Great story in The Chicago Tribune about Chef Curtis Duffy. It’s the story of a small town kid whose upbringing was less than ideal. When he was a teenager, his father killed his mother and then himself. But Curtis found a love and found a person, his home economics teacher, who would nurture it.

Slowly Curtis re-entered the world, and he seized upon the one stable thing in his life: the kitchen. When he’d first started cooking five years earlier, the kitchen was a place to run away to from the fighting at home, a place that kept him from bullying neighborhood kids.

Now his parents were dead. Every hour focused on cooking was another hour not dealing with his confusion and anger.

Curtis worked his way up from dishwasher to line chef to chef de cuisine until he decided to open his own restaurant. It’s a great story and touches on so many of the things that we treasure about our country. Hope you’ll read it this weekend.