18 Feb Patreon – A Kitchen Notebook

What is my patreon and how is it different to what I share on the blog and on instagram?

My patreon is like a monthly subscription blog where I share illustrations, pieces of writing and recipes inspired by my kitchen notebook. My kitchen notebook is an old French accounts book from the 1930’s, which I found in a junk shop for ten centimes, knowing that I would save it until I found the perfect reason.

When we started writing down our seasonal and store cupboard recipes, so that we could hold onto spontaneous recipes and whatever we had in the cupboard, it felt like a diary of our lives as a family.

I started writing food memories from my childhood, my twenties throwing dinner parties, moving to France, living on a small holding and a vineyard. The way my mum taught me to celebrate the ordinary in the every day, how I have listened to stories around the table, late into the night, witnessing how food, wine and candle light unravel stories from people, and thoughts on how I like to style a seasonal table.

And along the way I started illustrating our kitchen: doodles of candles, half drunk bottles of wine, vintage glassware, a vase of wilting flowers on the windowsill.

So now, I collect all of these words and images on my patreon ‘A Kitchen Notebook’, to keep me accountable, to create a diary of our family kitchen life that I don’t abandon. And by subscribing to the patreon, I am financially supported to not only create this work, but all the work I put out for free via my newsletter, instagram and the blog.

I am so deeply grateful to everyone who has subscribed and supported me so far, they feel like my core online family and I hope I can honour this with what I offer in return.

If you would like to find out more about my patreon, there is a short video here, where I clumsily explain all of the above. Thanks for reading, love Java xx