About Me

My name is Ken Sloan and I live in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. I like it here. I live here with my wife, Shannon, and a pair of sugar gliders. They like it here too.

My first glimpse into the world of food was with my grandma, who showed me how to make breads, pies, cookies and even playdough, though we could never remember which of her two cookbooks had the good recipe for that.

It wasn’t grandma who inspired me to cook though – that came out of necessity. When I was 14 I decided I would become a vegetarian. The hardest part at first was simply remembering that I’d made that decision and not accidentally eating meat. Once it set in though, finding something to eat became much more difficult. I grew up in a small town in Alberta, where potato was the only vegetable and anything else was steak. Eventually I figured out ways to subsist, but when I moved out 3 years later, I started to yearn for more than that.

I wasn’t a particularly good cook at that age, but over the next couple years being able to cook at all certainly made people fonder of me. I started to seek out anything that was new to me, which was a lot, since I hadn’t been exposed to much growing up. Risotto and sushi were exotic conquests. I became infatuated with roasting vegetables to bring out their sweetness and learning to make meatless items taste more meaty to appease my roommate.

Being a vegetarian had its advantages. It was always a conversation starter, and I had the ability to shock and awe people by eating a hot wing. Unfortunately it was doing little for me in terms of health. I was overweight and felt lethargic often. One day, one of my co-workers announced she was going to do the Atkins diet. I, for whatever reason, agreed to join her in this endeavor, despite the hurdles of doing so while vegetarian. On day one she’d already foibled, but I’d dedicated myself to it for two weeks and I wasn’t about to give in because she had. After those two weeks, I felt healthier, more energetic, and dropped an impressive amount of weight.

Nearly six years after I’d adopted vegetarianism, on March 17th (St. Patrick’s Day) 2003, I sat down for a meal of chicken Florentine with a pint of Guinness and never looked back. I got myself a Safeway club card and bought a couple hundred dollars worth of two for one roasts, chops and so on, and set out to learn how to cook flesh. In less than a year I’d achieved my ideal weight and felt better than ever, and an interest in nutrition had been born as well.

From then on, without limitation, every meal was a new canvas. I came up with the idea for A Food Year because people kept asking me to write a cookbook. I set out to eat a different dinner every day of the year and document the experience. I didn’t write a cookbook, but the more that I learned and discovered, the more I realized just how little I knew still.

I finished at the top of my class in culinary school. I do not wish to be a professional cook or chef, but I am deeply fond of food. I do what I can to educate myself on all aspects of the subject. I one day aspire to find my niche, whatever it may be.