About Fickle Foodie

This is an outlet for my (mostly) food-related musings – a virtual notebook of sorts documenting my cooking experiments, my discoveries, current fixations… etcetera. I started this blog while living in NYC, my “gallivanting-phase,” as it were. But I’ve since moved back to my old college stomping grounds, Austin, Texas. N.B. – As I ease back into that lazy Austin groove, I don’t update near as much as I should. But know this; I do have posts waiting in the wings, which will probably be published sometime after losing their relevancy.

I am by no means a professional chef. I am just a twenty-something girl who has this chronic obsession with food. As a child, food was more necessity than pleasure. Isn’t that cliché? But as I reached my teens and college years, I honed in on a new perspective on food. I discovered the pleasures to be had in cooking and eating good food. For me, cooking and eating became an experience that should stimulate all your senses (sight, hearing, smell, touch, and most importantly, taste).

I’m not quite sure when this obsession with food started, but I can be certain I didn’t begin experimenting in the kitchen until my late teens. Before that, I mostly watched, studying techniques of various chef/cooks on television. I recall being captivated with Julia Child as I watched her program on PBS. I used to watch Food Network in its early stages (only a handful of programs then), before it became the gargantuan network it is today. Nowadays I find myself reading cookbooks, scouring restaurant menus for inspiration, and deciphering scribble-like notes (of discoveries from my latest trips and miscellany revelations) that I’ve jotted down in my food notebooks.

My background lies in the fields of mathematics, computational linguistics, and aerospace engineering (i.e. – I suck at grammar). I have no professional culinary training of any kind. But I do have a lifetime of assisting my mother and grandmother in the kitchen. Any other culinary skills I seemingly posses are largely self-taught. My cooking is decidedly American, with influxes of Tex-Mex and Southeast Asian flavors (as homage to my childhood in Texas and my ethnicity, respectively). But I do enjoy trying my hand at other cuisines.

Why “Fickle Foodie” you may ask? Because I spend excessive (to the point of annoyance of my dining companion) amounts of time lingering over restaurant menus and my recipe collections, I can never decide what I want to order/cook! I suppose that could be an excuse to try everything!

Cheers!