Talk with Your Mouth Full: The Hearty Boys Cookbook

Talk With Your Mouth Full: The Hearty Boys Cookbook [Dan Smith, Steve McDonagh, Laurie Proffitt] on leondumoulin.nl *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers.
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I remember being very aware of it, I wasn't really sexually active the first year of college, so I wasn't worried about it, and no one that I knew in college was sick at that point, but I remember it being very pervasive, because I can remember thinking, you know walking down the street, what would happen if I got it? At that point there were a lot of questions about the possibility of it being in saliva, and as a child, what does that do to you?

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To be at your sexual peak as a young man is in your early 20s right? And you're having to shut yourself down. It was really scary, my first boyfriend that I was with when I met Steve, he had been an escort. In this weird way, I thought that was kind of cool, you know, so it was kind of an attraction for me, which, I don't even know how to feel about that now, it's a little embarrassing. But he got out of that whole thing, and did a complete about face, and he got involved with, and worked for Gay Men's Health Crisis just when they were starting. I remember visiting him at work, and they were in this little tiny office space, just little cubby holes, just at the very beginning.

You know, it's funny to even talk about this, because I guess as we become older, our histories become history, and it was a pretty amazing time. So going to that ACT UP meeting when people were just so frustrated, I decided not to continue going because I thought that their anger was coming out, they were just kind of lashing everywhere, and it wasn't always appropriate. I mean it's amazing now to hear people talk about Reagan being on Mount Rushmore, and the coins, and how everything is being renamed the Ronald Reagan highway, this that, the whole nine yards.

Reagan had blood on his hands. He didn't care about the gay and lesbian community, and he didn't do funding, and oh we were up in arms about it. As he got older, and we got further away from that, that's glossed over, not much was said about that, in fact when he passed away, Larry Kramer was the only voice in the wilderness saying, I'm glad he's dead, and I was like, I guess I really needed to be reminded of that, because the man has blood on his hands.

Well, let's move to how you got to Chicago. Being East Coast guys, what brought you here? I came to Chicago not for any really interesting reason other than I didn't want to live in New York anymore. You lived in New York, and … one day it turns and it starts to suck you dry, and you just have to move. I wanted grass, and a place for my dog, and I wanted a healthy relationship and a little more space. I still love New York, I just didn't want to live there anymore. So as a stage actor, my second choice was Chicago. So I moved here with my ex, which, moving here wasn't a mistake, moving here with him was a train wreck.

So that's how I ended up getting here. I was also in a relationship up there, which was a mess, so, you know I've been in three relationships in my life, and I don't imagine that I'm going to be in another one. So we got back together when we both broke up with our exes, and I moved to Chicago. I was 29 years old, I was here for just a matter of months before I had my thirtieth birthday party. So let's talk about the incarnation of the Hearty Boys.

I had worked for myself by that point for a good four or five years, I didn't want to work for anybody else.


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So we were in Lakeview, on Hudson and Belmont, right by the lake. I also knew that when I was between jobs, I didn't want to work for anybody else anymore, working as a waiter or whatever, so it was easy when Dan got here to just say, let's just start our own catering business. So we printed up little fliers with little tear sheets at the bottom with our number on it. We worked for another catering company when I came here for, I don't know six months, that I was actually working for the other catering company for cash. We wanted to do what we know. As a gay couple, I wanted to go to somebody's house, because we'd catered parties for other people, for other gay people.

And you come in there, and it would be us and a straight guy, or you know just some random, somebody else. We wanted to say, we'll make you comfortable in your house … SM: What's really funny is, we weren't going after a niche market … with disposable income, we're saying this is who we are, this is who you are, we just want to work with what we know.

And it took off really quickly, because it was a niche thing with disposable income, and honest to god, it's funny to see the larger caterers now, all going for that. There's one large caterer that has its gay and lesbian section. So I guess you call in and say the secret word. How soon did the restaurant come into play? The restaurant took a while, we took like this, kind of [ winding ] path.

