What's a camp cook to do in his spare time?

"What's your weakness at a sale?" asked reporter Kathy Hay Khay. The Cornwall Standard Freeholder featured business owner Mike Logan on October 20 in the on-line article, "For Mike Logan, it's all about the food."

"The yard sale! Obviously," responded Logan, owner of Logan's Gallery & Gift Shop in Cornwall, Ontario, "I never buy art."

"Kitchen gadgets. How many spatulas do you have? I have 25."

Six hand-blenders and two Kitchen Aide mixers top the collection. Logan mixes paint with one of the hand-blenders.

His passion for collecting kitchen makes sense when you consider his earlier career in food. Logan managed a large delicatessen until 1990, when Logan turned his passion for wildlife photography and picture-framing into full time business.

Logan's passion for food (and kitchen gadgets) never left him. It seems to have started in August 1971, when "jumped ship" from camp counseling right into the kitchen at Camp Pioneer in eastern Ontario.

"The next year he was made the camp cook and went from preparing meals for 35 people his first day, to 250 by his last that summer," wrote Khay.

Logan's "passion for cooking caught up with him again in 2004." This time he came full circle and opened a tea room at the gallery.

My guess is that Logan put those blenders and Kitchen Aide mixers to work, making "eight-egg quiches and four-layer cakes."

"Kitchen stuff is nuts," said Logan in the interview. "It's crazy."