Culinary Goals - Adriana Avelar 2014

Culinary and continuing education Statement – Adriana Marquez de Avelar

My love for food has been with me every day of my life since my grandmother put this feeling into my heart. I was only seven when I prepared my first dinner for my family, and since then I’ve been passionate about watching people delighting in food prepared by my hands.

In 2001, at 18, I entered the renowned undergraduate Food Engineering course at the State University of Campinas (Unicamp). After college I became a consultant with Accenture, a fantastic company. Although my career at business management was attractive, I was still immersed in the Food world, enrolling in culinary courses, visiting countless restaurants, buying cookbooks, and spending long hours on the Internet researching chefs and food. Thus, in 2010 I made the best yet scariest decision of my life: to become a chef!

I moved to a city in Brazil’s interior to take three restaurant management and kitchen positions simultaneously. I became well known, and soon the head chef at a luxury hotel asked me to work with him. This was my culinary baptism under fire.

The experiences in the Brazilian food culture combined with my work in Engineering allowed me to finally go to Sydney, Australia, where I enrolled in Basic Cuisine at Le Cordon Bleu in January 2013. In only six months that I had in Sydney I’ve tried to explore the culinary world from different sources: I’ve worked in a very small restaurant, in a Cantonese top restaurant, at Parliament House kitchen staff from agency, at big Easter Cooking Show Event and also in Sydney Seafood School as chef assistant.

In all those establishments I have applied my new Cordon Bleu skills whilst gaining confidence and speed. Le Cordon Bleu Sydney and the other jobs gave me a great education from culinary masters whose love for food is infectious. Since my return to Brazil in July 2013 I’ve been doing a volunteer job in a hospital with children and teenagers in cancer treatment and with the doctors instructions preparing a weekly menu for those special patients. I’ve been also teaching enthusiastic people French techniques throughout simple and easy recipes. And counting on media to share my knowledge with a lot of people: I’ve been writing weekly at an online journal publishing news of gastronomy development in Brazil and also sharing a lot of recipes in a popular website with 30 thousand visits per day and also to share my knowledge with Brazilians in Portuguese.

Build up a carrier as a Chef means hard work, commitment, patience, and an unflagging desire to learn. Furthering Haute Etudes du Goût at Cordon Bleu Paris will make me an even better professional, will provide me a deeper knowledge and a global vision of the complex world of gastronomy and the arts of the table and I believe this is what I need to finally realize my dream of having my own cooking school in Brazil to share this culture and passion.