We catered out of the Hotel Florence down in the Pullman district. Because they just called us one day and said, we've heard about you will you just take this kitchen over for us? So we saw a good opportunity there as well, because we thought, we can cater out of this kitchen as well, because Steve was always afraid of getting caught, working out of our eight-by-eight kitchen in our apartment.

Which, we came to find out that everybody starts out their catering company that way so, no big deal, but we worked out of the Pullman kitchen for like six months, but in that time, we were able to save up enough money, by running that restaurant as well, that we were able to find that space in Lakeview on Halsted. Dan was driving down Halsted, and he called me up, he's like, there's a place on Roscoe and Halsted.

Well you know it's a no-brainer, then we're also right in the middle of our community. I truly think that we would be somewhere very different today if we hadn't gotten that space. So it was just perfect, it was the perfect space for us. That was , that was right about the millennium. We took the money that we made at the Hotel Florence, and we pumped it into this space on Halsted. It wasn't a ton of money, so we did most everything ourselves. We rehabbed the space ourselves.

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It was an old coffeehouse. We stripped it down to the brick, and replastered, and did all the painting, and took off the doorknobs and shined them all up. We opened up as a gourmet takeaway at first. We had the catering business out of the back kitchen, and we had the front space. Let's talk about the break, I mean the TV show. When did that happen, and how did that happen?

The TV show happened two and a half years ago, somewhere around there. Steve, up until that point had still been acting, so he had gotten a gig with public supermarkets down south. He was going to be a spokesperson for them. It fell through at the last minute, so we knew about Food Network and their search for the next Food Network Star. They say, we're looking for the next Food Network star, send in your tape. You don't really, because who's really going to win that, right?

But I was so pissed about this contract falling through. His thing fell through, so we though oh what the hell, we'll just put a tape together and we'll send it in and see what happens. So that's what we did, we just sent in a three-minute tape, it was very much us, we were just making fun of Food Network and we did our food, and we've done a lot of like, three-minute spots on morning shows and so it was pretty easy for us. Yeah, we're familiar with it. After it went out I thought, you know we might really get a call about this.

But to get a call and find out that we're one of eight, we were concerned, because it was 10, entrants, so to be one of eight was the hard part, then we just had to, you know, knock the rest off systematically.

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Any truthfully, I thought, once we met everybody and were in the process of taping the show, I thought OK, I feel pretty good about what we're doing. It was scary the first night though, wasn't it? It was, it was really scary the first time, meeting everybody, because you didn't know who you were going to be up against. But we held our own, and I felt good about that because I'm not classically trained, I never went to school to learn how to cook, I've just taught myself as I went along but I was feeling pretty good about it.


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I always thought that we would probably get to the final two, but we would never win because it was an America vote. America votes for the next food network star, and I thought, OK they're not going to vote for the gay guys, it's not going to happen. We'll get to the final two and that will be great. Because we were also very much 'out' on the show.

The very first episode, our very first task was to make eggs.

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I was running through this in my head, and I thought, screw it. Screw it, I'm going to say this. We got up and I looked at the camera and I said, you know we have an unfair advantage because you're asking us to make eggs and as gay boys, we know brunch. I was like, that's either going to fly, or sink. They kept it in. And it took off because that's who we are.

The other thing was, we had been planning for a long time, we're thinking how can we get a TV show, a cooking show? Because there are no cooking shows with a gay couple. How many gay people of either sex are in the kitchen? I thought, this is a no-brainer, and if we don't do it, somebody else is going to do it. We managed to do it through this weird sort of back-door talent search so, we were really fortunate that we had the opportunity.

The thing about it though was that, on Food Network's Web site during Food Network Star, they had all of these threads of conversations that people could start, and the biggest thread that they had was about us. It was about us being gay, and a lot of people would write in and say, 'I couldn't even eat their food because they've touched it. With their dirty hands. So there's still that out there. The nice thing was that there were a lot of people that defended us then. So it's hard, because we have gotten, or heard about e-mails from people who write this weird crap about, 'I can't watch them because I think about what they do in the bedroom.

