This is me

Hey there! Thank you for stopping by my blog where I hope that you will find recipes that will bring you joy and inspiration for preparing tasty meals for you and your dear ones!

My name is Ioana and I am a Romanian foodie based in Amsterdam. I moved to Netherlands initially for a 9 months short term assignment with HEINEKEN - the company that I work for and here I am today, still living in Amsterdam, working for the same company that I enjoy very much, married to my better half since July 2020 and having a great bunch of friends here that became family.

I am born and raised in Suceava - a city in the north of the country, in Bucovina. Bucovina is a definitely " a go to" region when traveling to Romania, with its charming traditions and monasteries, spectacular forests and mountain roads and best traditional food prepared from fresh bio products.

For my Bachelor Degree I chose to move to Cluj-Napoca - a city very dear to my heart. Afterwards I moved to Bucharest where I studied for my Master Degree and lately, started working until I packed my suitcases to take on a new challenge and move to Netherlands.

It is not always easy - since a big part of my heart is still in Romania where my family and a big group of close friends are. Therefore, I am trying to keep the Romanian traditions and recipes alive and I am very happy to share few with you via this blog. I receive very often packages from home from my mum with the ingredients or food that I miss and that helps me cook authentic Romanian dishes for my husband and guests.

I love traveling and was lucky enough to visit 40+ countries spread over all continents - both privately and professionally. These great experiences helped me learn so much about new cultures, different traditions, living and eating styles, but also about myself. I loved experiencing all the traditional recipes wherever I was and have always brought back with me few ingredients so that I can share the local food experiences from those countries, through my eyes and hands with my dear ones.

All my cooking is inspired by the food experiences from all over the world, traditional family recipes and cooking books.

I enjoyed cooking and learning recipes from everyone in my family as I am a true believer in keeping the traditions alive. Besides that, I find it very relaxing since it allows my creative spirit to be brought to life. After a long serious day in corporate world, is nice to get your hands dirty and prepare a beautiful dish for the dear ones and spend some beautiful moments together accompanied by some good wine.

I always wanted to share my recipes with a broader community, but unfortunately with the hectic lifestyle that I had before COVID that wasn’t that easy since I was traveling 50% of my time and within the rest of the time at home I was trying to keep up the work-life balance.

With the lockdown situation, I started to rediscover this great hobby and tried different styles of taking pictures and sharing the recipes with you via Instagram. It has been such a lovely experience so far to meet so many great persons around the world and that we could inspire each other with our recipes, styles and ideas.

I gained so much positive energy from all of this so far that I want to continue expanding and growing the community of Foodies with Karakter.

Therefore I thought it is time to have my very own blog (created with the help of my husband - will definitely continue cooking for him even more now :) ). So here I am today, writing the first lines in my Blog with Karakter.

Hope you will enjoy spending your time here and please, share your thoughts!

I am willing to learn and grow from this experience.

Sending you lots of pink cotton candy hugs,

Ioana