Campolucci Bordi - Celebrate: Plant Based Recipes for Every Occasion

Our English word celebrate comes form the Latin celebrare meaning to assemble to honour. To celebrate means to mark a special day event or holiday. You might celebrate a birthday, a holiday a religious event like Easter, an occasion or an anniversary.

To me, this book is a celebration of food, community, cooking and being together with the people we love. The idea of this book was born over a year ago when the world was a different place. The irony is that I wrote the book during 2020, the year we had to figure our other ways to celebrate than being together with our nearest and dearest.

I hope from here on in we can make up for that time and celebrate as much as we possibly can! Dinner parties, birthdays, anniversaries, Christmas, Easter, barbecues and more. Lets celebrate the little things, the big things and be together.

The recipes in this book are grouped according to different occasions. All are plant-based, and I try to use local and seasonal ingredients where possible. I am also aware that practicality and ease play a role too and that not everyone has the same opportunity to source particular ingredients, as this depends on how accessible they are and where in the world you live and the climate. I wanted the ingredients to be accessible and affordable while also enabling you to include plants in ways that are easy, tasty and planet-friendly. With all that in mind, I hope there are options for everyone, from turning a bag of frozen peas into the most delicious fritters to finding uses for the humble swede (rutabaga) that appears in our vegetable boxes. I hope you all find your favourite recipe and use them to celebrate with your loved ones.

Heres to health, happiness and love.

Lots of love and celebrations,

Hi Lovely,

Bettina here. I am a self-taught chef and a hugely passionate advocate for plants. I specialise in plant-based (vegan) and free-from recipe development for brands and the hospitality industry and also within food advancement. I have written two cookbooks, Happy Food and 7 Day Vegan Challenge, and this is my third. I work freelance and run Health & Wellness Retreats as a Retreat Chef. I also run my Retreat Chef Academy where I teach all these food concepts along with sustainability and waste-free principles, which, as a Retreat Chef, you adopt right from the get-go. I am passionate about unravelling the potential of plant foods and the free-from area by establishing easy and basic principles that incorporate seasonality and local produce food that makes you feel good, is grown within the seasons, and nurtured by people who care.

From the very beginning

To really understand my background and where my love of food began, lets go back to the beginning. My father is Norwegian, my mother Bulgarian/Danish, and me? Well, I was born in Denmark, but lived for the first 11 years of my life in East Africa, Tanzania to be precise, and after that in Sweden. In Tanzania, I used to go with my mother to the food markets to pick our fruits and vegetables, and I quickly learned the art of haggling for the best quality and price. We also used to visit a small farmer with just a few cows. I would sit in the back of the car with a bucketful of fresh milk that my mother would magically turn into butter, cream and yoghurt. I learned early on that good things were worth waiting for. There is a running joke about my father taking his time to cook because by the time the food was ready, we would all be starving! He would spend hours getting all the ingredients ready, meticulously organised in between sips of wine and chatting making sure each element of the dish was cooked properly and was just right.

Our holidays were spent in Bulgaria with my grandmother and auntie, who were both amazing cooks. I used to sit at the kitchen table at my aunties house watching her make pineapple upside-down cake, crme brle, stews and breads baked from scratch all on their way to the feasts that would be conjured up on our arrival. Other summers were spent on the other side of the globe in Scandinavia, Sweden, where my other grandmother lived. Again, an amazing cook with green fingers who has all sorts of wonders growing in her garden and a tiny summerhouse in the woods. Jams, cordials and pickling were her speciality.

I come from the sort of family that does not remember visits to museums or art galleries instead, my holiday memories are filled with dishes, markets and food experiences. We travelled extensively as a family, gathering food memories, and that has stayed with me to this day. I love travelling, sampling and experiencing different cultures and countries through food. There are untold stories everywhere and these are such a huge part of our lives. Its magic, really and thats how I initially caught the food bug, which has blossomed into a life-encompassing passion that wont be going anywhere soon.

The beginning of Bettinas Kitchen

My original background is in the hotel industry. I have a BBA in Hotel Management & Business and studied in Switzerland, Ireland and Spain. However, I was always front of house. That background helped immensely when I got into the wellness industry in 2011, running health retreats in Spain and later all over the world.

Cooking has been a constant in my life. I have loved it right from the start and remember my first dish being pancakes when I was six years old. It is my daughters too now and a family staple at the weekends. Despite my passion for cooking, it did not become my career until my late 20s, so remember: its never too late to start working with your passion.

For me, cooking became a way of inspiring people to include and cook with ingredients that can sometimes seem daunting. I wanted to show others how food could be inspiring and where it comes from, and that cooking from scratch is the single most powerful thing you can do for yourself and your family. The retreats were the initial stage in spreading this message.

My lifelong passion for food meant I appointed myself retreat cook and my hobby quickly transformed into my career as a chef specialising in plant-based cuisine. From here, I specialised in gluten-free and free-from recipes, which form the foundations of my cooking.

I went on to study at the Matthew Kenney Culinary Academy, in Los Angeles, to expand my cooking skills and knowledge and to learn the culinary arts. I also enjoyed extensive travelling and discovering how other cultures cook and use plant foods. I started sharing recipes on Instagram and slowly but surely people wanted more, and Bettinas Kitchen was born.

Fast forward a few years and books. I am now living in the United Kingdom and my passion is still very much plant-based cuisine. However, I am keen to include as much local and seasonal produce as possible, and I am always focusing on making the vegetable the hero ingredient on our plates.

Bettinas Kitchen today encompasses culinary, yoga and mindfulness retreats, plant-based cooking workshops, recipe development, food writing, the Retreat Chef Academy and my cookbooks. Everything I do honours my own beliefs about food and wellness and aligns with my philosophies: that we should eat seasonally, locally and from farm to table as much as possible; we should support small businesses within our communities; we must use roots, shoots and all! Cooking waste-free is particularly important to me and we should also let our veggies do the talking the best plant food is fuss-free, simple, easy, inexpensive and speaks for itself.