Hi I’m Fran and, the heart and mind behind beauty food blog.
All you can see on my blog reflects exactly who I am.
I love healthy food, bright colors and photography!
I grow up in a huge farm in Brescia, near Milan, and I left for Genoa when I was 20 years old.
I spent there 3 years and then I moved to Sardinia. I lived both in north and south of that beautiful island and went back because of my job several times and stayed there for months.
Then I moved again and I left the sea for the mountains.
I lived in the outstanding Dolomites in North of Italy for a couple of seasons and then I and finally I moved to London in 2009 and lived there for 3 years.
I worked as a beauty therapist and massage therapist and loved every second of it. I also worked in a Jewish bakery / cafe in London and that was a real experience!
But then life happens and I move back to Dolomites and Merano, where I met my sweet half who shares with me the passion for food and health.
He is an Executive chef and travels around the world a lot. I am pretty jealous about this to be honest, but who wouldn’t be?
Then we moved together to New York City for 3 months. We still go there often as we have many finds there and we really and deeply love the Big Apple.
This is my Dobermann, my little boy Clark, adopted when he was 4 years old.
But this blog is not about me and my travels, ( or all least not yet, stay tuned! ). This blog is about food, health, and colors and beauty!
Because I am a therapist, a fitness trainer and an aesthetician, I dedicated all my life to improve health and beauty of people. But living this busy life made me forget about someone: I forgot myself!
I have been anorexic for less than one year and bulimic for 14 years.
I managed to overcome this hard period of my life, that seemed endless and hopeless, only when I moved to London. I remember that day, THE day! It was a Saturday afternoon, spring has arrived and the little birds were singing peacefully flying from one apple tree to the other. I felt peaceful too. I felt I could if I wanted. The growing awareness that my health and my well-being were few of the most important things in my life, my life itself, my new job in an Ayurvedic SPA and my new friends, all this made me believe and feel that I could make the change. And I did. So I will always be thankful to London, to that garden, to that flat and to those birds. I changed my life, I started to live again and eating became a natural part of my that I was capable of enjoying and cherishing. Food wasn’t an enemy anymore.
And then, slowly, food became my best friend.
And this is my sweet ” Hurricane ” Luna, adopted when she was two. They grow up together and have been abandoned together.
But I knew there was more. I felt the need to introduce healthiest and more nutritious food to my diet to improve my well-being. I felt the need to eat food that was alive and didn’t suffer ‘cause only food that is full of vitality could help me and who surrounded me to feel healthy, happy and more “alive”!
I always loved animals, always lived surrounded by them and I knew exactly what the dairy and meat industry was doing. I simply wasn’t aware that I had a choice: I lived in a dairy farm since when I was born, it was simply the way that we lived. But I knew there was something wrong in all that, but I couldn’t understand and explain what. It was a common job where I lived and it was hard to go against the tradition. But then I grew up, I understood and I became vegan.
It’s not been hard for me as I never liked meat and fish and I became intolerant to dairy products years ago. This seemed like as jock as my dad is a dairy farmer, but he never complains, fortunately!
Anyway, that wasn’t enough. Refined flours and refined sugars ( that I never really used if not necessary ) were something I couldn’t stand any longer. So I removed both refined flours and refined sugars from my diet.
But that wasn’t still enough. Myself, so many of my friends and my boyfriend, we were all intolerant to wheat. So I removed that and started baking using only gluten-free flours.
I began cooking vegan, refined sugar-free and gluten-free recipe for myself and friends and took some photos. People showed me their interest and asked me the recipes, so my boyfriend encouraged me to share them online.
I didn’t know anything about blogging and bloggers at all, and I had never heard the word wordpress in my life before. I am the less “social” person alive, but I had something to say so I made it possible. In a few days, completely unaware of what I was doing, my blog was online!
I decided to name it Beauty Food Blog because I believe in the power of food and beauty that glows from within.
Food can really Feed our Beauty and make us glow and sparkle from the inside!
I believe in the power of colors and light, so my photos are always colorful, plated as accurately as I can and vibrant.
I believe we should be happy when we eat as what we eat becomes what we are, it transforms into blood and nourishment for our cells, it becomes us. And I want to be a vibrant orange carrot, not a sad and lifeless piece of flesh!
I love travelling and taking pictures of the places I visit, especially at the sunset
I also add a nutritional label to my recipes so my readers are aware of what they are actually eating. That flours and sugars are both carbohydrates, that the olive oil is 100% fat and has 9kcal per gramme, that broccoli are rich in proteins and so on. That’s why I also add very accessible and approachable nutrition information about the recipe in mum posts.
Being more conscious of what we’re eating will make us choose better and appreciate more what we are introducing into our unique body. A gift that is given to us only once in a lifetime. We have no other chances. We need to make this one count.
Established in March 2015, Beauty Food Blog is now my full-time job.
I work as a food photographer, recipe developer and video maker for companies like Liebherr, Comfort zone and Chenot Group.
You can find my recipes on their leaflets, websites and apps.
I also develop recipes for restaurants and I’m quite excited to announce that in August 2017 my first vegan gluten-free menu will be launched in Meran!
The recipes you’ll find here on Beauty Food Blog are all
- vegan
- refined sugar-free
- gluten-free ( or with options – I only use brown spelt flour or rye flour or unrefined flour )
- simple, fast and easy to make ( so everyone every where can make them
- with step by step pictures or pictures of the most important steps and method
- with local ingredients easy to find in Europe ( I mostly use vegetable or olive oil and I barely use coconut oil, or only if needed, in raw recipes or as a facial treatment. )
- cholesterol free
- Italian and mostly Mediterranean recipes ( with few exception due to my gluttony, necessity and reader requests )
- enrich with beauty tips and chef tips + basic and simple nutrition information
- only colourful recipes ( that should make you feel happy and relaxed and make you want to eat more plantbased food!)
- bright and vibrant photos
- integrated with nutritional labels, so you really know what you are eating
- tested at least 3 times or until they’re perfect so I’m sure they’re foolproof ( I’m fussy!)
- with detailed procedure and explanation + substitutions
- recipes are entirely mine and developed entirely by myself. If not, It’s clearly stated with a link to the original recipe. ( Only happened once at the moment ). I’m here to share, not to copy and paste in respect of my colleagues.
- Last but not least, they’re all made with love
Thank you so much for your support
Fran
