culinarious • food adventures • writing

Martin Maier

About me

First things first: I am not a chef, just a food lover; someone who enjoys a decent meal, fresh ingredients (assuming these are nicely done), and usually all this comes down to one key thing: simple does it.

A key role has to be a birthday gift way back a few years: a pasta machine! A plain, but yet elegant, Ampia for home use. Eager to try it out, I followed the recipe word by word. The outcome was not exactly what I had expected. I then found how many things recipes assume that are not to be found anywhere. You need an idea of sizes, desired consistency of the dough before you are good to go. So fiddling around with the machine took some time. And mind you, pasta is one of the easiest things to produce on this planet!

However, the satisfaction, having produced something on your own, is quite rewarding and one soon wants to go further and explore more things that are, at least in theory, easy to produce occasionally. From then on, 'culinarious adventures' seemed the logical next step.

My passion for food has grown since then and playing around with dishes, ingredients, twisting recipes into new ideas has turned into a habit.

Becoming more confident with some skills and specific techniques and eventually mastering some dishes that have previously been just a puzzling mystery to me, has been a more than welcome pleasure. It also underlined how important the understanding of some little details might be and how these can make your life in the kitchen a whole lot easier!

But my appreciation of the many chefs making a living in this mess, being able to handle incoming orders while pushing dishes out in the heat of the night, fully concentrating on the work behind and ahead, and thereby providing a great experience for guests at the tables, has constantly grown over the years!

So these 'culinarious adventures' have become an important part of my life: scouting ideas, trying out new ingredients, getting better with some kitchen skills, etc. These "food adventures" range from getting in touch with local producers, discovering interesting restaurants & places and ends, at some stage, in the kitchen at home. And on this website.

I am far and foremost a writer, editor, journalist, and teacher by trade, having gained extensive experience in all these areas over the past 20 years. Having started in journalism for various broadcasters in Germany about 25 years ago, I have turned to explore the mysteries of the English language (linguistics, that is), eventually started teaching for the next decade or so.

All this lead to more than 13 years in educational publishing, where developing new concepts, working out designs, layout samples and numerous titles and textbook series (books, software, online) aimed at adult learners have played a major part. This meant working closely with authors, illustrators, advisors, photographers, actors, sound engineers, layout experts - to name just a few!

With this broad range of expertise in all these areas, I am now finally able to offer my services as an author, editor, advisor for any commissioned work as a freelancer now.

Contact: martin.maier at culinarious de

Important copyright notice

All texts and photographs, unless otherwise noted, are copyrighted material and may not be used by any third parties without prior written permission!

© Martin Maier, culinarious.de

And more legal stuff is here, too.