whoami

Why am I writing about food and why do I love cooking? The answer to this question starts in my great aunts Romanian country house, during a host summer i n 1993 when I was 6. We used to always spend our summer holidays here, we had a huge garden, full of everything, from cherries in the spring, to watermelons, salads, eggplants, all the vegetables and almost all the fruit you can find in summer, and pears, apples and grapes in the autumn.There was a small flower garden bordering the front of the house, with red roses, I still have a small scar on my leg from playing in the roses.

Another important part of these holidays were my grandfather’s and great aunt’s bee hives, the taste of the best acacia honey on breakfast toast or with fresh creamy cheese. My love for cooking started here a summer day, my great aunt was cooking a dish with vegetables, and I was fascinated by all the attention and technique she put into the preparation and was following her around the kitchen. She saw I was interested, so she gave me a mission, she told me to take the vegetable peelings and try to cook them as I thought better. It’s not a mystery that I didn’t know a lot about cooking at 6 years old, but still she tasted my cooking and she was nice enough to compliment it, she gave me some tips about how to improve the taste. In addition to this first experience, I have the luck to have grandmother and parents that loved to cook great food, each time I plan a dinner or a new cooking experiment, my olfactory memory takes me back to my childhood. In order to get to my grandmother’s kitchen when I came back from school for lunch, I had to get across the whole house, perceiving gradually the scents coming from the kitchen, they never disappointed me.

My love for cooking and good food developed greatly when I finished highschool and went to France to study. It is well known that French food and cooking is inspiring and just awesome, but what pushed me to cook was being part of a community, for me one of the most important purposes of cooking is to share it with people, be it a dinner party with friends or just a birthday cake. Whenever I plan to try a recipe or a menu, I usually plan to share it with others. When I started working, I used to ask my colleagues, I used to ask them what kind of cake they would like for their birthdays, the pleasure for me was in the challenge of a new recipe and the chance to share my results with my colleagues.

My husband and I love good food and travelling, so trying local restaurants or bed & breakfasts is a great part of our holidays, and when I taste something great, I always ask for the recipe.

The recipes you’ll find on this website come all from the heart, have be tried by myself, you will thus find dinner menus, birthday cakes, holiday recipes from France, Romania, and other countries I have visited. Enjoy, and don’t hesitate to ask for any advice, or suggest any recipes for me to test,it is always a pleasure.

• Share this article: