Thank you for stopping by, on this, the first ever fooodlove blog post! This site is all about making Greek and Mediterranean food approachable, exciting and easy.
My readers have said in the past that they like the fooodlove format; the way I prioritise the recipe, not the food story. That’s why I decided to keep the ‘chatty’, storytelling side of the site separate. That’s what this blog is for - storytelling! It’s a place where I can share my food, my heritage and my history, and hopefully hear from you too!
By the way, I do link to all of my recipes on social media, but I always post them here on the site first! Feel free to follow fooodlove on your favourite platform, or you can always subscribe to the newsletter and get my recipes delivered direct to your inbox every month.
This post will chart the evolution of the fooodlove blog, and some more about me...
Hi, I’m Sevi. Thank you for being here!
I adore Mediterranean flavours. I adore cookery. But you know what? I only really discovered that I love cooking after I was married! Sure, I could always make some egg dishes for breakfast, and simple pastas for dinner, but I didn’t have the passion to explore and experiment.
One evening when I was first married, I realised it was time to broaden my dinner repertoire (although my husband hadn’t yet complained about the many pasta dishes he was being served!) so I spoke to my mom in Greece, who explained her simple recipe for chicken with veggies. This was the first time I realised - food is the perfect medium for expressing love, and care for others! This knowledge ignited the spark, and that fire for food continues to burn.
I was born as one of three children, on the island of Rhodes in Greece. We were a ‘traditional’ Greek family; many elements of Greek Orthodox tradition and inherited Greek culture were foundational to our lives. The foods which come with cultural celebrations, the regional specialities, the seasonal ingredients - Greek food and Greek culture are closely entwined. It took emigration from my homeland for me to see this clearly - so nowadays my cooking is an act of love. Love for both the friends and family I cook for, and for the homeland which I sometimes yearn for. I try to celebrate my Greek heritage, and trace my own Hellenic histories, into my English kitchen today. It is an act of remembering, and it brings my daughters’ cultural inheritance so close that they can smell and taste it.
The birth of fooodlove
Since my love affair with food began, I always kept recipe notes. I had created hundreds of scraps of paper, listing every recipe and tip I’d tried. I listed what worked and what didn’t, how I tweaked a previous recipe, and in what measurements...if I didn’t keep a note, I knew I would forget what had been successful (and what hadn’t)!
Friends and family started asking me to share my recipes. Copying out handwritten recipes was beginning to be a little taxing! Encouraged by a tech-confident husband, I took my suitcase-full of paper notes into digital format, so I could just copy and paste recipes and send them to friends.
My digital treasure chest was initially just for me. But in 2010 we decided to make it more of a public notepad. It was still written in Greek, though!
Dutch Relocation
I was soon glad that we carried this recipe resource online. We moved to the Netherlands in 2015 (and carting a huge book of recipes and scraps of paper across Europe might’ve wiped the smile off my face!).
With an exciting job offer for my husband, myself and our two daughters packed up and moved to the Netherlands, leaving Greece behind. I truly began to see how important the foods of my culture were to me, and I began to remember Greece through the flavours we ate everyday.
I continued posting - now publicly. I still had no thought that this would evolve into something anyone else would find fruitful. I had never thought anyone except family and friends would find it, really! However, it grew to a daily visitor count than I could never have imagined!
Relocating to Cambridge
Now we knew that we could handle relocation. Although the Netherlands was beautiful, it was never quite ‘home’. So when, another job became available in a city we had fallen in love with - Cambridge - we jumped at the possibility. We’d visited the UK numerous times before as tourists, but we fell in love with Cambridge immediately when we first visited in 2012. Relocating again wasn’t easy, but the UK was easier to adapt to, primarily because we had more of the language. It’s become home!
As soon as we were all settled, and I had a little more time, I decided I wanted to reinvigorate my ‘digital notepad’. As I began to know more and more people in Cambridge (often the mums I would meet through school), more people were asking for my recipes, too. We decided to rebuild the whole website. Taking advantage of my husband’s knowledge, we built something that is super functional - and I think beautiful, too! We decided to write the content in English - allowing me to become a part of a bigger foodie community. And so, fooodlove was born!
In our new reality, where working from home no longer feels like a luxury and we all just want to be ‘back to normal’, food was my refuge. I decided to revive my website, rebuild it from scratch, and get cooking! My goal with fooodlove is to share Greek and Mediterranean-inspired recipes in a fun and easy way.
During this past decade, my life has changed a lot, with the biggest factor being our relocation. (At least, I had assumed that our move would be the biggest thing to happen this decade - but that was before the pandemic turned the whole planet upside down!) I’m so excited to share fooodlove with you now, in English.
How fooodlove works
Fooodlove is a website designed around convenience. It’s designed for mobiles which seem to be where we all spend more time these days. The idea was to make a website that’s easy to use when you’re in the kitchen, trying to track through a recipe speedily! That’s why we added a few more features, such as being able to tap the “method” images to enter “cooking mode”, where you can see each step in full-screen alongside a helpful photo, and you can cross out ingredients on the website when shopping, or even when cooking, to help keep your place.
Fooodlove is about sharing my Greek heritage through food, posting recipes both traditional and not-so-traditional which make up a part of our everyday life as Greek expats in the UK.
Stress-free cookery
A big part of fooodlove is to focus on how easy Greek recipes can be! People tend to wrongly assume that Mediterranean recipes might be long-winded and complex, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.
I wanted to demystify the process and help more people cook confidently, and enjoy cooking as much as I do! That’s why I decided to make sure my recipe videos are only 1-2 minutes long - if the process can be condensed into that time, I’m certain that anybody, no matter their cooking experience, can recreate it. My quick videos show how I make everything, then the recipes guide you through the process yourself.
Where to find me
Social media rules these days, doesn’t it! But if you bookmark this website and check back a couple of times per week, you will be the first to get your dose of Greek and Mediterranean recipes, as this is the first place I post them.
You can also sign up for our mailing list. Totally spam-free and friendly, we email you once a month with a bumper mail containing all of that month’s recipes alongside advice and extras from our ‘do you know’ column, all delivered directly to your inbox.
Get in touch
The reason I post is to share the recipes I love far and wide.
It's always so nice to hear from people who have tried out my recipes! I get even more excited when I hear accounts of people exploring slight variations in ingredients, or using my recipes as inspiration for something new. Does food relate strongly to your heritage? Do you remember your grandmother’s cakes, or eating fruit fresh from the tree in the summer? I want to hear your stories too, and celebrate our wealth of food histories.
I read everyone's comments on my social media accounts, but check out my contact page to get in touch with me in the way that suits you best!
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