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My scariest hunting/camping story is when I ill-advisedly camped in a tent in Tate’s Hell Swamp to hunt for evidence to prove the existence of the paranormal.As the name overtly suggests, Tate’s Hell Swamp is not a destination often sought out by tourists visiting the Sunshine State. Quite the opposite, the festering bogs of Tate’s Hell are seething with biting stinging insects, tarantula-sized yellow-web-weaving crawling spiders, and deadly creeping fanged pit viper moccasins - not to mention horrors not of this world. All these irksome grotesque terrors stealthily compose what is quite possibly the most uninviting maze on Earth. Even though Tate’s Hell is an official state forest, I have never in all my visits to the twisted tangles of the vast confusing swamp ever seen another human being there besides myself. Deep in the planted pine acres of the swamp-head uplands there’s a recreational pavilion which proves state employees built a structure, but when I have no idea. I never saw them in that gloomy haunt of the alligator, the snapping turtle, and the bull shark. The pavilion is starkly abandoned, like a cemetery in a ghost town. I didn’t go as a maritime thrill-seeker. I went in search of the truth.The first paranormal weight one feels pressing down upon the soul after entering Tate's Hell Swamp is the sinister revelation not to anger the spirits. Most of us don't have this fear to worry about because from birth we are naturally attuned to the subtle sublime nuances of nature, yet for the scoffing skeptic let not this warning go unheeded.A witch coven, the members of which are only local females who have been born within twenty-four miles of the swamp (I have not yet figured out why, but 24 is a significant number to the Tate’s Hell Coven) carries out unspeakable acts of ritual witchcraft at an undisclosed location within the shadow-coves of the immense dreaded morass.Their sacred totem is the Swallow-tailed Kite. Because of this elegant raptor’s graceful love of slash pine flatwoods dominated by an understory of Saw Palmetto and cypress swamp bottoms interlaced with Tupelo Sweetgum, (the two primary timber ecosystems of Tate’s Hell) the witches of the cryptic dangerous wetland spiritually identify with the sleek gorgeous white-feathered Swallow-tailed Kite.The coven took me in a small convoy of pirogues up the Crooked River deep into the heart of the brooding swamp. I was blindfolded and told not to speak a word. When we arrived at their consecrated ceremonial ground, which was a sooty hummock surrounded by slime green swamp water of unknown depth lurking with who-knows-what bog monsters, my blindfold was removed. I saw strange objects hanging from moss-laden tree limbs, some of them dark gray and brown, others brightly colored. There were ominous sculptures of salting flora and fauna carved out of hulking cypress logs. Before me my wandering eyes were awe-struck to perceive a ceremonial stage built of newly hewn Eastern White Pine. Seeing such cult organization in the middle of a godforsaken muddy thorn-vine wilderness is truly a shock to the logical faculty. The hypnotic aroma of turpentine and honeysuckle filled the damp muggy swamp air.With a “laying-on” of hands (ostensibly for healing, yet I suspected a hidden occult motive), it was explained that this privilege was being extended to me for two reasons - first, because I was born on the Florida Gulf Coast, and second because of the cancerous disease that is eating away at my insides. The witches said that as I understand the tidal salt marshes and live on a diet of backwater seafood which I catch myself, the slow agonizing death I’m facing from incurable disease mystically purifies my spirit, making me honest and strengthening me with the power to closely guard old and venerated secrets.I don’t know how the coven found out that I’m dying from a malignant tumor. I didn’t tell them. I suppose witches know things about people - even things left unspoken.So, I can say this much: I was permitted to witness a young witch apprentice as she was initiated into the swamp coven. A very wrinkle-faced wizened gray-haired hag, what I (in my ignorance of sorcery) would describe as a Matron Crone, began speaking to the adolescent girl, saying something in the fashion of “The first foundation of the Craft in Tate’s Hell is to never anger the spirits. When the spirits are angered, they don't come instantly directly at you. They observe, and they wait. They begin to unravel you. The spirits don't merely lash out in brutal rage-driven vengeance, they coldly calculate the naive offender's most vulnerable susceptibilities. The spirits plot corporal punishment based on darkest secrets of the psyche - weaknesses totally unknown to the narcissistic trespasser. To the spirits, settling the score is not an act of justice, but an art form perfected throughout ages that span epochs of time immemorial and when they finally do come, they come at what you love most.”I don’t remember very much about what happened after this vexing elucidation. A bonfire was blazing nearby, crackling and snapping, producing delicious fumes that were apparently intoxicating. The macabre primeval scene around me waxed ghoulish, becoming wavy and uncertain like a dreamscape. Next thing I knew, I was alone back at my tent camp on the west bank of the Crooked River where Tate’s Hell empties its murky backwater into the gleaming salty Gulf. I had apparently done myself a mischief. I had suffered lacerations. There were numerous scratches or claw-marks on my arms, legs, chest, and back. I felt totally drained, so weak I could barely move. My compass was missing and so was my sleeping bag. According to what I’ve read, witches shapeshift into swamp beasts in order to abscond with personal belongings of one whom they aim to target with charms, spells, and hexes. That night was the first time I saw the eerie blue lights. They burst out of thin air just above the tops of the towering slash pine and bald cypress. Sometimes they drifted earthward slowly, almost as if hovering; other times the glimmering sapphire spheres dropped rapidly out of sight into the grim obscura of the ancient coastal swamp.I don't know what the blue lights over the marsh are. Some of the more interesting residents of the nearby fishing village (Carrabelle which is Spanish for ‘beautiful river’ if you can believe that) who avoid the swamp like the plague whisper all sorts of rumors and superstitions. At a clapboard seafood eatery on the leaning barnacle-encrusted pilings of a rotting wharf at Alligator Bayou (a rustic dockside joint named Crawldads), a pot-bellied shrimpboat captain, Lem Tharp, wearing faded tattered bib overalls and scuffed white rubber boots that reeked with the pungent odor of seaweed told me not to look very long at the strange blue lights because staring at the mystical puffs of blue luminescence can break the rational mind. Eighty miles north, the florid-faced old salt said, the Florida State Hospital, a/k/a insane asylum at Chattahoochee, is populated with unfortunate victims who gazed too long at the soft alluring blue lights.On most nights, the fairy lights start glowing immediately as the gloom of dusk begins to fade into that surreal realm known as twilight. The hypnotic effect is similar to a lethal dose of scopolamine or Dead Man's Fingers. There’s an almond smell, like cyanide. The lethal danger of the delicate blue lights cannot be