Your Rovers
Chef Shelley Jaffe
I chose food as my art at the age of 18 months old while watching my great, great aunt make a lattice top pie. By the time I was 10 I was cooking dinners for my sister and my single mother. In my teens, that same great, great aunt, along with my grandmother, helped me hone my cooking and baking skills, while my uncle taught me how to garden. Throughout my teens I spent my summers working in Farmer Pritchett’s fields, and my evenings and weekends cooking and baking for the family, often using fresh, local ingredients.
At 22 I was fortunate enough to start my culinary career with Food Services of America and learned under four accomplished chefs, two of which were CIA (Culinary Institute of America) graduates who I also happened to live with at the time. Unfortunately, I found out early in my career that most places opened cans and pulled things from the freezer, and I quickly became disenchanted and struck out on my own.
By the time I was 30 I was catering using fresh, local ingredients grown in Washington State. I grew up farm-to-table, so it only made sense to me to carry this into my career. I later created, opened and ran a profitable organic farm-to-table restaurant. Unfortunately, the majority owner developed Alzheimers and we were forced to close. But like everything in my life, it was a learning experience for me and gave me the confidence needed to own and operate my own place.
In 2018 my husband Larry and I opened The Scone Age Bakery and Cafe in Dunedin, Florida. I took traditional European-style pastries and breads and made them healthier, as well as developing a line of grain-free, gluten-free baked goods using whole food ingredients. Unlike many others creating these baked goods, mine did not contain refined ingredients like starches and refined nut and coconut flours. I chose to use freshly milled nuts, as well as cassava flour.
It was a huge success, but I still was not satisfied. I wanted to do more to create truly nutrient-rich treats, teach people how to easily create healthy and delicious meals, and to reconnect people with local farms and with the earth that provides them with life.
Poet Larry Jaffe
Born in the Bronx, in the shadows of Yankee Stadium. He slapped the doc and pinched the nurse much to his own delight and the chagrin of his parents, thus shaking the rafters of baby boomers one and all. Jaffe heralds in a new era of neo-urban metrics. His words defy gravity even when painted on walls. They are shadows written on the bunkers of evil. He lets no villain go unscathed. He is a new kind of poet, one that tramples on fame and mediocrity and holds the written work accountable for the spoken. He is a poet of the people, a veritable folk-poet climbing out of the gutters of conformity, never to be constricted by the yokes of the plain and boring. He reaches for the golden ring and may miss but never ever stops reaching.
He uses his art primarily to promote human rights. His work has been translated into over a dozen languages. He was the poet-in-residence at the Autry Museum of Western Heritage, a featured poet in Chrysler’s Spirit in the Words poetry program, co-founder of Poets for Peace (now Poets without Borders) and helped spearhead the United Nations Dialogue among Civilizations through Poetry project which incorporated hundreds of readings in hundreds of cities globally using the aesthetic power of poetry to bring understanding to the world. He was the recipient of the Saint Hill Art Festival’s Lifetime of Creativity Award, the first time given to a poet, and was past Poet Laurette for Youth for Human Rights and Florida Beat Poet Laureate. He has several books including: The Anguish of the Blacksmith’s Forge, One Child Sold, Unprotected Poetry, In Plain View, 30 Aught 4 and A Man without Borders. He is currently the Poet in Residence on the planet Earth.
He is devoted to his wife’s dreams and promise to work wonders as we rove the country.