I am a Canadian born food enthusiast with way too many hobbies working in IT as an End User Computing Architect.
I'm 35, married with 2 kids (3yo & 6yo) currently living in Drouin, Australia (Dairy Country) and commute daily 100km by train to Melbourne where I work in Docklands area.
When I was a teenager I was super fussy eater, only eating spaghetti bolognese, hamburgers, and pizza. My parents taught me to cook by necessity, leaving me home alone at 14 yo with just a pizza recipe and the raw ingredients.
During high school (home schooled) I did odd computer programming jobs and performed Scottish/Irish folk music around the Nova Scotia countryside with my family
After high school I immediately got a job as a Software Tester. After a year of that I started a crazy crazy work schedule for a year:
8 am - 3 pm = Working in office, configuring Industrial Process Control Software
4 pm - Midnight = Working as dishwasher, laundry, kitchenhand at a steak house in Halifax, Canada
I loved working in the restaurant far more than the corporate world, so went to Sydney, Australia and tried to start a chef apprenticeship. I worked at the Sydney Opera Bar when it first opened but i was way tooooo slow for this fast paced kitchen (300 people served/hr) So I got fired...
Moved to North East China for a year and taught English to 1,500 high school kids a week, and learnt to cook various styles of Chinese foods - North East, Cantonese, Sichuan, Hunan, Mongolian.
Food was amazing in China esp. in Hunan, which is where I had my favorite foods in China...
After this experience came back to Melbourne, and back working in IT...
Found ChefSteps and watched all the videos and recipes for a year before I finally made the dive into Sous Vide. I bought Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking and think it is the most amazing book about food ever..
I also like cooking with charcoal and Kamado.
On Friday nights I frequently do a massive load of baking, specialising in Asian and American Breads, which I sell on a small scale (~500 bread rolls)
Dream one day of running some kind of food based business fulltime...maybe 10 years from now...Such as a beach side BBQ, burger or pizza joint by the sea in the Philippines....
For now I'm mainly in food research mode....
