I am passionate about both cooking and traveling. Since graduating from university, I have lived and worked in Korea, France, and Kuwait, and I have been to twenty-four countries in Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and North America. I also love to bake when I am living in a place that has an oven. I am a little bit of a risk-taker, and that shows in the amount of extreme sport types of activities I have tried (bungy jumping, canyoning, rappelling, scuba diving with sharks, etc) and the number of times I have been seriously ill from food poisoning (I was once stranded on a small island in Indonesia for six days before I was well enough to get on a boat to go back to Bali, and I spent last Christmas Eve doubled over in pain and on an overnight bus in Egypt because of some bad falafel and tahini I had eaten). I am a meat-eater, although I don't live and die for eating meat, and I enjoy quite a few meat-free meals and recipes. Although I don't have any moral issues with eating meat (I was raised in a butcher shop), I believe that we, as a society, eat too much meat and that human bodies are not built to process the amount of meat and animal by-products that we eat. However, there are certain foods in which I wish to continue to indulge and that is why I could never be a full-blown vegetarian.