I was born in Meaux, grew up in Nice, and somehow ended up in rural France by way of the Netherlands and England. Which tells you something about the kind of life I’ve had, full of movement, full of cultures, and always, always, full of food.

My father was Parisian, my mother Dutch. And in the kitchen, I always knew where I belonged. I was the kid who wanted to chop, stir, and taste everything. The one who drank watered-down wine before she was ten, because that’s just what French children do. There was no single dish that defined my childhood, it was the whole culture of it. The butter. The cheese. The vegetables pulled from the garden that morning. The unspoken understanding, woven into daily life, that food is love and meals are meant to be shared.

Growing up in Nice gave me a France built on sun, on markets, on the particular southern confidence that the best meal is always the simplest one, made with whatever was beautiful that week.

Then I left. I moved to the Netherlands, built a life, met my English husband, and spent years cooking French in a kitchen that wasn’t France. Because the Netherlands and the UK, much as I love them, were never quite my kind of food. French was the only language my hands ever really spoke.

When we eventually moved back, to a small village in rural France this time, something cracked open in me. I fell in love with my country all over again, the way you can only fall in love with something you’ve had to miss.

The neighbour who grows more vegetables than she can ever use and leaves bags of courgettes at your door, quietly, without fuss. The woman at the market who knows exactly which field your cheese came from and won’t rush the conversation to explain. The apéro invitation that warmly, inevitably, becomes dinner. The tart pressed into your hands as you leave for coffee, wrapped in foil, as if it were nothing, when really, it is everything.

This is the France most people never get to see. And it is the France I want to share with you. A food culture that doesn’t perform but just lives, quietly and confidently, in kitchens and village squares and long Sunday lunches that nobody wants to end. I have been lucky enough to grow up inside it. And now I want to bring you in too.

That is why I became a French food blogger and started Frogs in Britain. To make the real France visible, the recipes that come from actual French kitchens, the traditions that don’t make it onto travel posters, the everyday moments that are so ordinary to us and so extraordinary to anyone seeing them for the first time.

So pull up a chair. Pour yourself something good. And let me show you the France I grew up in, the one I fell back in love with, and the one I will always go back to.