over-stated. Diary cattle must have blinders put on at sunset, because gazing at what have become known as Mermaid Tears dries the fattest udders. The bewitched cows simply stop giving milk. They graze and moo and lie in the cool shade under the sprawling oaks at noonday just as all the other Jerseys and Holsteins do, but after their eyes have been helplessly transfixed by the spectral blue lights, the spellbound cows never again produce even so much as a single drop of milk, but then again, there aren't very many diary cattle near the shunned grim quagmire of Tate's Hell.To augment what has been previously stated (as I have tortuously verified during an agonizing 3-week vigil in that stifling humid den of bloodsucking Yellow Flies and swarming clouds of infection-carrying mosquitoes) Tate’s Hell Swamp is a lonely remote and seldom visited region along a sparsely populated stretch of swampy Gulf shore known as Florida's Forgotten Coast. There are no sugar sand beaches at Tate’s Hell, no high-rise condos or five-star gourmet restaurants. What the misguided trekker finds at Tate’s Hell are fierce flesh-slicing pincers of big blue crabs, dagger-sharp barbs of humongous stingrays, and miles upon miles of sand-gnat saturated salt meadow needle rush. The pain of sand gnat venom is utterly maddening. For as long as half an hour after the last stinging bite, the excruciating discomfort lingers, no matter how vigorously one digs at swollen red skin with finger nails or other sharp objects.I didn't dare stare too long at the Mermaid Tears, because my objective was to determine the source of the mysterious blue lights. During 21 frightful days and terrorizing nights of exhausting laborious life-threatening forays into the heart of the great boggy wilderness, I was unable to ascertain the exact point of origin of the spooky blue lights, yet I did find something of which the superstitious locals had not previously been aware - and that was the sad singing.For the most part, the voices sounded female. The haunting chorus didn't begin at the moment the disturbing blue lights first appeared with the evening star, but a few minutes later when the sky overhead was completely dressed in the deep shades of night. The only place I could hear the ghostly harmony was on a certain hump of humus which was only accessible via the little pirogue I rented from the Bait Shack at the last turn of the Crooked River where the ominously silent slow-moving current flows into the shallow shark-infested bay before reaching the abyss of the briny Gulf.On the last day of my second week in Tate’s Hell, late one afternoon just before sundown, I heard the sound of heavy fabric rustling hard in the wind then being suddenly yanked tight with a thunderous snap almost directly above my head while drifting toward the uncharted interior of the festering marsh forest.To my utter dismay, I saw a large unidentified object dangling from a colossal orange and white parachute. The unearthly object was irregular in shape and seemed to pulse with light from the inside in iridescent flashes alternating through every color of the rainbow. It reminded me of a lava lamp, yet it was encrusted with a mysterious green covering as if it had been dipped in swamp muck which had dried to the exterior of the odd pulsing thing. In a way, it was remarkably similar in appearance to an oyster shell. The unidentified object was about the size of a 30-foot trawler. It drifted slowly down into the swamp approximately half a mile northwest of my lonely little campsite.This was of course such a suspicious occurrence that I immediately hopped into my rented pirogue and paddled downstream to the small village harbor where I disembarked at the dockside seafood eatery for the purpose of acquiring a cell-phone signal.The military public relations office I contacted requested all information I could give concerning the incident. The liaison officer, Airman First Class Stephanie Hunt, told me she'd call me back when she had located the exercise about which I was inquiring.She never returned my call. When, after four tense days of anxious nail-biting waiting I finally called her back, I was told that no one by that name had ever been assigned to public relations. I was passed from agent to agent until finally, someone claiming to be head of public affairs for the Northwest Florida Air Superiority Division, a gruff and very rude fellow, Command Chief Master Sergeant Barton Briggs, informed me that the military had no knowledge of the incident I was describing.Though the nearest military installation is 100 miles to the west of the remote foreboding swamp, when I insisted that with active Air Force bases such as Tyndall, Eglin, and Hurlburt Field with high-tech radar towers and F-22 Raptors flying sorties every day of the week covering the Gulf Coast from Panama City to Pensacola, the military could not possibly be unaware of what I had seen, the call was terminated.Needless to say, I didn’t have the opportunity to ask about the reddish-orange flickering light that emanates from an utterly impenetrable mire of the swamp into which something similar to, but unlike any helicopter I’ve ever seen apparently lands for several minutes at the time before rising again to disappear into the fog-shrouded night.Now I’m not aware of any swamp creature that looks like a genetic hybrid between a salamander and a primate, but beginning on my very first night in Tate’s Hell, just such an inscrutable thing slithered from the marsh to forage around outside my tent, apparently for food. I had been out on the bayou with my lantern, pen, notebook, and digital camera watching the night sky for paranormal sightings. It was well after midnight when I returned to my quiet isolated camp. One of my dry boxes which I had neglected to lock was overturned. The slimy slithering creature had eaten a whole ten-pack of my Reese’s peanut butter cups. That was all the candy I had brought with me. The next night, the hideous ravenous marsh-beast had twisted off the lid to my jar of peanut butter. All but a small amount in the bottom of the jar was gone. The bizarre freakish thing had eaten a whole entire family-sized container of peanut butter in a single sitting. I could see evidence of where its webbed digits had scraped away at the inside of the jar in the small amount of peanut butter remaining in the very bottom.There’s a deep shadow conspiracy which I have inadvertently stumbled into via my investigation of the reports of paranormal mysteries occurring in and around Tate’s Hell Swamp. It will take several weeks for me to bring my scraps of evidence into a focused comprehensive account. I morbidly fear that I have tumbled into the chaos of a supernatural labyrinth that will consume what remains of my life with an obsession to uncover the cloaked and desperately guarded hidden agenda of this broad-sweeping enigma of the swamp occult. This is the beginning.What shocking truth have I really revealed in the novels I have written? What spiritual chain reaction have I set in motion that cannot now be stopped?

