Hi Everyone,

Yesterday I had a great interview with Charles Carroll, an award winning chef and co-author of the new book, The Recipe; A Story of Loss, Love and the Ingredients of Greatness. The book is a wonderful story of a little boy who learns to overcome tragedy and carve out a life of excellence and honor through cooking lessons at the hands of a retired chef. Chef Carrol has been mentoring young people for most of his career, and is one of 20,000 members in the American Culinary Federation (ACF) which fosters professional support of current and future chefs through educational resources, certification, apprenticeship and programmatic accreditation. Additionally, he is also a proud participant and a winner of many gold medals from the Culinary Olympics (hosted every four years in Germany during the same time as the Olympics!) Chef Carroll is proud to represent America, and used his patriotism to start Operation HOT (“Honoring Our Troops”), which took him to Afghanistan in the middle of the war zone, to put on a Vegas-style show and cook a home-cooked Cajun meal for thousands of U.S. troops! His stories of the young soldiers, and how his program effected them was very moving!

We talked about how food is such an integral part of life and how it is a vehicle for inspiring others. Carroll and I both agree that cooking from the heart not only tastes better, but can have a profound effect in your life and in others. His parting advice was to trust in the process and be OK with the bumps in the road. Success happens one at a time, and eventually, if you follow your passion, you will find yourself doing things and accomplishing all that you could hope for! If you missed our interview, you can listen to it here!