Beginning a Journey
We've all been there, flipping through the channels and seeing some fabulous looking food only to be found a few minutes later trying to recreate it in the kitchen. This eureka moment for me happened many, many years ago while watching Great Chefs of the World on PBS. Long before the days of the Food Network and the glamorous chefs like Alton Brown and Mario Batali I was admiring those wonderful dishes and wishing I could create the culinary masterpieces myself. I can still hear the soft woman’s voice describing and translating the European chefs as they whizzed around the kitchen. I was hooked on food for good, but it would take a decade before I was old enough and curious enough to really find my passions in the vibrant and varied world of cooking.

Specializing My Path
That journey started with making homemade pasta from all purpose flour, then wended around to making gourmet dishes for anyone who would eat them. Soon I found myself on the edge of cooking cuisine and moving into the realm of preserved foods. For a young bachelor I had an easy choice, homebrewing...and it sucked up all my life for almost two years. I just had to know every nuance about making my own beer, a desire that follows me into every aspect of my life. I pondered over every aspect of my recipes as I tried to create my own perfectly crafted brews. Eventually I ended up with a notebook full of cryptic homebrew recipes and an unsatisfactory experience. I then decided to cut my losses, put homebrewing on the back burner and try something else. That's when I realized I always had too much milk left in the fridge...hmmm what could I do with all this milk? Naturally the next weekend I was ordering up some cheesemaking supplies. I had found that a lot of the equipment I had purchased for homebrewing would spill over into cheesemaking, I just needed some specialty ingredients and I would be off.

Foods on Hold
Making cheese as a hobby didn’t last quite as long. It was time to get a real career and get my life moving. A decade later my career has grown as a web developer, I've got an awesome wife and two daughters and I am now in a permanent location about five miles from where I grew up. Then things started settling down again and the food part of my soul could be heard singing above all else. This time I had a welcoming audience there everyday to enjoy what I cooked and, who always with smiles would try my new experiments. Through nurture and support I quickly made a foray back into the food preserving world. Now with a home of my own I had access to and the resources needed to do the things I only dreamed of when I was younger. Since cheesemaking was where I left off...cheesemaking was where I started.

Coming Full Circle
The rest is really history now and all of my current exploits can be found throughout the pages of foodartisan.net. I discovered that cooking was as easy to fall back into as riding a bike. All the skills I picked up on the journey to my current state really matured my cooking and culinary knowledge. Coupled with the explosion over the years of free internet information and I made a massive evolutionary jump. I'm now making my own cheese presses, grinding my own sausage, baking worldly types of bread, engineering cold smokers and wondering where the next step will take me.

Making food has really become my greatest passion in life in all its different shapes and sizes. So much so that I needed an outlet and a place I could hopefully help others with. Food Artisan was born from that need and was created to be an extension of my love of food. You now know the passion that I put into my foods and the passions that I put into this website. I'm always happy to help anyone I can to make that first step into the culinary world, all you need to do is ask for help.

Contact Food Artisan
Email us at info@foodartisan.net