SINGAPORE : He's a surreal gourmet, a culinary adventurer and a glutton for punishment. Though celebrity chef Bob Blumer has never had any professional training, he is living proof that with passion and creativity, you can turn your everyday meals into unforgettable dining adventures, and carve out a successful career doing so.

Known for presenting his food in unusual ways, the cook with a wacky sense of humour is always game for a challenge and finds joy in taking your everyday food and turning it into something fresh and unexpected.

“As the surreal gourmet I like to take foods that appear to be one thing but actually taste completely different,” Blumer said. However, he admits that when he wrote his first cookbook, it was not his intention to try to create unique dishes.

“Originally, my first cookbook had very basic recipes in it but the illustrations were surreal, so I just called myself the surreal gourmet. I did the illustrations because I couldn’t afford an illustrator. So the illustrations were like how Salvador Dali would make it look like,” said the Canadian who was formerly in the music business.

"And then people started saying, ‘Well if you’re the surreal gourmet what’s surreal about your food?'"

And that, he said, was when he found his “signature style”.

“So then I started making surreal dishes to kind of live up to my name. It seemed like a nice challenge, to be able to do that. I started creating these surreal dishes and it turned out to be a lot of fun so it ended up becoming my signature style.”

But after six years, Blumer decided to pack up and move out of his Toastermobile on TV series “The Surreal Gourmet” to “Glutton for Punishment”.

“Well it was just time [to move on to something new]. We had done five seasons of the show and made up as many different types of dinner parties as I could possibly imagine,” he said.

On “Glutton for Punishment”, Blumer said, “I’m a very competitive person by nature, and so the whole notion of doing a show that was all about competitions where I would try to beat highly-trained professionals at their own game. It just really appealed to me.”

Though Blumer has always been fond of cooking, he never imagined he could carve a career from it.

“I didn’t really find my cooking career. It found me. I was actually in the music business, but I loved to cook. So as a little pet project I wrote a cookbook. And somehow, miraculously, I tricked somebody into allowing me to publish the cookbook,” he joked.

“And then, even more miraculously it sort of found an audience and the people seemed to enjoy it. And then it just turned into my accidental career.”

Blumer’s first book, “The Surreal Gourmet: Real Food for Pretend Chefs”, was so well received that he decided to release a second book, “The Surreal Gourmet Entertains: High-fun, Low-Stress Dinner Parties for 6-12”. His third, “Off The Eaten Path: Inspired Recipes for Adventurous Cooks” went on to win the “most innovative cookbook” at the prestigious World Cookbook Fair.

Despite all that, the ever-ambitious Blumer has more up his sleeve – a new TV series.

Said Blumer, “I’m working on a new television show called ‘The Hard Times Hedonist. It’s all about reducing your grocery budget but still increasing the flavours you put into food.”

And before we ended this interview, we asked Blumer: If you were a food, what food would you be?

The witty chef replied, "I think I’ve discovered that I would be a durian because I’m hard on the outside, soft on the inside. And I’m a little bit stinky sometimes.

"I’m definitely an acquired taste. So I guess that makes me a durian," he added cheekily.

The third season of his series “Glutton for Punishment” airs next month on the Discovery Travel and Living channel (StarHub cable channel 16).

- CNA/ap