Donovan honed his culinary skills working in a variety of restaurants during his school years. After a stint with NASA, as a space science lecturer, he opened a couple of restaurants and a gourmet food distributorship in Marin County California. As a self-taught chef he also experimented with microwave cooking and developed a fine appreciation of this new form of cooking.

Donovan perfected his skill with microwave when he entered into a partnership with Arthur Friedman, a successful appliance dealer in Oakland California, to establish a chain of "microwave only" stores. Donovan taught the cooking classes and trained store franchises the techniques of real cooking by microwave.

From this experience he realized that most people needed more information on how use their microwave ovens for more than just reheating so he joined a television production company to create a series of microwave cooking shows that aired nationally on cable television. The success of this series led to the production of another series that aired nationally on PBS stations and The Learning Channel.

He has also demonstrated microwave cooking many times on Good Morning America, Regis and Kathie Lee, Joan Lundon's Mother's Day, The Nashville Network, CNN, and HGTV.

Donovan served as spokesperson for Rubbermaid, Del Monte, Hunt and Wesson and a number of other companies to promote their products. In this capacity he appeared on most major television and radio stations in the USA and also feature articles were published by most major newspapers. Articles on his cooking techniques appeared in Family Circle, Working Mother, and Parade magazines.

Because of his cooking and presentation skills he tested and developed cookbooks for various appliances including; convection ovens, halogen ovens, infrared ovens, pressure cookers, and even high quality pots and pans.

Many on these products he presented on shopping channels QVC, HSN, The Shopping Channel, and The Canadian Shopping Channel. After each of these projects he realized that the microwave oven cooked as well as these appliances and when combined with them much faster and better. This was the reason that he wrote his latest cookbook, Jump-Start Cooking, that combines microwave with conventional to produce recipes that look and taste as if cooked the old fashioned way but in a fraction of the time.