Cooking doesn’t have to be tedious drudgery thateatsaway at your time at the end of an exhausting day. This is the kind of infectious confidence – that the kitchen can be an inspiring place and bring a smile to your face – that readers can soak in from the pages of the first book by Sophie Yotova, otherwise known for her culinary blog FoodieBoulevard.

“Delicious with a smile – 123 gastronomic adventures” is no ordinary cook book, it is more of a culinary diary, a teach-yourself book for wholesome eating with the help of… non-recipes.

“They are not recipes, they are more of an inspiration – a framework for one’s preferences and aptitude, for experimenting and creating a diversity of tasty food,” says Sophie Yotova. “That is why I urge readers not to be afraid that something in their cooking will go wrong, because those are the moments when we learn something new that will be of use to us in the future. Quite a few of the recipes in this book came about when some experiment or other took an unexpected turn, but the result is great and is worth giving a chance.”

In her own family Sophie is surrounded by culinary aces, but she started experimenting with food in earnest once she started living on her own and had a kitchen to herself. At the time she loved to experiment, playing around with the products as if they were parts of a puzzle she was piecing together to paint a colourful picture. Six years on, food plays a huge role in her life, though not so much as fuel for the body as a social bonding skill.

“I started FoodieBoulevard because for almost ten years I had been grappling with emotional eating – an eating disorder, associated either with strict dieting or indiscriminate eating. It was torture, a time when food was my enemy and it lasted too long. But gradually I started looking into the different kinds of effect it had on me, treating it as a form of art and moulding it into a tool to catalyze inspiration. Ultimately I formed a healthy bond with food.”

The blogger does not believe in prohibitions, or in denying temptation. She says the only way is to “tame” them and look for an alternative to unhealthy products in the kind of food that is healthy, but also tasty.

“Wholesome food is what keeps us healthy – psychologically as well as physically,” Sophie Yotovasays. “We can take care of our bodies, our health and keep ourselves feeling good in lots of different ways, but not at the expense of flavour or budget. In pursuit of a healthy diet people often go to extremes and tend to think that it automatically means consuming products that are expensive. That is a very dangerous myth and it deprives us of the knowledge, on the basis of which we make our choices every day. That is why I prefer to use the expression “wholesome food” – and it can come from different sources it can be home-made or it can even come from the store. The only thing we need to be able to make the right choice is information and the urge to try out new things.”

Sophie Yotova graduated journalism, and in her blog she combines the two things she loves best – writing and taking pictures. And as gastronomy is the language she uses to communicate with the world, it is in the language of cooking that she passes across the messages she wants to convey. One of them being that food is just one way of attracting the attention of people who would not otherwise listen to what we have to say.

English version: Milena Daynova