When I was growing up, I enjoyed cooking very much too. That’s saying a lot too because my Mom really was not good at cooking but more than that, she/we canned all our own foods, made jams and jellies, did lots of baking, especially for the holidays. Over the years, somehow cooking became a passion and even before I went to college, my most read books were cookbooks and Gourmet Magazine etc. I had no restaurant experience whatsoever but if you came to my apartment, I was always spending hours preparing some something I had never done before. My roommates had it made because we ate like royalty and all they had to do was the dinner dishes. I could spend three or four hours making dinner and they spent fifteen minutes doing the dinner dishes and wiping the table.Unlike you, I was unsure about culinary school, in fact, I was unsure about education after high school. I was legally on my own since the day I turned 18 and had great concerns about tuition. Finally, when I was 19 I applied to Cornell Hotel School in Ithaca, New York. The hotel program, at that time, it was considered the best program in America. I was not accepted primarily because my SAT scores were not high enough and secondly, I had no demonstrated experience in any hospitality setting. I was crushed but pushed ahead and got accepted to the hotel school at University of Wisconsin Menominee, I visited the campus and decided I was too good for the place and basically abandoned my plans for hotel school.Yes, I am going to answer your question here, where I am headed is to show you that there are options, even when you are set on one thing, one plan, there is more than one way to achieve, to gain specifically, the unique training/education you are discussing.If you are like me, or even a bit similar, you do not want to approach your future at some second rate school, you want to hit the runway and prepare for liftoff, so to speak. I believe that you seek an authentic culinary training from the finest in the land, not from some “cookie cutter” “wannabee” cooking school with a French name, am I right? I assure you I did not, and if that was all I could do, I wasn’t gonna do it at all, why embarrass myself graduating from The Jiffy Lube Culinary Academy?I ended up going to Evergreen State College, Olympia, Washington, my studies now geared to pre-med. Before I attended there, I want to Harvard night school for a year to get myself oriented/adjusted to a new plan. Getting into Harvard night school is not a big deal, you simply signup but, the beauty of it all is, the professors are the exact same ones that teach at Harvard during the day. You can get a Harvard education at a tenth of the price from the same faculty, you just don’t get all the prestige of graduating from Harvard, if that makes sense? I took out student loans to go to Evergreen, and I had a job on campus to earn spending/rent money.I did great at Evergreen for a couple years but started to get burnt out. I had gotten a job on campus security which required me to work from midnight to 8:00 am, and my classes began at 8:30 am. Slowly, i began slipping and wondering how I was going to pull it off? One day a friend of mine said he was going to Guatemala to study Spanish, a total immersion school where you study Spanish with a tutor 7 hours a day, one to one, and live with a local family that does not speak English so you will be forced to use what you are learning in class. I decided to go with him and we spent a year down in Central America, mostly in school and a few months hitchhiking all over Central America from Belize to Panama. Evergreen State allowed students to design their own education curriculum for credit so the whole time I was there, I got college credit.When I got back stateside and eventually back to campus at Evergreen, my focus had shifted again, I had a travel bug in me which actually has lasted my entire life now. Getting back to the point, I was at Evergreen, I had a student loan, but my heart and mind was miles away. I had a modest presence on campus but it dwindled quickly, and soon I was no longer attending college. About a month later, I got a call from Oregon State Bank saying their records show that I was no longer attending classes and that meant my loan was now due. The lady told me I had thirty days to pay it back or I would be charge with fraud. That pretty well lit me up inside and panic prevailed because I had taken that loan and bought a sports car. Of course I was not concerned, I freaked out, all I could hear was that lady saying those two big words, bank fraud! Needless to say, the sports car was sold quickly and the funds repaid, what a relief! Of course now I am broke so a job would be handy. A friend of mine said The Melting Pot restaurant in Olympia was looking for a cook, the lights went off in my head and I am thinking, ,made in the shade, of course they will hire me, nobody cooks better than me! The interview went poorly, I was met with this force of resistance because I “had no restaurant experience”, and true as it was, I was stunned.I was however, offered a job as the pot washer/dishwasher, and I took it. The Melting Pot was right across from the capital building in Olympia and as such, got some pretty swanky diners, all the senators, representatives, and related. I humbly performed my duties and when not scrubbing, I was watching and talking to the chefs. I had been there for about six months and the news came that the two chefs were leaving to start their own restaurant. I knew the owner, but not well, I just knew that they needed a chef or two and very soon. I dropped my name in for a candidate, was not taken serious at all, that is until I pushed the chefs to push me ahead. I challenged them to ask me to do anything required of that position and they graciously accepted, put me to the test for a week. I did not fail a thing, they loved it because I did everything including dishes, cleanup and most of their cooking.Round two with the owner and he finally decided to give me a one month trial run, and then would decide if I could be permanent. The month passed and no problem so now I am the chef and they hired me a cook for lunch. I was proud of myself, at least for awhile, and then I got bored, I truly was not learning anymore, I had nobody to look up to or teach me. My girlfriend was born in Hawaii, and in a short time we talked about going there to live. A few months later, we sold everything we owned, except for travelling clothes, and mover to Hawaii. We blew some money at first, ended up in Maui, found a studio to rent on the ocean, and both of us got jobs.It was here that my cooking took a big turn because, of all the crazy things, I am being interviewed by this little tiny man, Sammy Shorrock, and he had just gotten to Hawaii a year before me, he had been the executive chef at DisneyLand in Anaheim, for the last fifteen years. He said he got truly burnt out, the pressure and all, and he had to step down and breathe. This chef was a “game changer’ for certain. We also had a lady sous chef from Denmark, another fine talent. I showed Sammy the menu from where I worked, and at this restaurant they had an exhibition kitchen, all the meals are cooked behind a line, in the dining room, and with lights on low, and a lot of flambe’ dishes, we filled the room seven nights a week, with two turns, doing about 250 or so covers a night. On the line were just Sammy and I. There was not one single thing that I did that Sammy did not somehow refine, alter, fine tune, but all for good reason. I was all ears and here is where my education truly took a giant leap, the fuse was lit, and now I was inspired and sitting on the launch pad of my career.Five bucks say there is no way you expected this kind of response when you asked your question here on Quora, am I right? When I saw your question, bingo, my mind was reeling, I have told this story many