From the Air Force to the Kitchen: Why I Built BFAM

Five years. One month. One day.

That's how long I served in the United States Air Force. I can tell you the number down to the day because when you've given that much of your life to something, you don't forget.

I started in San Antonio for basic. Moved to Illinois for tech school at Chanute. Got stationed in Del Rio, Texas. Then Arkansas. Then New York. Then Indiana. Then Dallas. You learn to call a lot of places home when you're in the military. You learn to build community fast, because you don't always have a choice. And somewhere in all of that moving, food became the thread that ran through everything.

But if I'm being honest — that thread started long before the Air Force.

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It Started With My Nana

My grandmother was one of those women.

You know the ones. The Black women of the church who handle everything — the funerals, the fundraisers, the Sunday dinners after service. The women who cook for a hundred people the way most people cook for four. Who move through a kitchen with a confidence that doesn't come from a recipe or a cooking show — it comes from decades of feeding people and knowing exactly what it means.

My Nana was part of a whole community of women like that. They weren't just cooking. They were doing something older than any cookbook — they were holding people together through food. Keeping a culture alive. Saying you matter in the only language that never needs translation.

I grew up watching that. Absorbing it. I didn't know then what I was learning. I just knew the kitchen smelled like home.

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The Years in Between

Before BFAM, I worked in restaurants. Fast food places, small local spots — the kind of places where you learn that feeding people is real work, and that the people who do it don't always get the credit they deserve.

I understood kitchens. I understood the pace, the pressure, the satisfaction of getting an order right. But cooking for strangers is different from cooking for family.

In the military, you move so much that "family" gets redefined. Your unit becomes family. The people you're stationed with — people from completely different backgrounds, different cultures, different ways of cooking — become your people. You eat together. You share food. You figure out that the way someone grew up eating tells you almost everything you need to know about them.

I ate a lot of interesting food in the Air Force. And I carried all of it with me.

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The Turn

Here's when everything shifted.

My wife and I were doing what a lot of couples do — watching Food Network, talking about food, dreaming about dishes we'd never made. And at some point one of us said: why are we just watching this?

So we stopped watching and started doing.

We turned cooking into our thing. Not just making dinner — learning. We started traveling specifically to eat and learn. We'd go somewhere new and the question wasn't just "what are the sights" — it was "what do people cook here, and can we learn how?"

There's one night we still talk about. A wine and food event in New York City. We'd done the whole thing — the pairings, the courses, the conversation. And then dessert came out. That dessert landed the plane.

In the Air Force, that's what we called it when a mission was complete. When the crew came back, touched down, and everybody exhaled. The job was done. The ride was over. You made it home.

That's what this dessert did. It closed out the whole experience so perfectly that we just looked at each other and didn't need to say anything. We knew. We were in the right place, doing the right thing, with the right person.

We still talk about that dessert. And we've spent a lot of nights since then chasing that feeling — in our kitchen, in other cities, around tables with people we love.

That shift changed everything. Cooking stopped being something you do because you're hungry. It became the thing we did together — the adventure, the date night, the creative outlet, the way we showed up for each other and for the people around us.

And somewhere in there, BFAM started taking shape.

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What BFAM Actually Is

BFAM — Brother From Another Mother Cooking — is the intersection of everything I just told you.

It's my Nana's kitchen. It's the military family that keeps moving but always finds a way to eat together. It's the people I was stationed with who taught me that soul food isn't one thing — it's a feeling, and it shows up in every culture that knows what it means to cook from the heart. It's my wife and me figuring out that the best adventures happen around a table.

The tagline is: Recipes for the soul where culinary meets community.

That's not marketing copy. That's just what this place actually is.

We built BFAM for military families who are constantly starting over in new places and need food to feel like home. For veterans who carry their service history and their flavor history in equal measure. For POC communities whose culinary traditions deserve to be celebrated, not overlooked. For anyone who has ever sat at a table with people they love and understood, without saying a word, that this is what life is actually for.

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You're Part of This

If you're here, you're already part of the fam.

Whether you found us through a recipe search, social media, a podcast, or someone who said "you have to check this out" — welcome. Bring your appetite. Bring your stories. Bring your grandmother's recipes that have never been written down.

We want all of it.

Cook something this week that means something. And if you want to share it with us — tag @bfamcooking on Instagram and TikTok. We'll be watching.

— Jerome