Hello to Platform 13 and to their dedicated readers... So a brief intro to me... I am first and foremost a food lover. Originally from Antwerp in Belgium, I trained as a chef in the culinary schools of France, but the kitchen garden is where I feel most at home. All that is cooking for me and for my partner Kris, is about love, feeding our guests, friends and family with the goodness of our adopted French seasons. Simple stuff, done with love.

There are few ingredients as humbly useful as the onion. It appears in every kitchen, at every stage of unprompted regrowth and under every list of ingredients. Raw and sharp in summer salads, melted and brown in winter stews, or quietly working in the background of rich sauces, often without due credit. The French don’t just cook with onions — they have built the entirety of French cuisine around them. France grows more onions than any other country in Europe, and you can ta

It is all well and good to throw buzz-words around, but one that often comes up in casual conversation these days, is ‘frequency’. Like most expressions, it can mean different things to different people and yet actually, is very rooted in science. Not in a “my frequency is like..so off today” as though you‘re just having a bad hair day, but involving physics…a real exchange of energy with the environment and people - total friends or total strangers. We’ve all been in a room

This is something I came to learn very late in life, having never questioned my beliefs or my decisions. I’ve since found so many areas in my life where I blindly accepted that my beliefs just are what they are, fixed in time, and my decisions simply followed. Turning things upside down to get a different perspective, allowing myself to question things and decide again, has become such a valuable tool. I like to think of it as “curiosity with benefits”. As young children, oft

Golden apples. The asteroid-like quince is the last fruit to ripen - the one that waits until the year breathes out. Hard and bitter when raw, it softens only through patience and care. Once sacred to Aphrodite, it remains a quiet symbol of transformation: if you take your time, you'll get your reward. It's not the best looking fruit in the orchard, but nature is not so bothered with looks. Perfect imperfection is sometimes just right. The quince is a golden relic of autumn t

The rather sultry soundtrack of November is not only about cold fingers tapping on the barometer and raindrops on rooftops. Over the ploughed and purposeful fields of Lot et Garonne, the air is full with the honky tonk of departing geese. Like feathered fighter jets, you will hear them before you see them — a ragged, cloud-bound squadron, formed as a straggly V, calling desperatey to each other to keep things together. It's comfortingly instinctive - a DNA thing. I love seein

This month, rather than a focus on food and what makes our table groan, we feel a bit caught up in remebrance. Of course that in itself is quite fitting for November. It is a month roomy with retrospection, governed for most of us through the memorial of the 11th hour of the 11th day, to the waste they called "Great War".

Every nation tends to make a contribution to the great theatre of style. England gave us understatement, Italy provided road rage and France — with predictable irony — gave us austerity disguised as art. The word silhouette began not as a term of beauty, but of mockery. Étienne de Silhouette, was the well intentioned but disastrously unpopular 1759 French finance minister. He tried very hard tried to balance the Nations chequebook after yet another costly skirmish with the En

There are so many questions when one moves to France. Will it be hard to learn the language? How should I dress? And, most urgently, how will I not “wear” all those pastries and calories, never having been raised on French cuisine? I can’t be the first one to obsess over these things, right?

Ah, the walnut tart - that quietly confident dessert that needs neither hot custard nor sticky jam to make its entrance. Born in the hills and valleys of southwest France, it’s what happens when fistfulls of rural walnuts meet a good curl of butter, a wide ribbon of cream and a decent crackle of sugar. No drama, no tiers, no soufflé to collapse — just a golden crust holding everything in perfect balance.

Let’s start with the obvious: the French eat. With butter, with wine, with joy. Meanwhile, across the channel or indeed the big pond, we seem to eat with an undercurrent of apology. We talk about “being good” when we skip dessert, or “cheating” when we don’t — as if a pastry were a moral failing. Somewhere between the calorie counter and the confession booth, food stopped being nourishment and became a referendum on self-control, by which we often judge ourselves unkindly...

Self-talk is not something to be taken lightly. Saying things like “I can’t carry a tune, I’m tone deaf.” whilst it can be an expression of mock humility maybe it is true... for now. How do you know? What if saying this is why you haven't become better? Sing because you love to. If all people thought they had to be perfect in order to love something or try something, we'd all be sunk. What I wanted to say has nothing to do with singing, or maybe it has everything to do with i

The word sabotage is a genuine “drama picture”. It can conjure machines grinding noisily to a halt, partisans blowing up railway lines, or each of us inexplicably wrecking our own best chances.. It feels shivering, cinematic and rebellious. But sabotage has much humbler roots, in the clatter of a wooden shoe…

Platform 13 CEO Vanessa Grant sits down with the a local artisan who shares her story of creativity and community. In a sun-washed workshop on Rue Notre-Dame, in the beautiful bastide village of Monpazier, jewellery designer and maker Claire Lamouroux shapes stories from natural materials. Her boutique, Semilla (“seed” in Spanish), is shared with her partner Jean-Luc Pigeat — together they create wonderful, original jewelley pieces that feel both ancient and utterly present.

I love almost everything that is old. Old books, old times, old manners. One of the few enviable advantages of being British lies not only in how we have managed to preserve old things, but in how we continue to delight in them. We don’t simply store the past; we keep it in circulation, like a favourite chair, endlessly sat in.

There was a time when a social visit began not with a text message or a hopeful knock, but with a small, stiff rectangle. The calling card was both introduction and safeguard — a way to say, “I was here,” without barging into someone’s day. It was etiquette in miniature, a pocket-sized handshake.

“Travel whispers to the soul’s boldness. It asks not for the absence of fear, but the courage to lead into the unknown, to embrace both the journey and the self that is discovered along the way”. Attributed to Mark Twain Every step beyond what is familiar is an invitation to growth. We do not travel to coll

October in the Dordogne is quieter now. The fields are slowing, the walnuts gathered, the vines picked clean. But for bees, it’s still very much office hours. The hum in the hives may have softened, but inside, a busy workforce is still clocking in.

September is a bit of a hinge month, a threshold that resists placement in the pigeon hole. It is neither the lingering ease of summer, nor the crisp certainty of autumn. It hovers in a space of its own — a pause in the rhythm of the year, a seasonal ellipsis. Spiritually, September invites us inward. The sun still warms our skin, but the evenings hint at a chill that asks for sweaters and thoughts of firewood come. This duality reminds us that change is rarely abrupt; it is

Platform 13 CEO Vanessa Grant on Soul, Strength and the Sacred Feminine. Sitting in sacred silence There are words that carry weight far beyond their syllables: soul, strength, sacred. Each speaks to something elemental, a truth we sense in our bones even when we struggle to name it. When combined, they sketch a portrait of the feminine at its deepest level — not as a role or a set of expectations, but as a source of power rooted in authenticity. At Platform 13, we believe st