About

I love to eat. That should come as no surprise to those that know me. What might come as a surprise to people is that I also love to cook. As of late, I have also become quite fond of writing about and photographing food. In fact, I love just about everything there is to love about food. This love affair with food has been a part of who I am for as long as I can remember.

At an early age, I was mesmerized by what I saw on cooking shows; the “Great Chefs” series on the Discovery Channel was an early and influential favorite program of mine. Having grown up in New York City, I was fortunate to have exposure to a tremendous variety of great food at an early age. As a young adult, I often subjected my tolerant and taste-impaired family to my early dinner experiments, eventually moving on to my first real cooking job at the young and impressionable age of 17 when my parents shipped me off to a remote part of Upstate New York to cook in a camp kitchen for a summer. I loved every minute of it and became convinced that I wanted to open up my own restaurant, so I enrolled at Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration to learn how to turn that dream into reality. For a number of reasons…poor timing, lack of focus, short attention span, desire to make easy money, easy access to cheap beer…during college I decided to put the knives down and focus on a career in Finance. After spending the last 14 years since graduation flailing about from one unfulfilling analyst job to another, never to stick with a company or position long enough to make any meaningful advances in my career, I decided that enough was enough.

In May of 2009, I enrolled in the Professional Chef’s Program at The Cambridge School of Culinary Arts in order to engineer a long overdue career change. In order to fit this into my schedule, I began to reduce the number of hours per week that I worked at my regular desk job, thus beginning the process of slowly weaning myself off of Finance, hopefully for good. At the beginning of 2010, I finally left my Finance career behind and in March, I graduated from the CSCA with high honors. With school complete, I’m now working towards finding my niche within the food industry.

I initially started See Dan Cook as a way to document my journey through culinary school, but it’s become much more than that to me, especially with school now behind me. This blog has provided a way for me to celebrate all things relating to food, including my adventures in home cooking, some of my favorite recipes and food photographs, highlights from the ‘road’ (in the rare event that my minuscule student budget permits me to travel or eat out), reports from different food-related events that I attend, along with assorted other thoughts and rants. So keep visiting See Dan Cook for more on all of this, I’m just getting started!

Thanks for stopping by,
-Dan