Greetings fellow foodies!

Hi, nice to see you, we have your table tight over here, come on in!

My name is Lee Mathis and I will be your host for this blog. In this blog, I hope to entertain you with Culinary Tales, Stories, Events and such from a Foodie Point of View, yes, I am an unabashed Foodie! I love to cook; I love to find out why other people love to cook and what this great area has to offer.

I love the Grand Valley! Plain and Simple! I moved here from New Jersey, via a 20 year or so detour in Northern California and for whatever reason, found a home. About two years after I moved here, I found myself wondering what I was going to do with the rest of my life as I just wasn’t happy with the path it had swerved onto. After over 20 years in the newspaper industry, I just wasn’t happy and looked back on my life to see if there was something that made me happy and I realized that I had always loved to cook.

Whether it was flipping pizzas on the Steel Pier in Atlantic City, cooking steak and eggs at The Ranch House or making Silver Dollar pancakes at Nash’s Beef and Beer, both on the Boardwalk, also in Atlantic City, doing ‘Protein Feasts’ for my roommates, friends and neighbors in Sonoma, California or just seeing a recipe in the newspaper that I had to try, I just LOVE TO COOK!! So, why not see if I could make a living doing what I loved?

Upon some research, I found out that Mesa State had a Culinary Program and was told to give Dan Kirby a call and made a call that would help shape the next version of my life.

Now, Dan did not know me from Adam, yet spent over 3 hours the next day talking to me, not just about Mesa State’s Culinary Program, but the path I had been on and where I wanted to go. I applied the next day and was accepted into the program.

About three or four weeks into the program, I brought in a cheesecake that I had been making for years, a Vermont Maple Cheesecake and one of my Chef instructors, Chef Jon St. Peter, took a bite, then another and asked me where he could buy one. I thought about it for a minute and said, “Give me 90 days!’. After meeting with the Small Business Incubator people, I opened Decadence Gourmet Cheesecakes 90 days later. We celebrated our 5th Anniversary this past August.

What I hope to do with this blog is to have some fun! There is too much stress and worrying in our lives and, at least in my mind, food and cooking is a way to escape a little from that. I will be interviewing some of the ‘food’ people around the Valley, letting you know what makes them tick, and maybe posting some recipes that you may actually want to try out at home and a little bit more.

I also would love to hear from you! Have you been to a restaurant that you just loved? Was there a dish that just blew you away? Is there a recipe that you would like to see? Drop me an note and I will see what I can do!

So,Welcome to my little world of food and foodies!!