Food For Thought Cookbook

I was born in the 3rd ward section of Houston Texas, and there were eight siblings; six boys and two girls, Ronald, the late Bobbye Wagner, the late Johnnie Wagner, Chef OJ (Otis), Sandra, Gary (Joe), (twins) Kelvin and Melvin Wagner. My father was a baker in the US army and they called them ’dough heads’. This was back in the early 1950s. My father did a lot of baking around the house when I was a kid and this is what sparked me on this journey and when I began to develop my love for food. I didn’t become a chef until 1988. I started out as a yellow cab driver in Manhattan, New York and realized this was not what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. So I enrolled in the New York Food and Hotel Management School (now known as Star Career Academy) where I took up gourmet cooking, baking and catering.(My Beloved son Chef Lawrence Wagner graduated from the same culinary school 30 years later) At that time, I was 38 years of age and memories of my late father baking in the kitchen were still fresh in my mind and is still a motivating force to this day. My late mother Lillian Echols Wagner was a bilingual school teacher for over thirty years. She raised all eight of us and went back to college and gained her degree. So, it was from my mother that I got my determination. A. Thousand Thanks Mother Love you more!!!