My Story
My love for cooking began after I started travelling the world.
I did not grow up discovering recipes in my mom’s kitchen or baking together with my grandmother. In fact, I had no interest in eating nor cooking. I was a very difficult eater, there were many things I did not like. You know, the typical person where everyone said that she would be such a difficult one, one day. Even more, I was never at home when I was younger, I was too busy discovering everything about life, except food.
Oh, how things can change.
My Journey
Like I say, I always had a passion for travelling and discovering the world, minus the food aspect. As a child, my parents used to take us camping in France, which was very exciting, but the rest of the world was waiting for me.
After graduating in business administration, I landed a sales job in an international steel company. Finally, I could travel, which is how I finally discovered local food, local products and local flavours. During my yearly holidays, I took my backpack and travelled to Asia, Africa, South America and the Middle East where a world of flavours opened up to me. I was now intrigued by spices and by aromas. Where most tourists come home with piles of souvenirs, I came home with bags of different spices. I could not wait to recreate the dishes I had tried abroad, in my own creative way.
My Food
So that’s when my passion for food, flavours and cooking started. For my work I lived 6 years in Madrid, Spain, a foodies heaven, but in 2008, I finally quit my job to follow my passion and started working in tourism. I went to Southern Africa where I worked as a tourist guide. What I loved about the job was that I could combine my 3 passions in 1 job; travel, photography (Africa has some amazing photographic opportunities) and cooking. Indeed, part of my job was to cook local African dishes for groups of up to 30 people in the bush, often just on an open fire.
There I discovered that you don’t need fancy equipment to make a delicious meal for a group of people, just some basic kitchen items and a gas stove or open fire. I learned to be a creative cook, to cater for various diets with hardly any means or shopping for food possibilities.
Why The Tasty Chilli?
With The Tasty Chilli I would love to share my ideas on how world cooking can be easy and simple. My dishes are not authentic, original, cookbook recipes, but created with flavours from a specific cuisine (or mixed), made with ingredients that are available in my pantry and that don’t need a lot of time to prepare or cook, apart from a nice stew of course, which needs a lot of time on the stove, but it can just sit and simmer while you do something else.