Joseph Madson has been cooking all of his life, and now he is cooking to raise money for a personal mission in Mexico.

Madson, known as Chef Joseph, will conduct cooking classes Sept. 29 and Oct. 15, at the Oklahoma Cooperative Extension Service Center, 316 E. Oxford. On Sept. 29, the class will be French cooking, and Oct. 15, he will feature Italian cooking.

Madson has been cooking for 25 years. He started at 15 working as a salad-maker and coffee boy in a restaurant. From there, he went to a grocery store delicatessen and a Boy Scout camp, where he fed 300 people every meal during the summer. By 16, he had remained in the restaurant business as a waiter and was trained at a Denny’s restaurant, where the manager told him he needed to learn how to cook.

“After college, I moved to Las Vegas thinking I knew how to cook,” he said.

In Las Vegas, he was hard-schooled in cooking and got into the industry working with chefs who taught him how to cook French and Italian, along with German, Russian and Greek. He worked as a line chef in Las Vegas, where he learned the trade, he said.

“I would learn all they had to teach me, then move on to someone else,” he said.

Currently, he is in missionary service in Mexico, part time. He travels to Mexico about six months of the year. He became acquainted with Patti Wilber, who helped him set up a cooking class through the Alfalfa County OSU Extension and Northwestern Oklahoma State University Walch Center for Business Development in Cherokee.

Some of the students in that class began helping set up the Enid classes.

“I have been marketing myself as a personal chef for several years anyway, and it seemed like an idea to help support the mission trips to Mexico,” he said.

Meals in the classes will be five-course meals prepared by the students, and at the end of the evening, everyone sits down and eats together. His Italian meal includes antipasto, soup and salad, a main course of eggplant parmesan/chicken parmesan served with fresh marinara sauce and angel hair pasta. He also plans a vegetable and dessert.

The French meal includes an appetizer, soup and salad, Beef Wellington and dessert.

The cost of the class is $35 each, and there is limited availability. For information, call Marlene Buck, Extension educator for Family & Consumer Science, at 237-1228.