I started cooking professionally while I was in college at West Liberty University, back before it was even a university, around the end of 1999.

Sloppy Joes don't need reinventing. They need doing right, the kind of right that gets lost when everybody's rushing. Real ground beef, mashed fine, tenderized the same way a diner cook would, and a sauce built layer by layer instead of dumped from a can.

In 2016, we shot a documentary tracking the road that led here. The cross-country motorcycle trip covered over 13,000 miles, visiting kitchens, farms, fisheries, breweries, and bakeries before the decision to bring it all home to Wheeling. These cookies were at the end of that trip, and they are the only item that has always been available at Vagabond Kitchen. Now you can do what we do: take something everybody already knows, do it with intention, and don't apologize for the salt on top....