About

Welcome on my kitchen diaries!

Here’s a bit of the who, why, how and what there is behind my kitchen diaries…

The girl in the kitchen

I am a french girl living in the Netherlands, a country we familiarly call “l’autre pays du fromage” in france (no, we french are not food oriented chauvinists…). My diploma in hand, I have deserted my country more than seven years ago now, full of ambitions and dreams of european citizenship… After some time, the rain , the too-pragmatic-and-too-tall dutch guys and the strange food got me thinking if this was really a country for a little girl from the south like me. That was until I found my own pragmatic-and-very-tall(-only-half) dutch guy! And I stayed …
Also, when I tell you I am french, it’s only half true as my beloved mother is morrocan, and even though I was born and grew up in France, I love morocco (depending on my mood I will be 100% morroccan, 100% french or half/half).

How it all begun 

In fact the whole idea of starting a blog came to me after I got addicted to the many wonders of the foodblog community. I love talking about FOOOOOD! … and I love cooking and eating too, though I whish I wouldn’t be such a “gourmande” from time to time. Some will say that it’s the combination of my french and morroccan roots. Or maybe it’s in the family (my grandfather was a great professional cook)… Anyway, now you are warned.

After inadverantly discovering the wonderful world of the french cooking blogs in the end of 2005, I spent months dreaming of my very own food blog. In  april 2006,  I finally gave it a try and started My kitchen diaries on the french platform Canalblog.

With my kitchen diaries I wished to give you a glimpse of my passion for food, my gourmandise, my curiosity. I wanted it fresh, spicy and slightly girlish…

Changes in the kitchen 

Since I have been back online in september 2007 after a long break of almost a year due to a much to busy schedule, new ideas for my kitchen diaries have been rushing through my mind. It was great to comeback to blogging, but I wanted more. Actually, I wanted to offer you more…

First, I  wanted to improve my recipe writing (actively working on it thanks to the The recipe’s writer’s handbook from Barbara Gibbs Ostmann  right aside my keyboard ), and my photos too, definitely… (more tricky with my limited skills at the job and the even more limited amount of light around lately, but working on it too). Finally, I wanted to be able to play around with all the new blog gadgets to make your blogging time on my kitchen diaries more enjoyable.

Problem: I am far from advanced at blogging and I have little time left with my dayjob. After many sleepness nights in front of the computer, I had to give up. I just couldn’t get it the way I wanted it with my blogging platform and my limited programming skills. Canalblog has been a great companion during the last couple of years and I’ll always be thankful to them for making my first blogging experience so much fun, but… I had to admit, that it was time for a change.

So, a lot of browsing around later, I decided to move to wordpress. After two months of hard work behind the scenes, reorganising my kitchendiaries, working on a couple of new features and mostly transferring every post one by one (there’s no export function on canalblog ).

Welcome in my new kitchen! 

From today, on the new my kitchen diaries, you will find all my former and new recipes, but also dedicated pages for the recipe index and the french-english-dutch lexicon as well as a brand new page for food shopping tips in holland. Aside from the recipe index you can also browse through the tag clouds on the bottom of the left sidebar to get directly to related posts with an ingredient that inspires you. My biggest regret until now is that I haven’t figure out a way yet to transfer your former comments, my favourite part of this blog. I’ll be working on it.

So until I ever become an advanced blogger with my own domain and my own themes, you will find me and my kitchen diaries here on wordpress.com

With all my heart, I hope you’ll like!

Bienvenue dans ma cuisine et bon appétit!

Myriam.

30 November 2007

ps. Please feel free to leave me a word in the comments if you feel like it. I’d love to hear what you think about my kitchen diaries and my cooking adventures!