John Michael Lerma

I grew up on a farm in North Dakota where I learned from my grandmother how to grow fruits and vegetables, prepare large meals, and can preserves. I was a double winner at the 2005 American Pie Festival in Celebration, Florida sponsored by Crisco and filmed for the Food Network Challenge.

I am the director of Culinary Tours to IL Rifugio in Cortona, Tuscany and a member of Slow Food USA. I live in Saint Paul, Minnesota, with my partner Chad and own daughter Heather.

After surviving the 1997 flood that destroyed my hometown of Grand Forks, North Dakota, I moved to the Twin Cities of Minnesota where I worked in management at a Fortune 500 company. I turned to cooking, gardening, and food preservation as a form of relaxation and to recapture the life of contentment that I knew growing up in the Red River Valley. Eventually, I began to enter my recipes in the Minnesota State Fair competitions and won numerous honors.