ABOUT ME

Welcome to Shiny Veggies!

Here I’d like to share my love for food, creating new recipes, making pictures about it and shared them. Everything on this blog is either vegetarian ir vegan, most of the recipes are also sugar free and easy to make. In Shiny Veggies you’ll find awesome ideas for all kinds of dishes like noodles, casseroles, desserts, salads, soups and a whole lot more.

The veggie food blog you were looking for!

I’m just a Venezuelan girl living in Germany as fate would have it. I love reading, cooking and spending time with my husband and son, actually for whom I became a vegetarian, but I’ll explain that later on this page.

This new project means a lot to me personally for many reasons, one of them being the beginning of a journey as a vegetarian, learning and trying more and more about the vegan ways, which has been a very enriching and nourishing experience by all means.

So far I’m the one taking the pictures, making videos, editing, writing, posting and all the work around Shiny Veggies. It’s all made in my kitchen, I even translate all my posts because I intended this project to be trilingual (english, spanish and german) from the very beginning. I know it sounds like an impossible task to do it all, but up until now I love doing what I do and it works just fine, who knows what the future holds for Shiny Veggies.

By the way I apologize in advance in case you ever find a spelling error or you read an expression that is not quite right.

I hope you enjoy being around and just so that you know a little bit more about this blog, I want to share the story about Shiny Veggies and how it became what it is today.

So this is pretty much how I switched from eating chicken almost everyday to not eating any at all.

One night by the end of 2019 I was scrolling down my Instagram feed to find out about this awful, horrifying video about animal cruelty in a Mexican cattle farm, which change my life in many aspects completely. First mentally, then it made me realize that for so long I’d been ignoring certain things by telling myself “it can’t be that bad”, when deep down I knew something worse had to be going on.

Then, physically. The moment I stopped eating meat I felt entirely different, I lost some extra weight and my acne got much better among other stuff.

And last but not least, emotionally. Suddenly sprouted out of me this much stronger empathy feeling towards animals I had never felt before. Not to mention that I had recently become a mother and I couldn’t help but imagine

what it must feel like to lose a baby by such reasons regardless of the species.

At this point I started questioning and judging myself for not thinking about this before. To be honest I was never exactly a pet person. I never had a pet or at least not by choice anyway, there was never an actual reason good enough to realize things and more importantly, to care. After all, I was only doing what I learned to do long before I can even remember.

Anyway, after watching it (around 10 p.m.) I couldn’t sleep. I’m not going into the details but let’s just say after that night I couldn’t allow myself to follow that path anymore. Obviously the first couple of days I had to make some exceptions, since it wasn’t something I had planed beforehand, I still had some meat left in the fridge.

And that’s how I became vegetarian without looking back.

A couple of weeks after, I got this great gift for christmas. A recipe book, from a well known British chef, which gave me that little extra push I needed to be more creative.

I started trying out every single recipe, making as many new dishes as possible, not only from the book but also experimenting on my own, and you wouldn’t imagine how I enjoyed it!

Thanks to this I discovered a whole new world, and after a certain point my husband told me “you should take pictures of what you do and share it in social media, why won’t you?

But sometimes it’s easier to think how hard can it be than taking risks.

One day like any other we decided to take a walk around the lake. It’s my favorite place when I need someplace for quiet time and get in touch with nature, it’s almost magical.

It was also one of those days where you don’t know where you’re going, you can’t even recognize what drives you, or if you’re moving at all. Wanting to do everything but not being able to do anything at all. That’s exactly how I felt, lost and frustrated.

It happens sometimes that even though there’s no reason for it, we just keep underestimating our abilities and talent, and end up building ourselves a little cage of disappointment and dissatisfaction.

In my case, I needed someone to help me get out of there, to let me see what I was failing to notice and to me that someone was my husband.

He thought it was a shame the fact that only him could see it and appreciate everything I was doing. His pep talk not only made me consider things over but it also changed my perspective, and even better, it helped me find a purpose.

Ever since he has been my most demanding critic and my greatest support.

It became a hobby to capture every scene, every dish and it’s beauty. Afterwards, it turned into a challenge. I realized how much effort and energy it takes to capture the essence of it.

I also understood that everything I had done up until that moment was no good, the pictures, the light… I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

Then I got dragged into the idea of making my own overhead recipe videos. It took me a while to finally put all the basics together, things that could fit into my kitchen as well as my budget.

The editing software took me another while but someway I managed to find one and at last I was able to make my very first overhead recipe video for Shiny Veggies! Yay!