times to people asking me about culinary schools. I assure you I am not here to talk you out of going to an incredible school in Switzerland, I want you to grasp how important the “hands-on” , “school of hard knocks” is. One thing I have noticed about culinary school graduates is that, while most of them knew culinary terminology, and basic principles of cooking, such as mother sauces, and from stocks to garde manger, they could at least provide intelligent conversation, but most were impractical when the pressure of time was upon them. Too, if a mistake was made, regardless of what and how, could they correct it, or could they find a next best substitute, could they do magic? I assure you that it is not magic that makes it all work out when the chips are down and servers are hollering, you are soaking wet and there are 15 monkey spankers staring at you wondering, (as they laugh inside) if you can pull it out, and correct the dire problem at hand. The spankers want you to fail so they can say “I told you that guy was a putz, what a loser! You will find when the going gets tough, the only ones who will help you, are the ones that actually can, they recognize the urgency of the situation and they will assist you as you call the rapid commands and gracefully waltz yourself out of hells gates and succeed!I stayed in Maui for a year and there again, I got bored, my job was repetitious, Sammy had taken me about as far as I could go I felt, and I left to go back stateside. I went to see my old roommate from boarding school in Minneapolis, just to visit, but funds ran low so I looked for a job. With luck on my side, I interviewed at the original Radisson Hotel in downtown Minneapolis and got hired to be the saucier. This was a massive hotel with seven restaurants, and The Flame Room, the main dining room had their own symphony that had been doing dinner shows there for fifteen years. The Flame Room alone would do four to five hundred covers a night and one line served two restaurants. The chef there was Ralf Gahlin and I assure you he was every bit a master from the “old school”. He grew up in Denmark and started his apprenticeship, as they called it then, at age seven, working in a kitchen scrubbing pots and mopping and peeling potatoes etc.The kitchen at The Radisson was so old it had mostly these giant copper pots. These pots were so big that we had a cart with some kind of pully rig on it to lift the pots off the flat tops. When they were full, there was no way to safely get them off by yourself. We had about eighteen kitchen staff, not counting dishwashers, from garde manger with two, and the rest pretty much supported the line in one way or another. We served an excellent baked stuffed potato that I could never forget, if it was your turn to get on that nightly production, it was a workout. We would bake 350 large potatoes to yield 700 baked halves. The mix was beautiful with ham and sour cream, caramelized onions, lots of seasonings and cheeses. The mixture once made was then piped out into those 700 skins and that was a true test of your arm muscles. Squeezing that pastry bag for so long was nothing short of strenuous.When I began, I trained on sauce for one week, I’d never made that many sauces and certainly not in such quantity, there was no time for moving slow either, every move you made mattered, time was not on your side. Right at five o’clock each day, Ralf would do his rounds and started with me, I would stand there with bated breath, hoping he would not find flaw with my sauces. If I screwed something up there, it would have been, could have been, disaster, with those massive quantities. The cream based sauces, left to their own device, on a flat top, certainly in constant fear of scalding, or burning, one of the worst mistakes to make as it commonly cannot be fully rectified. I got in the groove quickly and soon was helping in all seven kitchens on top of my saucier demands. The chef was superb, no tantrums or hollering, or demeaning remarks as some famously do. I was there about eight months, got tired of the freezing cold and decided to head south. At that point there was only one other Radisson in America, and it was in Lakeland, Florida. The chef said he would gladly transfer me but the pay scale was much lower, I chose to leave and find something on my own.I went to Miami, had no car, so I walked miles each day looking for work. I lived on the beach on Collins Ave. where today is known as South Beach, at that time it was rundown and closed stores everywhere. I landed a job at the Doral Hotel on Miami Beach, I was to be the saucier and do relief work on the line on the top floor in the award winning Starlight Room. The thirty or so cooks and chefs were all Cuban, I was treated as an outsider, an outcast. On top of that, I would make a hollandaise each day with about sixty eggs worth but, their recipe called for msg. I hate msg. I didn’t tell anyone, I just did not put msg in my hollandaise. I got busted for that and now outcast turned to outlaw. Oh, this was not appreciated, I had no right to refuse to put their poison in such a wonderful sauce. I was soon ignored and no longer graced with so much as a smile. It was not difficult for me to decide to leave The Cuban Coral, as I called it.Now I’m broke and unemployed in Miami, I was living off potatoes because that is all I could afford. I walked miles and miles, came home and ate potatoes, getting ready to be kicked out of my grubby little room. I scoured the want ads and one day I walk into this brand new, still being built establishment called The Outrigger Club. I found my way to the kitchen on the 16th floor, asked for the chef, and out walked this huge man, with a starched chef hat on, he was pushing towards seven feet tall. I had no resume’, I brought my menus I had worked with, he liked that and said he knew from that, what I had done. He would look at a dish, and ask me how the various components were made. His name was Hoerst Roelkes, and here again I struck gold. Hoerst was from Germany and he too was old school, having started at age seven, later in life was the executive chef at The Savoy in London followed by some posh resort in the Bahamas. There was a second chef too, Albert Anduze from Toulouse, France. Albert was really old school and had been everywhere. He had started the landmark restaurant in San Francisco called Ernies, and had Olympic gold medals for tallow carving and hot food competition.My education climbed quickly here though initially I was on edge, Hoerst drank on the job, all day, endless Heinekin beers and kirchwasser. Regardless, these guys were cooking just like I had read about in the Escoffier cookbook, now I was doing it with them and the “the father of cooking” Auguste Escoffier began to make perfect sense. I was impressed and proud, each day I would go home and study more cookbooks and terminology. I did not want to act a fool in front of these guys. Albert and I became friends, he would invite me to his home after work, we would drink wine with his wife and look at his massive stamp collection, get a buzz and go home.I was at the Outrigger for about nine months. I used to be a whitewater river guide in Utah in the summer season so I left there to spend another summer in Cataract Canyon, Moab, Utah. On one of my many trips I met a husband and wife who had just come back from living in the Caribbean, on a charter sailboat. We got to talking and they recognized my culinary skills, they suggested