Chef Charles Michael has enjoyed cooking and baking since his grandmother taught him as a child, learning “That the best way so show people you love them is to cook for them.” While he cooked and baked his whole life, Charles has worked at his technology company founded in college writing software, websites, and mobile apps to this day. It was some 25 years after college that Charles took the time to formally go to culinary school to further chase his passion and love for cooking and baking. One of the biggest reasons he was never a restaurant chef, was the fact that he was a people person, and chef’s get stuck in the back of a restaurant. Besides technology, he’s catered, thrown events and parties, wrote nutrition and cookbooks, won chili cookoffs, and lent his talents as spokesperson to large foodie events like the Taste of Dallas and many other venues.
At 48 he moved to a small town in Wisconsin, where it was tough finding ways to use his culinary passions in a town that has less people than attended some his parties. For years Charles had been creating his own recipes and collecting, testing, and tweaking others while adding beer or wine pairing notes. He had a file cabinet of recipes which stacked over 4 feet tall and a library with over 1500 cookbooks, each tabbed and bookmarked with tested recipes. It began by sorting the recipes by his passions: International Cooking, Barbecue, Wine Dinners, Party Food, Catering, Appetizers, Xmas Cookies and Best Courses. It looked overwhelming until he found a .99 phone app that could photograph a recipe and return it to a text file which was pasted into each cookbook file.
While helping a friend throw a wine dinner in Dallas, he realized that he consulted over 30 cookbooks choosing courses that paired with the wine selections that were to be served. It was then and there that Charles decided on a theme to his future cookbooks, “Easy to Plan Parties” with all the course recipes, party size multipliers, and noting wine and craft beer pairings. Chef Charles Michael received his formal training in Pastry Arts and Culinary Arts at El Centro College in Dallas, Texas and received his Sommelier Certification from the National Wine School. He maintains a small vineyard where he makes his own wine, builds cedar strip canoes, and travels far and near for good barbecue, wine, and/or craft beers.
Visit ChefCharlesMichael.com for more information about chef and his cooking adventures.