I was born and raised in South Texas, on the kind of country where you fish before you can read. Some of my first memories are running the flats of the Laguna Madre with my dad, throwing topwater at first light and eating whatever we kept. The water taught me before the woods did.

The cooking came right alongside it. I grew up in a kitchen, learned to cook before I learned to hunt, and treated every fish that came back in the cooler like it deserved the work. Hunting came later. I was thirty before I picked up a rifle and chased my first big game animal. Came to it late. Took to it hard.

These days I live in the Pacific Northwest, on the South Sound. Different country, same way of moving through it. Blacktails in the timber, elk in the cascades, salmon in the rivers, crab and oysters off the boat. The ground changed. The standard did not.

Rack and Flame is what came out of all of it. South Texas raised, PNW based. Saltwater roots on both ends. Late onset hunter. Lifelong cook. The whole brand sits on the idea that the meal is the back half of the work. You earn the protein. You earn the fire. You earn the right to tell the story.

I am not a classically trained chef. I am a hunter and a cook who learned by doing. I have run cooking demos with various brands like BHA, Casa M. Spice and ACE Hardware. I have cooked at various outfitter camps like BHA Armed Forces Initiative. Every plate that comes off my fire ties back to something earned in the field, on the water, or by hand.

If it is wild, hunted, cooked over flame, and worth telling, it belongs here.

Hunt hard. Cook wild. Tell the story.