Each month, we get to know another Canadian food blogger and post our interview with them here.  This month, we feature Montreal based, Ken Sloan of www.afoodyear.com.  You’ll find some great recipes on his blog along with other great posts on gardening and home brewing.  You really need to check it out!

1. Who taught you how to cook?

My grandma was a cook by trade until she retired when I was still a little boy.  Together we would make cookies, pies and breads in her kitchen when I was very young.  It wasn't until I became a teenager that I really started to learn to cook though it was mainly out of necessity.

I was raised in Northern Alberta by a single mother, which meant very meat and potatoes type meals when she had time to cook, and lots of convenience foods when she didn't.  I became a vegetarian at age 14 (which is a strange thing to admit in an interview with the Chicken Farmers of Canada) and was forced to teach myself to cook or I would surely starve.

Years later when I hit my twenties I had absorbed as much ethical consciousness as I could, but not nearly enough protein, so I put vegetarianism on the back burner.  This opened up a whole new world of cookery and I haven't looked back since.  I spent a bit of time in restaurant kitchens and I went on to complete a degree in professional cooking here in Montreal in 2009.

2. What made you decide to start blogging about food?

I started blogging about food on January 1 of 2006 as a way of documenting a one year long project to eat (and cook) a different dinner every day of that year.  After completing the project and amassing an online catalog of several hundred recipes, I took a step back to evaluate whether or not I would continue to do so and for what purpose.  I now use A Food Year (www.afoodyear.com) as a way to both share and document the recipes I've enjoyed using and branched off to a second, less updated blog Bread is Pain (www.breadispain.com) for a scattering of Montreal restaurant reviews and opinion columns about food in general.

3. What is your favourite thing to make for friends and family?

It's just my wife and I living here, so I often don't cook very large meals.  When I do have the opportunity to cook for company, I don't have a favorite or go-to thing that I like to prepare.  Anything that gets the house smelling pleasant so people are greeted with that scent of home cooking when they walk in the door, whether that be a simple roasted chicken or a lasagna or something more elaborate, it doesn't really matter to me.  I try to cook seasonally and prepare things that take people out of their comfort zone a little bit, that opens them up to new experiences and potential new favorites.  I'll never get tired of hearing, "I never really liked X, but this is delicious!"  Showing people food in a different way and having that be as much a part of their memories as our visit is very important to me.

4. What is the most memorable thing you've eaten?

The first food "revelation" I remember having was when I first ate roasted red peppers when I was a teenager.  Something then just clicked, this realization that cooking can be so much more than just making food hot and safe to eat, that cooking in itself could add flavor that ingredients alone never could.  My first quintessential Montreal food memories are definitely deeply ingrained in me; the first time I had a smoked meat sandwich, the first time I had a Fairmount bagel.  I'll also always remember those little donuts from the fairgrounds when I was a kid - there was one stand in particular called Ken's Donuts.  I would have swore to you then that I would've grown up to take over that business.

5. What's the one ingredient you couldn't live without and why?

Salt.  Sodium is always getting so much flak from being concentrated in convenience products, but salt is such an important ingredient.  Historically, of course, as a preservative, but just in everyday chemical situations like making cooked vegetables green, controlling properties in baking and, of course, for flavor.  Salt, when used properly, makes everything taste "more like itself," so it's completely indispensable in the kitchen.