Use This Blog, I Am Honored

Since I have the honor of being The Firehouse Chef, I will now begin to work on my memoirs and include my most famous fire house meals. I am a recently retired firefighter and I served the fine people in the wonderful community of San Rafael, California for 29 years. I am proud and honored to have come from the most wonderful fire background in America. I served the people of California for 3 fire seasons while a member of the California Department of Forestry, now known as CalFire. The State of California actually runs the largest fire organization in America. My first assignment was duty at the California Ecology Corps, at the Vallecito Fire Camp, just outside of Angels Camp, California, in the Sierra Nevada Mother Lode country. CDF was California Division of Forestry, and they were administrating the California Ecology Corps. The following year the name of the organization was redefined as California Department of Forestry, but it was still CDF. Several years later as the California Fire Service matured and standardization of fire incident management and nomenclature became normalized, the California Department of Agriculture, which the divisions of conservation, forestry and fire suppression are part of, decided to call the fire suppression division CalFire.

The assignment with the Ecology Corps was outstanding, although there was absolutely no cooking involved, which at the time was perfect. We had a breakfast mess, a brown bag lunch for the road and we all ate community mess after our workday. We were charged just over a buck a meal, something like 5 bucks a day. I could probably do some research, but it was real inexpensive. I remember tongue sandwiches for brown bag lunch on occasion.

There were girls on the crew, I am trying to remember her name. I think that the other women were on other crews and probably were not as attractive as... Every guy wanted to marry her! I think I sat next to her one day on the crew bus. I don't know if she liked the tongue sanddwiches either.

I retired, now I need to commemorate my life's effort in the firehouse galley. I will try and recreate all or some of the most memorable eats that I prepared for the crew and I will also inclde some items that I happen to like but would not share at the fire house.