A Little about Bettina’s Kitchen

To really understand my background and where my love of food began, I’m going to go back to the very beginning. My father is Norwegian my mother Bulgarian-Danish. And me? Well, I was born in Denmark, but spent the first 11 years of my life in Tanzania, East Africa, before my family relocated to Sweden. In Tanzania, we were very connected with the food that was put on the table; I used to go with my mother to the markets to pick our fruits and vegetables for the week, and quickly learned the art of haggling for best quality and price. All of our dairy products would come from local small holdings, and on the journey home from the farm, I would sit in the back of the car with a bucket full of fresh milk that my mother would then magically turn into butter, cream and yoghurt. So in all this, I learnt early on that good things were worth waiting for – in fact, there is a running family joke about my father taking his time to cook, because by the time the food is ready we are all starving, such is his meticulousness in preparing every element of a dish.