My name is Mieke. I’m a Dutch-Indonesian 40-something living under a very large mulberry tree in the South West of France with my partner, our three cats, Kitty, Smokey and Noodle, and our dog, Tofu. We will host writer’s retreats in our gîte La Forge starting in 2024.
A food philosophy of sorts
While I think eating with an eye on the planet and human rights is important, I loathe all other forms of moral finger pointing surrounding food that affects our relationship with our bodies (‘healthy’, ‘guilty pleasure’, ‘lazy’, ‘dirty’).
The diet industry and the patriarchy have been spreading horrible ideas about women’s bodies for decades to line their own pockets, leaving too many of us with bad relationships with food, our bodies and ourselves. Never mind the way capitalism is depleting us all of our energy, time and resources and making food less and less accessible. I don’t want to add to that.
What can you find on my foodblog
Life is complicated enough, food should be fun and enjoyable, so rather than add stress to your day-to-day I hope to bring you joy in the form of approachable recipes with a certain degree of sustainability built into them. If you are a first time visitor I highly recommend you read about my approach to recipe writing as well.
I will be sharing mostly vegan and vegetarian recipes here from the unhealthy amount of cookbooks I keep in my kitchen on a semi-weekly basis.
Why donate?
You may notice I ask for donations on this website. The truth is, it’s not cheap to run a website. Just for hosting and the bare minimum photography costs I am looking at 500 euros annually, if I add in other photography costs I’m looking at 2.000 euros annually, and that is not factoring in the cost of purchasing ingredients and cookbooks for example (though I do get sent some cookbooks for free, by authors and publishers alike). I don’t want to run ads because I find this ruins your experience using my website, and I’ve tried affiliate links with organisations I feel comfortable working with, but they resulted in nothing. So instead, I am giving visitors the option to make a single, monthly or annual donation, in whichever amount you see fit in hopes of starting to break even or maybe even making a living out of this.
Remember: if and what you donate is totally up to you. I am generally just super happy you’re visiting and curious about what I have to share on my little corner of the internet.