that I would be a shining star if I went to St. Thomas, USVI, to get a chef job on one of the super yachts. They said there was a shortage of talent and I could easily land work. They were going to Africa on safari in September and they made me an offer to come watch their home in California for a month and then I could fly direct from Los Angeles to St. Thomas and look for work. I accepted, lived a life of luxury for a month and flew to St. Thomas, walked the docks and had a job in two days. I started working on a couple different boats and too, I was interviewed on the monster yachts 200 feet or more. What I noticed though was on the big boy yachts, you had to wear uniforms and kind of kiss ass like a servant so, I downsized to where I could enjoy myself. I ended up working on a yacht for over two years, and got to go to every island in the Caribbean, and in style. We would go up to Maine in the summer and charter there. My cooking skills only progressed with study but I did not care, I had an experience of a lifetime. When I decided to leave my cushy yacht job it was to open my own restaurant.I tried to lease a building in the British Virgin Islands, Cooper Island, but the last minute the owners backed out. I scrambled, found a lady partner and a historic house that we soon turned into Wet Willy’s Restaurant. We got it up and running for about ten grand, unbelievable by any expectation, and would be impossible to do today. My partner Diane, used to be neighbors with Jimmy Buffet so he came and did a free concert for us, to raise money, we got permits to shut down the streets, and had a party to remember, and in the end, we had no debt.The house was two stories with two bedrooms upstairs, one for Diane and her boyfriend and one for me. We served lunch and dinner seven days a week and were packed, we could seat about 100 total, half of which were outside. I had no menu and everything was fresh each day. We had a chalkboard menu, and the servers had to verbally present the menu selections. My partner knew some higher-ups in town so we got a 4:00am liquor license, one of only two on the island. What that meant is that when every other bar closed, we filled up no matter what. I had one cook and one dishwasher in a small kitchen, very basic at that. Just having simple fresh food drew the crowds, we filled each day for lunch and dinner doing about 120 covers average each meal. With all the success, I got sidetracked along the way, I could not resist the endless parade of ladies coming in and with a bedroom upstairs, I became very busy. I decided to sell out my half after a year, I was pretty much having far too much fun, and work was becoming far too demanding. I made a choice to leave and did. I went back to my river guide job in Utah, and moved to Arizona at the end of the season.I ended up in Tucson, Arizona and soon had my first sous chef position at the Travel Holiday Award winning Charles Restaurant. The chef, Johnathan Landeen, had recently come from New Orleans, having had worked at Commander’s Palace under the tutelage of Paul Prudhomme. It was during his time there that the American Culinary Foundation was formed, the basic premise being that in America, there were no apprenticeships, there were no guidelines to evaluate culinary skills to determine at what level a person may be. They set out to establish guidelines for evaluations and initiated a formal apprenticeship program designed for on the job learning whereby an apprentice would follow a program covering all culinary skills and ultimately lead to the designation of certified executive chef. Depending upon where you are in your skill set, the average time for the apprenticeship would be two years. I joined the program and worked through it for a full two years and earned the formal designation of Certified Executive Chef (CEC). Soon thereafter, I got my first Executive Chef job at The Tucson Hilton Hotel.I was at the Tucson Hilton for maybe two months and it was sold. I thought I would lose my job but in only a few weeks they approached me and asked if I would go to Texas where they owned a Sheraton Hotel. They said the chef needed some organizing and training, would I go do that? I went to Beaumont, Texas and the chef Tony was indeed an idiot, ten days later I fired him. I put an ad in the local papers for a chef, after two weeks of interviewing, we had no candidates. I was then offered a permanent job there which I did not want. They sweetened the pay, promised to build me a suite to live in on the top floor for myself, my wife, and baby son. I accepted on one condition, I promised them one year only and then I most likely would leave. Life in a hotel is not a good deal, the breakfast cooks would call the front desk saying they were gonna be late or not show up at all. In turn the front desk calls me and now I get to open and survive the day through all three meals. I did make it for one year there, to the day. During the time I was there, a friend of mine called me from Arkansas, he said he had a VIP party coming up and it was far out his element, it was a group called Fifty for the Future, comprised of the wealthiest, powerful people in Arkansas and their spouses and more.The company my buddy Brian represented was Entertainment Services out of Omaha, Nebraska and he called them to ask if he could hire me to do the party. I would take a week of vacation time I had and do the party. The company approved and they said they were going to represent me as their corporate chef. I did multiple calls to the planning committee to plan the rather ambitious menu. I flew out days ahead to organize, meet his staff and put the wheels in motion. The prep was a monster as all the help there were basically used to doing basic fries, burgers, chicken. So the night of the party rolls in and there will be about 225 people there. We had a full seven course meal, and by the time dessert went out, the kitchen got quiet. I do not see Brian, I cannot go out in my messy clothes and nervously wait. Finally about 10pm, he comes back smiling. He said they were raving and to pass on the compliments. I flew back to Texas to finish up my last couple of months. The day I returned I got a call from Entertainment Services and they told me they had gotten multiple calls from the party guests telling them what a fantastic job I had done and to tell me, the so called corporate chef, it was the best party they had had in all the years they were together. One of those calls was from Hillary Clinton, of course I was unsure who she was but know now. My family and I gladly left Texas and went back to Phoenix where my wife’s folk s lived. I was there a week and got a call from Entertainment Services. They had just got the contract to run the then being built Arlington Convention Center and they wanted to interview me to be their official corporate chef based in Arlington. They flew me to Omaha the next day, I had to interview all of the bosses in the whole company which took all day. I flew back that night and the next day got the call that I was hired as their first corporate chef.Two days later I am on a plane to Dallas and a new job, my wife and son stayed in Phoenix until I got settled, and it was too fast for her. I assumed my position readily and starting catering tons of VIP parties all over the country. There were times I would be on the road for a month at a time just doing parties in various cities, Most every party I did from then on would be a thousand