Frank Gonzales has a mission: "I want people to learn how to feed themselves better."

To do this, all people need to do is to learn a few basic techniques and how to trust their taste, he says.

As coordinator of noncredit courses at Kapi'olani Community College, the 39-year-old manages the largest for-the-public cooking school in the Islands, almost the only program on O'ahu with regularly scheduled classes aimed at "just folks."

Besides employing chef-instructors from the college, he recruits chefs, caterers and other culinary experts to teach the wide-ranging class series three times a year — fall, winter and spring.

But "noncredit" seems such a dismissive word for experiences that can profoundly change people's cooking lives.

A few years back, Lisa Cosigo, of Kaimuki, took chef-instructor Grant Sato's knife skills class — consistently among the college's most popular.

"I am so much more confident around knives. I know how to sharpen them, how to safely use them. And I can properly prep food. I learned how important an even cut was to — not just appearance — but to having the ingredients cook at the same rate," she said. "Plus, I love it when we have somebody over for dinner and they're watching me mince an onion or make a chiffonade and they're like, 'Wow!' That was one of the best Saturdays I ever spent."

For Gonzales, who tries to visit every class the school hosts, and often acts as a teaching assistant, that's the payoff: "It's so much fun to watch the light bulb go off. They come in with their hands shaking, we pair them up in teams when it's time to start cooking, and pretty soon they're going for it."

On the face of it, Gonzales is an unlikely person to be doing this job. The child of working-class third-generation Mexican-Americans, he grew up in the small town of Lindsey, Calif., an olive-growing region near Fresno. His mother made sure all her three sons learned how to take care of themselves (cook, clean, iron). But he had no intention of working around food.

His first goal was an engineering degree, but calculus tripped him up. Then he switched to political science, history, economics and language, thinking of diplomacy or the State Department.

But he had particularly good roommate karma, and that made all the difference.

From 1991 to 1993, Gonzales lived in Washington, D.C., where he worked as a political analyst for the federal government. There, he roomed with a State Department guy who was a gourmet cook, an Anglophile who also had a thing about Chinese cooking. "We'd sit down and have these formal meals. He'd literally make tea on the weekends," Gonzales recalled. One memorable Christmas, they threw a black-tie dinner: course after course, and 22 different desserts.

"It got me into the whole food lifestyle," Gonzales said.

Later, Gonzales returned to California, to Palo Alto, where he worked in market research for an international consulting firm, doing technical analysis and writing papers. The money was good but the work soon palled.

Again, a housemate, a Frenchman named Philippe Andre, provided welcome distraction. "He was the best home cook I ever met," Gonzales said, and soon they were cooking dinners together almost nightly.

"He was the one who taught me how to stop looking at the recipe and taste, trust yourself and taste — which is how you get to the next level."

Then Gonzales visited Hawai'i with a girlfriend, and another life change occurred. They ate plate lunch, Hawaiian food, a memorable dinner at Roy's in Po'ipu, Kaua'i. He remembers thinking, "I don't even know what this is. I can't even recognize anything on the plate, but the flavors were just knocking me out."

He told his friend, "If I could learn to do this, this is what I would want to do."

Back in California, being a researcher, he consulted with chefs and attended an open house at California Culinary Academy. He was told such a career involved long hours, hard work and low pay. He could go to school, or he could start on the bottom rung in a kitchen.

Then he called KCC, took a deep breath and, at 33, much older than most would-be chefs, dived into the Pacific. "I thought, 'If I don't do this now, I'm never gonna do it."

At school, he volunteered to work every event, did an internship on Lana'i. "I needed to catch up in a big way."

He made an impression, and when the previous noncredit coordinator left, he got the call.

And now, he says, "I honestly feel I'm in the right place at the right time, doing the right thing."

The No. 1 question in noncredit classes, he says, is: "Is it done?" His answer: "Did you taste it?" As his housemate told him years ago, "It's done when it tastes like something you'd serve to your mother."

Reach Wanda A. Adams at wadams@honoluluadvertiser.com.