My appearance on Fox 5 Good Day Atlanta felt like a full-circle moment because my connection to Fox television and cooking began decades earlier.
During the summer between my junior and senior years of high school, I earned an internship at Fox 13 KSTU in Salt Lake City, where I grew up. During my senior year, the station offered me a job as floor director for the morning show.
The show began at 5:25 a.m., but I arrived around 4:30 each morning before heading to high school afterward. It was an unusual schedule for a teenager, but it became the beginning of a television career that would continue for many years.
Around the holidays, my family always made tamales together. My first few months, as I was quick to share food, I brought a generous sample to the station for the morning-show crew. During an informal tasting in the break room, weather personality Henry Stone ate more tamales than he expected and started asking me questions about how they were made.
He hosted a chef demonstration feature and asked, “Can we have your mom and grandmother on the show?”
My grandmother was too old to appear, but my mother agreed, even though she was incredibly shy.
Around January 1999, my mom appeared on Fox 13 and showed Henry how to make tamales. Throughout the morning, Henry talked about me and our family’s holiday tradition. The anchors ate the tamales on set, and I joined them during the live broadcast to talk about the food.
Years later, I would return to a Fox morning show in a completely different role. This time, I was on Fox 5 Good Day Atlanta as Chef D.Mart, sharing the cookbook inspired by the food, techniques, and traditions that began with my family.
