Mine starts in a campus garden, with a grain nobody had asked me to cook. Sorghum wasn't on the syllabus. It wasn't in the pantry the culinary school stocked, and it definitely wasn't on the plate they expected from a student trying to impress.
I popped my first batch of sorghum in a dry pan because I didn't have popcorn, and I didn't have the budget to buy any. It jumped and cracked exactly like maize does, smaller and nuttier, and I remember standing over the stove thinking: why has no one told me about this?
That question became the whole project. Not "how do I make indigenous grains palatable to people," but "why did I not grow up knowing this."
Every recipe on this site starts from that same irritation. Popped sorghum on a brownie sundae isn't a garnish — it's a small correction. A reminder that the ingredient was always there, doing interesting things, waiting for someone to take it seriously.
Not all stories begin with once upon a time. Some begin with a dry pan, a stubborn grain, and a question that wouldn't leave you alone.