CulinaryMélange

Quite a while a go I started twittering about my eating habits and posting recipes in my personal blog. As I figured, it was not the right place to do so, I tried not to do this too often. This, on the other hand, was rather unsatisfying. So, as many people before, I came up with the idea of starting a foodblog. Being a blogger since early 2005, I have experienced that having a carefully developed concept or having a concept at all, helps a lot when starting a new project. CulinaryMélange is the result of thinking and preparing for days, filling numerous slips of paper with keywords, sketches, etc., discarding, rethinking and so on.

About CulinaryMélange

CulinaryMélange is about everything related to food that comes accross my way and sparks my interest. The title is composed of two words: Culinary for (guess what! :D) the culinary aspect of food and Mélange, as the French expression for mixture. Not only does this stand for the mixture of topics in this blog but also for the international cuisine I’m interested in and finally there is the Viennese Mélange, a coffee-classic served in the countless Viennese cafés.

As I’m mostly cooking for myself only, my recipes usually are for one serving. Also you will never find garlic or cayenne pepper or chili in any of my recipes as I’m allergic to garlic and react extremly sensitive to the other two. Other than that I am allergy-free.

About Angeline

Actually, Angeline is not my real life name. It occured, that many years ago, when I was about 14 years old, I was looking for a suitable alias to identify myself in the internet. Somehow Angeline remained with me and has developed into a kind of alter ego. It goes so far, that some friends of mine called me so for years even in everyday life, until I figured it kinda uncool and childish and demanded to be called by the name my parents gave me: Iris (yes, like the flower). I leave it up to you if you want to adress me with Angeline or Iris :) (Don’t tell anybody, but sometimes I’m even thinking about having my name changed to the compound name Iris-Angeline, but as I have, thanks to family tradition, 3 middle names, this would make my whole name even longer and that’s something I definitly don’t want :D)

I grew up in Switzerland (yes, where the best chocolate and cheese are to find ^^), but decided to move to my home-town Vienna, when I finished School back in 2006. Here in Vienna I’m yet a student of landscape planning but hope to have the bachelor degree by autumn this year. But not only do I know the Swiss and Austrian cuisine, I also lived half a year in Sydney, Australia, where I had first contact with Sushi (yum!), lamb and other Asian/Australian/American influenced cuisine.

Now, where was the point when I started to get interested into cooking and food in general? In fact, I was interested in baking already when I was a child. Mainly for special occasions such as birthdays or Christmas. But, to be honest, my contribution was more to cut out cookies than anything else. :D And also I wasn’t paying too much interest into the rest of the preparation process. Shame on me! Actually my interest in food arose only when I had moved out and got sick of convenient food (literally, I’m allergic to garlic that is used in almost every instant meal) and pasta and all variations of rice I could think of.

As I’m living in a small room in a dormitory and only got one hotplate (plus an electric kettle) or the often untidy/gross shared kitchen I have become rather creative about cooking. :-P In the last months I’ve changed from a student who “ate to live” to an aspiring amateur-chef-in-training.

I hope to not only learn from fellow foodies but also provide some inspiration to others :)

Principles

I’ve been aware of organic and local food for quite a while and have been buying locally/organically/”fair” produced veggies and fruit since some years (when I lived with my parents they used to buy local/organic/fair too) and this awareness for high quality products remained with me till today. Yes I know, just before I wrote that I got sick of convenient food, which is mostly neither organic nor regionally produced. But in fact the range of organic convenient food such as ravioli or other organic semifinished products becomes wider and wider (and is still limited enough to get tired of it soon enough).

Another of my principles is to cook everything “from scratch” and don’t use artificial substitutes.

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