or more people, a logistical nightmare. Too, I would do presidential dinners with the secret service clearance mandatory of me and all my staff. During that time I did parties up to just over ten thousand people at a time. I even did a company picnic back in Arkansas for Tyson Company, the chicken people. What would you imagine they wanted for their company picnic of five thousand people? You guessed it, frickin’ chicken! It was there I pulled off one of my greatest culinary feats. Tyson provided all the chicken but they want fried chicken. Hmmmm! Can you imagine breading chicken for five plus thousand? I couldn’t see this being easy but in talking to my buddy Brian who was still the manager there, his brother was a contractor and had just bought a cement truck, brand new. We were drinking and suddenly I got this flash thought and started laughing. I told Brian we should use the cement truck to bread the chicken, he said I was nuts. I persisted and told him how I would do it with massive amounts of flour and seasonings, the chicken soaked in buttermilk, then dropped into the tank, turn the mixer on for a bit, tilt it up and slide the chicken, with a bit of guidance, down the chute and then onto sheet pans with parchment paper and dusted with flour. We did it, and of course sanitized the shiny new tank beforehand. The plan worked like a dream, we then rinsed and cleaned it out and nobody was the wiser.By now, you have read a very nice slice of my days as a chef, I have tons more to go but, my true intent today was not to overload you with my culinary past. My ultimate goal was/is, to give you a perspective of how a chef career can go without formal training. I know I was fortunate to have found the world class chefs I did and get to work with them. Today many aspiring chefs pick out the chefs they like and approach them for a job and why they want to work with them,. I know that if the candidate is seemingly worthy, many chefs will take someone on and mentor them while they are on the job. Many a great chef is born that way.Again, I do not, in any way, wish to cast a shadow on your sights set on a primo school in Switzerland. What I want to stress to you is how very valuable real life training, hands on, under pressure, with the guidance of a master chef, can be. I want you to think about, no matter when, doing an apprenticeship with the American Culinary Federation to eventually earn your Certified Executive Chef (CEC) designation. Ignoring the value of a professional designation can impede your success, and having it can certainly open many doors where some people simply demand credentials.. You could easily merge in working on a CEC status after you finished your schooling in Switzerland.I have a gut feeling, from your one simple question, that you are intent on success. Today, more than ever, the culinary field has exploded and at the same time gotten much more competitive. It is not just cooking, this is artistry in motion, taking food to new heights, using every cell of creativity you own, and adding to the fast paced evolution of food as art, as well as treasuring the undeniable pleasures of comfort foods. I hope you find some value or entertainment out of this far too long answer. More importantly, I wish you great success , don’t let that fire die in you, there is much to be done!***As a footnote: My son Marco, with no persuasion from me, chose to go to culinary school, he went to The Cordon Bleu in Orlando, Florida. When he finished he starting working in cool bistros and cafes, later The Four Seasons as a sous chef and now a Chef at a country club but still climbing the learning ladder to fame. He too has that passion, and seeming natural creative ability, to construct an awesome meal or menu.

I came across this article on HuffPost, and I am sharing it here, he didn’t give up , turned around and took savage revenge!!HUFFPOST PERSONAL08/16/2019 09:00 AM EDTMy Best Friend Was A Con Artist Who Scammed Me Out Of $92,000. Here's How I Got Justice.Today she’s sitting in a prison cell in Los Angeles County probably wondering how she became the victim of one of her own victims.“I can help,” she said, and with just those three words, a four-year nightmare began to unfold as I fell hard for one of the oldest cons in the book: The Inheritance Scam.But this scheme wasn’t cooked up by some fictional Nigerian prince soliciting me through a sketchy email. I fell under the spell of an immensely lovable woman who inserted herself into my life and became my best friend. Unfortunately, she was also an international con artist on the run from the authorities and I was about to become one of her many “marks.”She scammed me out of nearly $100,000 using a series of brilliant confidence tricks as she simultaneously destroyed my sense of self and darkened my once joyful outlook.And as she was ruining my life, she was also scamming dozens of others around the world by impersonating psychics, mortgage brokers, psychologists, lawyers, travel agents, and even pretending to be a cancer victim.She was a true “queen of the con,” utilizing disguises and even plastic surgery to alter her appearance from one crime to the next, and she might have gotten away with cheating many more people if she hadn’t unwittingly turned me into a relentless vigilante. Because instead of completely falling apart in the wake of her scam ― and the bankruptcy she forced me into ― I somehow found the strength I didn’t know I had to pick myself up from the wreckage. And I fought back. I started my own investigation into her scams, uncovered other victims and painstakingly brought her to justice.Today she’s sitting in a jail cell in Los Angeles County, probably wondering how on earth she became the victim of one of her own victims.Well, allow me to explain.She introduced herself to me as Mair Smyth in May 2013 when she joined a group of angry neighbors in my living room to discuss what to do about losing access to our building’s swimming pool due to a legal spat with a neighboring building.“I can help,” she told us. “My boyfriend is a lawyer who can get the pool back!”I liked her immediately. We all did. She was brash. Funny. Extremely intelligent and outspoken. Ironically, she came across as a woman who always “told it like it is.” She also came across as an incredibly wealthy woman. She wore $1,200 Jimmy Choos and once showed me her closet filled with more than 250 pairs. That’s $300,000 in shoes alone! I thought to myself. But I Iater discovered they were all fake.After our initial meeting in my apartment that night, Mair invited my husband, Pablito, and me to dinner. And over the next year, she frequently wined and dined us at fancy restaurants and always insisted on picking up the bill. “I love you guys,” she’d convincingly plead. “I have a lot of money ― let me pay!”We’d hang out almost every evening in our BBQ area, exchanging intimacies under the cool LA sky. Mair told us she was originally from Ireland and one night she pointed to a framed document hanging in her living room. “This is the Irish Constitution,” she said. “See that signature at the bottom? That’s my great uncle’s.” Since my knowledge of Ireland was scant, I believed her. I had no idea that like her shoes, that tale was also fake.Mair brought me Irish tea and pastries and regaled me with stories of how when she was a young girl, her grandmother, who was supposedly in the Irish Republican Army, would bring her to the top of a bridge and teach Mair how to hurl Molotov