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Community Corner

Cooking and Computers Fuel Renton Man's Passion for Volunteering

Steve Denison helps local charities by cooking up a storm.

What do computers have in common with Chinese cooking?  Nothing, really.  Except possibly Steve Denison, who has a flair for both.

Denison is retired now, but spent 14 years working for the as their Application Support Supervisor.  He grew up in California and was trained to work on computers while in the Air Force.

“We worked on one of those old mainframe computers,” laughs Denison.  “It was twice the size of my living room.” 

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That experience put Denison in a good place to build a career, and when he and his wife, Betty, moved to Renton, he worked as an Information Technology consultant.  Five years later, he landed a job with the City.

In those early days, Denison didn't volunteer much, cultivating instead his love for Chinese food.

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“I've always been kind of a foodie,” he says.  “I got my first electric wok when I was in college.”

He took some cooking classes and began putting his skills to use entertaining friends.  As his culinary skills grew, Don Persson invited him to stage a dinner at his home on Renton Hill.  Denison was honored and showed up with crates and boxes filled with raw ingredients and set about preparing the elaborate dinner in stages.  Guests participated in the cooking process, chopping and mixing ingredients.

“It didn't go so well,” admits Denison.  “While I tried to supervise people, they were chopping all wrong and taking forever.”

Eventually, , stepped in to help with the chopping and yet still, the dinner didn't end until eleven o'clock.   

The dinner couldn't have been a complete failure, however, because eventually someone asked him to donate one of his dinners to the Rotary auction.  That opened the flood gates. By his estimation, he's donated three or four dinners a year now for almost 10 years, benefiting such organizations as the Special Olympics, Renton Historical Society, Renton Community Foundation and the Unitarian Church.

“I used to hold the dinners at the donor's homes,” says Denison.  “That was twice as much work, because I not only had to think of every little thing I needed, I had to pack and unpack and then help clean up.” 

Today, he holds the dinners at his own home overlooking Lake Washington teaching the secrets of Asian cooking to a variety of guests.  Having learned from that initial mistake, he also prepares everything in advance.  I attended one of these dinners just last week and was duly impressed with how well-organized Denison was in orchestrating a complicated six-course dinner.  Denison patiently explains how to mix, stir, and fry, even taking guests into the garage to use the Big Kahuna gas burner needed to heat up a huge wok. 

“If someone does something wrong, I can usually fix it.  Chinese food is pretty forgivable.  The only thing I can't fix,” he says with a sly smile, “is if someone uses too much hot sauce.”

Denison not only foots the bill for the dinner, he spends approximately 2-3 hours shopping for ingredients for soups, stir frys, appetizers or noodle dishes, another three to four hours preparing the ingredients, and another four to five hours staging the event itself.  He even provides copies of printed recipes for guests, or directs them to his web site for more information.  If you're lucky (like I was) you might even go home with leftovers.   

Although Denison doesn't consider himself a Chinese chef, he used to teach a class at the Renton Community Center and admits he's, “pretty good.” 

Denison is also pretty good at computers and has expanded his volunteering in that direction as well.  Currently, he serves as the Renton Community Foundation's web master, and is helping to migrate the Renton Rotary web site.  But Denison hasn't limited his volunteer activities to cooking and computers.  While his wife serves on the Renton Historical Society Board, he volunteers on Saturdays as a museum greeter.

“The museum couldn't open on the weekends if it weren't for the volunteers,” he tells me.

In his spare time, Denison has traveled for pleasure to places like Hungry, China (of course) and Ireland.  But he's also participated on a Rotary trip to India to pass out polio drops, and to Romania with his church as part of a cultural exchange.

When asked why he volunteers, Denison says, “I like to have a sense of giving back.  I mean, what are you going to do when you retire?  You can't play all the time.”

Some might disagree.  But then, what is play, but doing what you love?  And for Steve Denison, that's cooking.

 

 

 

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