The basics about me:-

• Name: Vanessa
• Age: 26
• Day job: Aspiring Trade Mark Attorney
• Passion: Anything to do with food!

What is MyGastroAdventure.com?

Quite simply, it is a site through which I will document my adventures in the kitchen.  I will be sharing pictures, recipes, tips and advice for a wide variety of recipes.  To start with, I will be embarking on a year long challenge trying out 52 recipes chosen by my wonderful friends and family.  To find out more about Challenge 52 click here.

How did My Gastro Adventure come to be?

I am a self proclaimed foodie – I love to look at, share, make, feel and, of course, eat good food!  As you will see from the cute albeit slightly embarrassing baby photo’s, my love of food goes back to the very beginning. 

Trying out chocolate fingers and baking with my big brother.

As I grew so did my passion for food.  My parents and nan always encouraged me to have a go at making things and I have some great memories of being in the kitchen with them.  It was all going so well until the “great bread and butter pudding disaster” of 2003 at the age of 14! To find out more about this story, click here.

After this disaster, I spent less time in the kitchen.  That is, until I moved out into the big bad world and had to fend for myself at University. I won’t lie, during my time at University I ate a lot of the student staple foods, including pasta, pizza, cereal and, my personal favourite, chicken dipper wraps with chips and baked beans.  However, I also began to get back into my baking and I soon became one of the designated cake makers for all my friends’ birthdays.

When I left University, I moved in with my boyfriend and I suddenly found I couldn’t just cook what I wanted anymore.  I had to cater for someone else’s taste, a very picky someone at that!  With this, I started to get a bit braver with, not only my baking, but my every day cooking.   

A few years on, I have finished my studies, settled into working full time and found time to really embrace and explore my passion for food. I still have a lot to learn but I love experimenting and trying out new recipes.  In this wonderful age of social media, with each new recipe I tried, a picture would get posted on Facebook and my poor friends were being inundated with updates of my food.  With only a picture and a brief descriptive, even the best of us foodies would soon get sick of the updates. 

I decided its time to find another outlet to share my experiences and so it is we arrive here, mygastroadventure.com and Challenge 52. The rest, as they say, is history.