacoa. I didn’t know what barbacoa was. I just pointed.
What came back was three corn tortillas — warm, blistered, smelling like a cornfield — piled with beef that had been cooked so long it forgot it was ever tough. Cilantro. Onion. A squeeze of lime. Two bucks.
I remember standing there in the parking lot eating that taco off a paper plate and feeling something rearrange itself. It wasn’t fancy. It wasn’t expensive. But somebody had cared about it. Somebody’s grandmother had figured out, over a lifetime, exactly how to coax that flavor out of a cheap cut of beef, and she had passed that recipe down, and now I was eating it for two dollars in a strip mall in Texas.
That was the first time food felt like a story to me. San Antonio gave me tacos, but more than that, it gave me the idea that food could mean something.
Omaha, Denver, D.C.
After San Antonio, the pattern kept repeating. Omaha taught me about steakhouses — real ones, the kind where the steak doesn’t need anything but salt and a hot pan, and the bartender remembers your drink the second time you come in. Midwest barbecue, burnt ends, slow smoke.
Denver opened up a different door. The food scene there was exploding, and I rode that wave. Green chile on everything. Craft beer that took itself seriously. Restaurants that made me realize a meal could be a destination, not just a refueling stop. Denver is also where I started actually cooking at home — not well, but with intention.
Then D.C., where I discovered Mediterranean food and lost my mind over it. Gyros, falafel, shawarma, lamb cooked on a spit for eight hours, hummus that tasted nothing like the plastic tub I used to buy at the grocery store. I’d walk past a Lebanese place after work and the smell alone would stop me on the sidewalk.
Four cities. Four educations. By the time I got out, I knew food mattered. I just didn’t know yet that I could be any good at making it.
Kimi
Kimi is the reason I can cook.
I met her in the service — she’s a veteran too — and the first time she cooked for me, I understood that I had been doing it wrong my entire life. Not the technique. The attitude. She approached the stove the way a carpenter approaches wood: with patience, with respect, with the assumption that if you do this right, somebody is going to be happy.
She didn’t teach me recipes so much as she taught me to slow down. To taste as I go. To trust my hands. To care. The first thing I ever cooked that I was actually proud of, I cooked for her — and she took one bite and told me, with that quiet half-smile of hers, that it was good. That was it. I was hooked. I’ve been chasing that feeling in the kitchen ever since.
Every cook needs a north star. Kimi is mine.
Wyoming
We moved to Wyoming in 2022, on purpose. We’d been driving back from a trip out west when we hit the Bighorns at sunset, and something in both of us went quiet at the same time. We talked about it the whole way home and then for six years after, and then we packed up and came.
Wyoming changed my cooking again, the same way every place had. But this time it was wild. Elk. Antelope. Mule deer. The occasional moose from a friend who drew a tag. Cooking wild game is its own discipline — you can’t bully it, you have to listen to it — and I fell in love with the work. I wrote about a lot of it in my wild game season guide, if you want the nuts and bolts.
Wyoming also gave me bison, a meat with more history in this state than I had any idea about before I got here — there’s a whole story behind bison ranching in Wyoming that I keep coming back to. And it gave me the green chile cheeseburger, my favorite collision of my Denver years and my Wyoming life on a single bun.
Why This Blog Exists
People hear “Wyoming food” and they picture a gas station hot dog. I get it. I thought the same thing before I moved here. But this state has wild game, ranchers who actually know their cattle, small-town diners that have been quietly perfecting the same chicken-fried steak since the seventies, and a food culture that doesn’t shout about itself.
I started wyofood.com because somebody needs to shout about it. A kid from St. Louis who didn’t care about food spent a decade in uniform learning that food is how we tell each other we matter, met a woman who taught him how to actually cook, and ended up in a kitchen with mountains out the window and elk on the cutting board.
If that’s not worth writing about, I don’t know what is.
The pan is hot. Time to sear.