About Don Lesser

I’m interested in difficult cooking projects and words, le mot  juste, world flavors and local ingredients.

My background is this: English Lit  with some low-end  restaurant cooking, followed by a stint in Cambridge (more low end  cooking) and the start of a novel that took me to UMass  Amherst  for an MFA in Fiction. Finished the novel. Got into computers (pre-PC). Became a tech writer to avoid becoming academic migrant labor. The novel remains unpublished. Spent 25+ years as a tech writer, programmer, trainer, and business owner, while specializing in dinner  parties and general rooting out of interesting foodstuffs.

In 2003, I wrote an article about making fresh  pasta with a rolling pin (with quotes from Mario Batali and Lidia  Bastianach who I met at a local Books and Cooks event) that led  eventually to two columns in Northampton’s Daily Hampshire Gazette, Chef’s best, a monthly cooking column and No Reservations, a biweekly restaurant column from 2005 to 2010 and in Edible Pioneer Valley.

In 2008, I won the James Peterson Food Writing Passion Scholarship and was a finalist for the Greenbriar Scholarship and the Apicius scholarship at the Greenbrier Symposium for Professional Food Writers. In 2010, I was asked to be a judge for several Greenbrier scholarships.

Why russelnod? It’s Don Lesser backwards, more or less. The other anagram of my name is Nerd Loses and that will probably appear somewhere.