That's a real e-mail. Well, you know that's your sick head going on, because I don't look at a straight couple and think about what they're doing in the bedroom if they're cooking together, but we get that. That was a weird thing. I think that one of the things that we're proudest of in our lives is that we are the first gay couple to ever have a national TV show. You don't hear that, though. And not a lot of stuff has been made out of that.

That's kind of a big deal. I mean television has never had a real-life gay couple on television. Not only just, to just actually be us. It's not a reality show where somebody is trying to outdo each other or hurt each other or any of that other nonsense; people are invited into our home and are really learning about us. I think that was what was so vital to us during whenever our show is on. It's to try to get America to see a real, normal, God-willing, relationship. It started in , and it's an entertaining show, so it's about cooking. Steve always does some kind of an entertaining tip, and stories because we like to tell stories, any time we do the show or personal appearances, we always weave in stories about our experiences.

Talk about the book that you've done. Our first book [ is out now ] and it's called Talk with Your Mouth Full, and it also kind of follows the line of our TV show and our life, it's not a collection of recipes, it's stories about how we got here, and it's real-life tips.

I always say I don't want to get all Martha Stewart on your ass, it's real-life tips; if you're going to use a chafing dish, how much water do you need, how do you open a sterno. The most important thing to us as caterers is to make it accessible, and just show people how they can have parties in their own home, and that's kind of our shtick. Why do you stay in Chicago [ the show is taped in New York ]? I think that this is kind of where we both would have ended up, no matter what. Because it's, [ to Dan ] don't you think that Chicago is like the most user-friendly city?

We both say that we love New York, and we both do. New York is a hard place to live, we both lived there for easily 10 years. It's a hard place to live; it's a hard city.

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By hard I mean concrete, everything's concrete, it's hard. Chicago is an easier place to live, it's a great metropolis, there's a lot going on here in a lot of different ways, there's a lot going on in the food scene in Chicago, which is great for us. But at the same time we get to have a house, we get to have a yard, we're very near the lake.

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That's the most important thing. To me, it's the visual expanse. I always thought in Manhattan, you have to get out of the city, every weekend, I need to get away. I've never thought that since I moved to Chicago. Driving down Lake Shore Drive, that visual expanse just clears my head, and I never feel trapped. Chicago is the only place I've ever lived in my life, where you can just be hanging out with a couple friends, and you're driving down Lake Shore Drive late at night after just leaving somewhere, somebody in that car will always say, God it's pretty here.

It's only in Chicago. So let's talk about your son, and what went into planning for that. What went into planning to adopt? It's sometimes been on the back burner. When we bought our house four years ago, in Rogers Park, we bought it because we knew we were going to start a family. It's a big house. It's a family house. I used to think, man if I were with somebody like Dan Smith, it would be pretty easy. We go there as gay people. We have already mourned that loss of having a natural child.

We did that when we were teenagers, right? We figure it out. We know it, it's a given, we move on. So for us, we're in a place of all possibilities, this is great! We can have a kid! However, the other couples there, the straight couples are still in the mourning phase. They're there because they don't have a choice, and they're doing second best.

And it was kind of awkward because, things are going on, people are saying things, and jokes are right at the tip of my mouth and I'm like, shush. Bite it back, bite it back. We get in the car and I'm like, you know, when she said, she was asking how much it costs if there's twins, I wanted to say, you're looking for a two-fer. And he said, yeah me, too, but you can't make jokes in there, it's just not funny.

But, you know, the process took a while. The paperwork process takes a long time, it takes as long as you need it to. We kind of dragged our feet on it, it took longer, but we just wanted the paperwork to be perfect. It really didn't need to be, but once we went into the adoption pool, they said it takes between nine and 12 months. Tabbouleh is traditionally prepared with bulghur wheat and eaten as part of a mezze a selection of Middle Eastern appetizers. Most everyone has a traditional slaw recipe. But one summer night w Log In Forgot Password? Log In Register Now! Sample recipes from The Hearty Boys Cookbook: Talk With Your Mouth Full.

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