Coffee & Vanilla is a blog dedicated mostly to European & Caribbean cuisine but also crafts, travel, multiracial hair products and any other aspect of our family life.

My name is Margot (Gocha) and I was born in Poland, my husband Michael came from island of Dominica. We are both freelance photo retouchers & graphic / web designers located in London, UK: 416 Studios. You can read about our sites on my personal micro-site at gocha.co.uk.

I have been vegetarian for many years and right now I don’t eat red meat.

I will be posting here recipes that we use in our home.
It can be something Dominican, Polish, British, mix of all that or something from totally different part of the World…
All recipes are simple (as we don’t have much time to spend it the kitchen) and tested by us and our children: Marissa (4) & D’wayne (14) and other family members and friends.

On weekdays I will posting lots of lunchboxes as I’m packing them daily for both children. But on the weekends I always try to find time and cook or bake something new so I will be blogging about it.

Pictures on the website are actual dishes that were prepared by us, taken with Nikon D50 and Nikon D70s plus standard 18-55mm Nikkor and 90mm (macro) Tamron lenses. Some of them can be purchased via this website: Gifts by Marissa.

Design of the blog has been done by Michael and it is based on fabric that accompanied me through my entire childhood… my mom had big roll of it and there was many things in the house made with it… on my trip to Poland I found last piece of that fabric. It was not big enough to sew anything so we used it for the blog header

I don’t blog for living so I did some Spring cleaning and I removed all other parties advertisements, scattered all over the blog, except 9 ad units on the right top of the blog and few links on the Links page. Just to help cover costs of the web hosting and some gadgets I would usually never buy, but this way I can get them and blog about it.  So please visit our sponsors whenever you can.

Instead I revived my Amazon store where you can find only tried, tested and recommended products. Every week I will be also featuring on the side bar recommended product that I used myself and I find worth mentioning.

From time to time I write also review, article or post a quiz that I was asked to write, it is then placed under “sponsored” category, but it does not mean that I was told what do write… all reviews are my unbiased impressions of the products or services.

I have as well Amazon wish lists where you can find things that I find nice but not necessarily would want to have all of them.

If someone is curious how my kitchen looks like at the moment (it is already 6th flat since we are in London), can take a look here:

I hope you enjoy the recipes.

Margot

p.s. Please forgive me not replying to all your comments and emails. I do read all of them and do my best to reply to most of messages but sometimes my day does not have enough hours as I’m trying to be stay at home mom, freelance retoucher and at the same food blogger.  So please don’t take my lack of time for ignorance.