Hi, I'm Verena Frei – the cook, photographer, and storyteller behind freistyle. What began years ago as a small Swiss food blog has since followed our family halfway around the world to Bali, where we've traded fast days for slow, sun-filled ones by the rice fields.
And the name? It's a quiet play on ours. Frei is our family name – and in German, frei means free. So freistyle is simply that: our style, lived freely – vibrant food without rigid rules, a slower pace, and room to wander.
For years, that freedom looked like a strictly plant-based kitchen. Today it's a little more open: I cook vibrant, plant-forward food that still puts vegetables first, now woven through with the warmth and flavors of Southeast Asia.
We collect moments, not things.
This is where it all comes together – the recipes that grew into my cookbook, Taste of Life, slow island mornings, family life with our girls, and stories from our travels across Bali and beyond. I shoot every photo and write every recipe myself, with my family as my most honest taste-testers.
Because in the end, what we're really collecting here isn't things – it's moments. So pour yourself something good, stay a while, and make yourself at home.
And so I can focus on the cooking and the photographs, my husband Dominic looks after all the tech behind the scenes: he lovingly rebuilt freistyle and cares for it through his studio Freistyle AI.