Hi, and welcome to SemiSerious Chefs. My name is Andrew, co-owner of this site along with my wife Vanessa. One of the many goals we have for this site is to share what we have learned throughout our culinary journeys. In fact, we hope to share everything we know with as many people as possible.

We are by no means professional chefs, but that doesn’t mean we can’t cook up something just as delicious from our kitchen at home!

Cooking can be quite the adventure as you begin experimenting with blending all kinds of new flavors and textures together. Sometimes it works, sometimes it most definitely doesn’t work, but that’s the fun of trying new things.

So with that being said, let me share with you the reason we decided to make this website. In February of 2011, our son Nathan was born. He was the best thing to happen to us. Unfortunately, he struggled to put on any weight no matter how much food we fed him.

Now, I know you didn’t come here to read something depressing so I’ll get to the point as quick as I can. Thank you to all the doctors and the pre-screening they do at early ages now, because they suspected something was wrong and told us they wanted to do a ‘sweat test’.

Sure enough. It showed that our son’s sweat had much more chloride than a normal healthy baby should have. Sadly, this led to the diagnosis that our son had what is known as Cystic Fibrosis, or CF for short. It is a hereditary disease that primarily affects the lungs, making lung function deteriorate over time. It also causes many other issues due to thickened mucus that patients have to live with including clogged sinuses, digestion issues, and pancreatic insufficiency.

It’s therefore our ultimate goal to help raise awareness and as much money as we can, towards finding a cure for this awful disease. Proceeds from this site will go directly towards research that will hopefully lead to finding a cure for Cystic Fibrosis.

Researchers have made great strides in the last couple years and are getting closer and closer to finding the cure. And that’s what we’re truly excited about.

If you have any questions about CF or what our daily life is like and what Nathan’s treatments consist of, please feel free to contact us. We’d love to hear from you.

So to make a long story short, Nathan’s diagnosis is what lead Vanessa and I to decide we didn’t want to work for anyone else our whole lives – we’d rather raise Nathan together at home. I (Andrew) in particular had a very hard time leaving for work each day with the knowledge of Nathan’s condition.

Up til this time we had basically lived in Alaska most of our lives, and although it’s an amazingly beautiful place, we ultimately decided we wanted to take Nathan to see different parts of the world. We were also getting to the point where we wanted to be closer to the rest of the world. Alaska is just plain far away from basically anywhere we wanted to go.

This lead us to make the decision to sell our four-plex, buy an RV, and travel to the east coast where we decided would be a good place to settle for a bit. Basically we were traveling as far away from Alaska as possible.

Along the way, we’ve really found our groove and enjoyed our time spent RVing for this leg of our journey. We’ve also documented our travels on video, and if you’ve like to check them out you can head to our YouTube channel Semiserious Chefs to take a look.

Finally, we as a family love to learn. Whether it be new recipes and cooking techniques, trivia, or the science behind how magnets work, we soak up as much information as we can. That is why we’ve decided to homeschool Nathan. There’s so much we want to teach him, and the best part is we’re learning new things along the way with him.

So with all that being said, before I bring this post to an end let me tell you a little bit more about each one of us.

Nathan, our son is one amazing kid who bounces off the walls non-stop, but is also super bright. He likes math and is exceptionally good at it for his age. Despite having CF, he is super healthy and loves to run around and give his dad a bad time. He spends most of his treatment time creating on various video games like Minecraft or Trials Fusion, or simply re-beating Dark Souls for the umpteenth time. He has also recently taken up the skill of mastering the Rubix Cube.

Vanessa is an outdoor enthusiast. She likes camping, photography, nature walks, and most definitely putting her Dutch oven to good use whenever she gets the chance. She is also the one who does all the finishing edits on our videos before we post them live.

I enjoy music, especially playing the guitar and the drums. Aside from cooking and music, I like working online doing web design and programming.

Finally, let us say one more thing, and this is very important to us. This is not a review site that tries to promote products just for the sake of earning commissions. We will speak truthfully in any product we recommend, period. If you buy something through an affiliate link great. If not, that is completely awesome as well.

The bottom line is this: At the end of the day, even if we haven’t made any money for ourselves, if we’ve helped raise money for the CF foundation, we’ve done our job. So take that for what it’s worth, and we hope you find value in this site.

Nathan at 3 years old