I’ve loved cooking and eating good food for as long as I can remember; it wasn’t difficult to develop this love, thanks to my mom who always prepared us the most delicious meals, using only fresh ingredients. She was into ‘whole foods’ before the term even existed!
Fast forward to adulthood – Creating food is one of a few things that have come naturally to me in my life. I just seem to have a knack for it! Despite this, I didn’t start working with food until I moved from inner-city Amsterdam to the countryside of Southern Spain, at the age of thirty-five.
At the time when I was living my Amsterdam city life, I was entrenched in a fun but short-lived career in advertising, with daydreams of moving abroad to live under the sun on a Spanish hillside somewhere. Well, it was through food that I was able to make that dream a reality.
As a young adult I’d worked as a waitress in dozens of restaurants and bars, yet I’d had no formal training in food, was not a qualified chef and I’d never cooked for others, outside of friends and family. None of this however crossed my mind in applying for, and then somehow winning a position as a chef to open a small restaurant in a rural B&B just outside Malaga, in Andalusia in 2006.
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