User

In my former life, I was a musician.My passion for art first manifested itself in music. Throughout all of my schooling, I was involved in every musical opportunity that I could find, and although I did get a business degree and hold a respectable office job for a few years, I was never fully satisfied unless I was indulging my artistic side.Eventually, I decided that music should be my main focus, and I then spent several years playing on street corners and in restaurants and clubs. I had opportunities to travel to other parts of the country as well as overseas, and I took advantage of all of them. And, along the way, I made it a point to sample foods from everywhere I traveled, because I love trying new dishes whenever possible.Most of my culinary training up to this point had been informal, to say the least - looking over the shoulder of chef Mom as she prepared meals for the family, over a campfire with the Boy Scouts, or in that one kitchen where they hired me as a dishwasher, but through a random sequence of firings and quittings, I somehow found myself as the lunchtime chef without any training whatsoever.(As an aside, I would like to apologize wholeheartedly to the patrons who came in for lunch during this time - luckily, roughly 85% of them only wanted nachos)At home, my approach to cooking was adventurous yet wildly untamed. Everything was an experiment, and I often arrived at a completely different dish than the one I initially set out to make. I gave recipes only a partial glance (as one might do for a product manual for an electronic device that has been poorly translated from Japanese), and then did what felt right. Measurements where not in teaspoons and ounces, but in handfuls and "ehhh, about that much, maybe? " Nonetheless, my blunders began to eventually turn into edible creations, and I have now reached the point where my girlfriend has begun to demand that I cook all of our meals.However, even though I was now successfully creating dishes, I was like operating like a musician who had never learned to read sheet music, and thus I have now enrolled in a culinary management program here in Tampa, FL. My goal is to refine and hone my cooking skills, and to ultimately find a position in a professional kitchen where I may delight customers with delicious edible artwork.