For Your Sweet Tooth
A
n award-winning blogger, cookbook author, recipe developer and much more, Marie Asselin infuses her French-Canadian roots and love of Italian cuisine into delicious recipes that are easy to follow and beautifully packaged. We wanted to learn more about her culinary journey — where it began and where it’s taking her. AD: When did you first realize you wanted to dive into baking and cooking? I started cooking with my mom when I was a kid. She was a stay-at-home mom, and she made everything from scratch. Very early on I learned to make desserts with her, and I soon took over the task whenever we had guests. After I left home, as a young adult, I had a phase of eating pretty bad, processed stuff—I didn’t have the same knowledge in cooking actual meals as I did in baking desserts. Two things converged to make me become serious about food: I studied graphic design in the late 90s and I soon discovered the publications that inspired me the most design-wise were cookbooks and food magazines. I would literally spend the little student money I had on books and super expensive magazines from France and Australia. This inspired me to register my website, FoodNouveau.com, in 2000, and I used the platform to practice my web
design skills and store my favorite recipes. Around that same period, I discovered that I was lactose intolerant. This forced me to make more conscious choices about what I was eating, and to make the effort to find alternatives to dairy products to use in my desserts. My experiments in the kitchen led to a growing passion for food and cooking in general, and over the years, I started dreaming about making it a career. (It would take 10 years before I would get to that, though!) AD: Have you always had an interest in developing recipes? If not, when would you say that began? I would say that my passion was first and foremost in following recipes. I would cook and bake my heart out using my growing cookbook and magazine collection. Contrary to chefs that tend to be more intuitive in their cooking style, I loved the guidance of recipes. In that sense, cookbooks were at the heart of my culinary education. It was only after several years of cooking and baking other people’s recipes that I grew the confidence to start riffing, and then to come up with my very own recipes. I think my interest in cookbooks and recipes is what allowed me to become a good recipe developer. I’ve always been a meticulous cook, and this is a quality that comes in handy when you write recipes you want others to use.
ArtDiction | 42 | September/October 2021
