Cory Gallant has a zest for the good food things in life.
And he has taken this self-fostered interest in a new online direction with his blog, Zestycook.com, which shares his love of food with the world.
“My premise around creating zestycook was a one-stop shop to find everything you would need for cooking,” Gallant says from the kitchen in the Marshfield home he shares with his wife, Janet Gallant, and their two children, Carter, five, and three-year-old Ella.
Gallant’s interest in food in all its forms was fostered by lots and lots of kitchen time as a child.
“I’ve been cooking with mom since I was six or seven — baking, cooking. I cooked at home all through high school, so it has been just a regular thing for me to do,” he smiles.
“It’s different. For some reason it’s just a way to step away from the real world and do something you like and eat it when it’s done.”
As a director of a software consulting firm, it was only natural that his interest in software and bakeware would blend to form a blog that has close to 8,000 subscribers from around the world.
“I’ve probably been consulting in the blogging world since 2004, helping other people create blogs in their communities,” Gallant says.
“(Around) 2008 I thought, ‘well I help everyone write blogs. Because I love to cook why don’t I start my own cooking blog and see where it goes?’ So that’s kind of how zestycook.com was created.”
His blog went online in July 2008.
“I think I went months without telling anybody but my immediate family about it because I didn’t want to get the big hype and then I would stop doing it. So I wanted to make sure that A — I really enjoyed it; B — I knew what I was doing; and C — OK, now it’s at a point where it’s worthy, so to speak,” Gallant says.
“I remember the first time I checked and I had eight subscribers and I was like, ‘wow, eight people are reading this thing.’ So that was kind of neat.”
From there, things just exploded like a soufflé gone wild.
Gallant has been a guest speaker at a number of conventions, including a healthy living conference in Boston in 2009 where he spoke in front of more than 15,000 people in the audience and virtually online.
He has also written some magazine articles and now authors a popular food column in the hip new P.E.I. publication, G!.
