Let's get personal!

Allow me to introduce myself 👋🏼

Hey, Bettina here.

This is my first newsletter and something I have been thinking about for a long time and we are finally here. I have been sharing on other platforms but I have been longing to get a little bit more intimate and personal. I am hoping this is the space where I get to do both. Before we kick things off perhaps its a good idea to tell you a little bit more about me.

I’m a chef, a cook book author, content creator, wellness consultant, health enthusiast, a mother, globe trotter, and avid yogi. I love walking and will avoid getting public transport where I can. I love mudlarking (basically treasure-hunting along riverbanks look it up and you will be amazed) and find all sorts of trinkets, ceramics and other pieces of history. I love painting, especially watercolour. My secret vice is watching The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, New York and Orange County – I’m always up for a debrief after each episode. And of course, travelling and food take top spot on things I love.

To really understand me and my journey to where I am today, we’ve got to go back to the beginning. My father is Norwegian and my mother is Bulgarian and Danish. I was born in Denmark but grew up in Tanzania until I was 11, then moved to Sweden.

My earliest memories of food date back to my time in Tanzania where I grew up for my first 11 years, when my mother would take me to the food markets and farms. I remember sitting in the back of the car with a bucket of fresh milk, which my mother would then turn into butter, cream and yoghurt. I learnt early on that good things were worth waiting for. My father was the cook that took things slow, and he’d spend hours getting all the ingredients ready (between sips of wine and chatting, of course), making sure each element of the dish was cooked properly and just right.

My whole family were foodies – my mother, my grandmother and auntie in Bulgaria would welcome us with homemade breads, stews, and cakes on arrival. My other grandmother who lived in Sweden (but who was originally from Norway) had green fingers and would make jams, cordials and pickles from ingredients plucked from her summerhouse in the woods.

I come from the sort of family that doesn’t remember visits to museums, art galleries, and landmarks, but instead what dishes we ate, the markets we visited, and all our food experiences. I love travelling, sampling and experiencing different cultures – there are untold stories everywhere through food.

These cherished memories and passion for food turned into my career today. If you’re familiar with my work, then you might know me as Bettina’s Kitchen, and that all started in the hotel industry. After doing a BBA in Hotel Management & Business, I got into the wellness industry in 2011 running my own health retreats in Spain that quickly made its way into Condé Nast Travel magazine. There were not that many retreats back then, and wellness was only just a buzzword. After being in the food and beverage industry from the age of 15 and cooking from the age of six (pancakes were my first dish), I knew that food was the space I wanted to be in. Chef schools weren’t encouraged and I suppose if you look back at the 90’s it was also a very male-dominated space (still is today but getting better) However, when the opportunity to run retreats came along, we couldn’t find a chef to curate a plant-based and gluten-free menu – which is when I took matters into my own hands and also cooked on my first-ever retreat. I sourced ingredients from the farmers markets of whatever was in season and researched ancient grains to figure out gluten-free, nutritionally-dense and tasty options. After running and cooking my first retreat, I was hooked. I knew this is what I wanted to do. For me its not about taking away options or preaching; its about including as much diversity onto one plate of food regardless of food preferences.

If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading. Now’s the part where it gets a little personal. The joy of food has always been innate to me, but as the retreats grew (at the same time as the plant-based space), I started Bettina’s Kitchen as a blog and Instagram page. During this time, I also experienced struggles with health issues such as PCOS and endometriosis. I discovered that what I ate and did made a significant impact on my physical and mental health. Despite doctors’ prognosis, I fell pregnant and brought my beautiful daughter into the world along with my business that slid into the right time and space of the plant-based revolution.

Cooking became a way of inspiring people to include and cook with ingredients that can sometimes be daunting, and I became a chef who specialised in plant-based, gluten-free and free-from cuisine (I promise, plant-based cooking is not boring and expensive, and can be extremely tasty). And cooking from scratch for someone? It is truly the sixth love language.

Fast forward a decade and I am living in London. I now have three cookbooks: Happy Food, 7 Day Vegan Challenge, and Celebrate. I run Retreat Chef Academies for (you guessed it) budding retreat chefs. I host wellness retreats in Bali and beyond – think seven days of nourishing, healthy foods, yoga, meditation and mindfulness. My goal is to inspire people to make conscious food choices through cooking from scratch as much as possible with local, seasonal ingredients to positively influence the next generation in the importance of true self-care.

When I first started out, my diet was strictly vegan and gluten free for a good few years and that really worked when honing my skills and recipe-developing. As my career catapulted, so did travel; I spent some years freelance-cheffing in more remote destinations where gluten-free became trickier, and from a cultural perspective, food is linked so much to community. Not being able to share local dishes or try different types of traditional cuisines became slightly limiting. I love the fact that we as humans can cook together, eat together, and enjoy food and have a bond beyond language – its magical. I have experienced so much joy spending time with teams in different countries where food has been our common language. My personal diet today what I would call ‘plant-centric’ or some call it ‘flexi’. I love Michael Pollan’s quote: “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.” I have chosen professionally to stick to a plant-based diet with a big focus on whole-foods, sustainability, and diverse ingredients because I believe that this is where the general public needs the most help. Our gut health (microbiome) thrives on consuming at least 30 different plants a week and my mission is to make those plants as tasty as possible and easy to incorporate into your life.

My love for hosting retreats and running my Retreat Chef Academy has brought me full circle back to where it all began. I am at my happiest hosting and cooking for health, supporting where I can and teaching a whole generation of new budding retreat chefs new skills in a creative way that isn’t traditional but paves the wave for a new generation of feeders. There are so many avenues to take within food and that is what excites me the most.

This is one of reasons I have been wanting to share more of my experiences within what we now call wellness. It can consist of bio-hacking (which I love), tinctures, powders, IV’s and treatments. It can also consist of switching off your phone before bed, drinking more water, moving your body, getting better sleep. Its the wild wild west out there when it comes to the options of what will make us feel better and I am always up for giving anything a go. I’d like to use this space to share some of those experiences along with what I believe is true balance and that is to have a good time and enjoy life to its fullest. After all, we are given 80 summers at its best and it’s up to us to figure out what we fill those with.

I am looking forward to getting to know you all,

Bettina x