cocktails down on British soldiers. I was captivated and horrified. But her stories about her family were all lies too.When I tearfully confided in her that part of my family had disowned me for being gay, she pounced. “My family disowned me too!” she said, as she fought back tears. “They’re trying to get me disinherited.” All of a sudden we weren’t just new friends ― we were two discarded souls bonding over our incredibly painful family circumstances.Mair told me that an uncle, the patriarch of her family, recently died and her cousins were dividing up an estate worth 25 million euros. She said she was supposed to receive 5 million euros ― the equivalent of $6.5 million at the time ― as her share of the inheritance. As months passed, she’d frequently show me angry text messages and emails from her Irish cousins threatening that she wouldn’t get a dime of the inheritance.I didn’t realize that Mair actually created those phone and email accounts herself to impersonate her “cousins” as part of her scheme.Mair told me she had taken a lot of family money with her when she left Ireland many years ago, so she never needed to work. However, she claimed she enjoyed working, so she got a job selling luxury vacations at a travel agency in Los Angeles that her family did a lot of business with. She said her family’s association with the company made it easy for her to secure employment there.Fourteen months into our friendship Mair and I were like sister and brother. We even began ending our phone calls by telling each other “I love you.” She told me that her “barristers” (I had to google what that word meant) were having trouble trying to secure her inheritance and that they had warned her about a clause in her uncle’s will that stated that if any family member was convicted of a felony, they would forfeit their share of the inheritance.Mair was building up the framework of her con in such enthralling detail that I became an actual player in scamming myself. Instead of her telling me the next step in her deceitful story, she got me to tell her!“You better be careful!” I cautioned her. “Since your family does a lot of business with the travel agency you work for, one of your disgruntled cousins might try and set you up to get you convicted of a felony to keep your share of the inheritance from you!”I’d read news stories about husbands knocking off their wives for million-dollar insurance policies. We were talking about $6.5 million here. And according to the emails and texts I saw, many of her family members certainly appeared to hate her. Why wouldn’t they set her up? I thought.On July 8, 2014, my phone rang.“You have a collect call from ― It’s Mair ― an inmate at the Century Regional Detention Facility. … Press one to accept,” the computerized voice instructed me.I quickly pressed “1.”“You were right!” she sobbed. “I was arrested today. My family set me up to make it look like I stole $200,000 from my job.”“I told you this would happen!” I yelled into the phone. I was distraught. I quickly found a bail bondsman and paid him $4,200 to get her out of jail. That’s when I first learned that her legal name was Marianne Smyth, not Mair Smyth.She paid me back the $4,200 the very next day when she was released from jail. Or, rather, the married man she was dating at the time paid me back the next day. Little did I (or he) know it, but she was in the process of scamming him too.As the months passed, Mair showed me emails from her “lawyers” assuring her that the criminal case against her was falling apart. I had no idea those emails were also from fake accounts she had created herself.Then, almost three years into our friendship, she told me the district attorney prosecuting her case had frozen her bank accounts. She was devastated. So I started lending her money. She had immediately paid back the $4,200 I used to bail her out of jail, so I felt confident she’d pay me back any other money I loaned her.But that’s the thing: The term “con artist” is short for “confidence artist” because these individuals are skilled at gaining your confidence ― and then, once they’ve attained it, they use it to scam you out of your money.Over the course of several months, I loaned Mair nearly $15,000. You’d think I’d be worried about giving her that much money but I wasn’t. At all. She was not only my best friend but she claimed she was about to inherit millions of dollars ― at least that’s what all the emails from her “barristers” said ― so I never even considered the idea that anything sinister could be taking place.One day, Mair called me and said the DA was now demanding $50,000 to dismiss the criminal case against her. I didn’t have $50,000 in cash. But I did have an 840 credit score. So I let her charge the $50,000 on my credit cards using her PayPal account to get the criminal case against her dropped, thereby opening the pathway for her to secure her $6.5 million inheritance and pay me back. I had only ever been to court for speeding tickets at that point. I knew so little about the criminal justice system. Besides, Mair was now like a family member! I just never imagined that she could be scamming me.A few months later, I was shocked to find out Mair had been arrested again. She said the judge in her case considered her charging my credit cards with her PayPal account “money laundering” and punished her with 30 days in jail. The charge was not a felony ― she said it was just a “slap on the wrist” ― and she assured me, once again, that as soon as she got out of jail and received her inheritance, she would pay me back in full.Mair called me collect from jail every day and begged me not to visit her. “I don’t want you to see me like this,” she said. But I insisted. So I logged onto the jail’s website to schedule a visit and that’s when everything fell apart and the true devastation she wrought on my life started to reveal itself.The jail’s website showed there had been no “slap on the wrist.” Mair was serving time for felony grand theft.I took the day off work and immediately rushed down to a Los Angeles courthouse. With trembling hands, I started reviewing every record from Mair’s case that I could find. I discovered she had lied to me about everything. I suddenly couldn’t breathe.That $50,000 I let her charge on my credit cards was really to pay $40,000 as part of a plea agreement to a felony grand theft charge she faced for stealing more than $200,000 from the travel agency she worked for. Had she not been able to come up with that $40,000, she would have received a five-year jail sentence ― not the measly 30 days she actually served.I discovered that her bank accounts had never been frozen. There was no wealthy Irish family or inheritance. She’s not even Irish! Those were all lies she used to entrap me.I went home and collapsed in my husband’s arms. I didn’t cry ― I wailed.“How could I let this happen to us?” I sobbed over and over again. I was inconsolable.Eventually, my pain was replaced by breathtaking anger and the determination to do something.First, I confronted Mair in the parking lot outside our apartment building the day she was released from jail. I told her I knew she wasn’t Irish. I knew no one froze her bank accounts. I knew there was no inheritance. She emphatically denied everything. “That’s not true, Johnathan! That’s not true!” she pleaded over and over again as tears streamed down her face.But I had finally learned that those tears, like everything else in her life, were a complete fabrication. And I was done believing anything she had to say. I balled up my fists. Clenched my jaw. And walked away. We never spoke again.I went to the police days later in March 2017 and filed a report. The officer interviewing me seemed skeptical that there was anything they could do. “Don’t give strangers your money” were his parting words.So I started my own investigation.I dug up Mair Smyth’s yearbook and learned that she was born Marianne Andle in Maine and graduated from Bangor High in 1987. She later moved to Tennessee, where, according to her estranged family, she told everyone in town she had breast cancer and allegedly scammed her friends and neighbors out of thousands for “treatments.” They told me Mair was oddly obsessed with wanting to be Irish ― so much so that in 2000 she went to Northern Ireland on vacation and ended up marrying a local and then stayed in the country for nine years.In the same way that wooden stakes kill vampires and silver bullets kill werewolves, publicity kills con artists. I began turning my pain into a profound sense of purpose. I started an online blog and detailed how Mair had scammed me. Soon Mair’s other victims from all over the world started reaching out.I learned that she scammed $10,000 from one victim by impersonating a psychologist, according to allegations in a police report.She tricked our landlord out of $12,000 in rent by pretending to have cancer.I did some sleuthing and found out that Mair had low blood iron and would purposely avoid iron-rich foods so she could strategically get admitted into hospitals for transfusions. While sitting in a real hospital bed for a few hours, she’d ask a nurse to take her picture and then email that photo to her victims to better sell her cancer story. She used this particular scam a lot.I even got a call from a police detective in Northern Ireland. He told me authorities in Belfast had been looking for Marianne Smyth for years. The detective said she had worked as a mortgage broker in 2008 and had scammed many other people and then vanished.And these are just some of the stories I discovered. All in all, Mair Smyth used (at least) 23 different aliases. In this video, she goes by “Mair Aine” as she tries to convince people she’s psychic. She worked as a psychic for years scamming the most vulnerable of victims by using their innermost secrets and confidences against them. She’s also been charged with felonies for fraud and grand theft in Florida and Tennessee under the alias “Marianne Welch.”The Los Angeles Police Department ended up spending 11 months investigating my case. I called them every day and became a huge pain in their ass.Finally, in early 2018, Mair was arrested at the halfway house where she was hiding and charged with grand theft for scamming me. She was then released on her own recognizance, which was a huge mistake. One month before trial, Mair filed for a fraudulent restraining order asserting that I was threatening her with violence. I was forced to lose another $1,500 to her scams ― the cost of hiring an attorney to fight her bogus claim.“If a judge grants the restraining order, you would be prevented from testifying against her at her criminal trial,” my lawyer explained. I was apoplectic.Could this be her checkmate move? I wondered.Thankfully, a prudent judge refused to grant the restraining order and her criminal trial proceeded as scheduled.Four victims testified against Mair in early 2019 and a mountain of irrefutable evidence was presented by the prosecution. Though she was only being charged with scamming me, the judge allowed testimony from several other people she conned to demonstrate a pattern.Mair did not testify in her own defense. As the witnesses described how she had scammed them, Mair sat there with an emotionless look on her face. That was probably her biggest tell to the jury. As brilliant of an actress as she proved to be while she was conning people, remarkably, she did not know how to “act” innocent.The only defense her attorney had for the jury was that I was supposedly making the whole story up and that I had persuaded all of the other witnesses ― people I didn’t even know before Mair scammed me ― to lie under oath so I could make a compelling documentary about it. And he was terrifyingly convincing.I had in fact decided to make a documentary about Mair. When I took the stand to testify against her, her attorney asked me why.“I want to warn people about her,” I responded. “By the time I’m done with Marianne Smyth, the world will know her face so she can never scam anyone ever again.”Testifying at trial was particularly grueling because the prosecutor went over each dollar Mair scammed from me in extreme detail. Having to relive that experience in front of a roomful of strangers ignited fury and embarrassment and regret in a new, especially painful way. I was an emotional wreck.I spent two years doggedly pursuing Marianne Smyth. It consumed me. I had to file for bankruptcy because of what she had done to me. And the 24 court appearances I made even before the actual trial ― including continuances, pretrial motions and hearings ― meant I had to miss a lot of work and lost even more money. Not to mention the cost of hiring six private investigators in multiple states and countries to ferret out all her scams.But, damn, it was worth it.On Jan. 9, 2019, Marianne Smyth was found guilty of scamming me out of $91,784. She was sentenced to five years behind bars.Out of all the victims I uncovered during my investigation, only two of them had ever reported her to the police and that enabled her to continue scamming people for years before she met me. Most of her victims ― like most victims of any con artist ― were too ashamed to tell anyone what happened to them. I’m ashamed too. But my desire to stop her from hurting other people is much stronger than my shame.I’m forever changed by my experience of getting conned. I’m now suspicious of everyone and everything. I subscribe to multiple criminal databases and I background check everyone . Often, I will suss out even the most minuscule inconsistencies in someone’s story upon meeting them and throw it in their face, demanding an explanation.Making new friends is not something I’m good at anymore. But that’s not something that I can really help. I was taken advantage of by someone I truly trusted ― and loved ― and when you’re shattered in this specific, unthinkable way, it’s impossible to go back to who you were before.While my life may never be the same, I hope others can learn from my experience with Marianne Smyth and, by reading my story, avoid being swindled themselves. If you meet someone new whose backstory is filled with drama and intrigue, or even just really unusual circumstances (especially if there’s money involved), there’s a good chance they’re trying to scam you. You might not ever encounter someone as conniving or cunning or deceitful as I did, but confidence games are more common than you think and your entire life can change because you have trusted someone who wants what you have and will stop at nothing to get it.Johnathan Walton is a reality TV producer by day and a justice-seeking vigilante in his off-hours. His experience putting a con artist in prison has woken him to a new calling in life: helping other victims hunt down their con artists in the name of justice and closure and healing. You can reach him through his website, JohnathanWalton.com .Note:- this did not happen to me but it’s worth the read, I copied pasted it