love cooking by choosing chocolate
Love cooking using your own ingredients? Let us find out how chocolate is made and how you can use this to bake a yummy chocolate banana bread
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National BBQ week and time to get your flame on
Find out why the UK tops Germany when it comes to BBQ, which items top the BBQ list and just how often we get our Flame On a year in the UK
Bake Yourself Better in Mental Health Awareness Week
Bake yourself better as part of Mental Health Awareness Week.
Some of the reasons why include:
- Focus your mind on a single task
- Reflect on the things that trouble you
- Take time out from your surroundings
- Learn a new skill
- Improve your confidence
All these and many more are among the benefits not typically associated with baking.
Yet they should be.
Why you can Bake Yourself Better
Imagine yourself suddenly not being able to breathe.
You have been feeling stressed lately, but not more so than usual.
Your life is busy – working, running around, juggling family activities and friends.
Totally normal right?
Until your struggle for air and you end up having to call someone for help.
That was me six years ago
A busy and somewhat successful Marketing Communications Consultant working in a fairly specialist field, I thought I was doing OK.
I enjoyed my career and was rather good at it.
Until my world as I knew it came crashing down.
I had been travelling all over the UK that week – London, the Midlands, Wales.
I was a mom and still feeding my daughter.
This was challenging to say the least.
It was my second baby, so I thought I was used to juggling being a mom and working full time.
Then I switched on my laptop.
Fifty plus emails asking me for status updates.
Micromanagement on a whole new level.
I felt myself getting upset.
My heart was pounding in my chest and within minutes I just could not catch my breath.
I called the GP surgery.
Twenty minutes later, I could not speak to say what the matter was.
She signed me off from work.
This has never happened to me before.
I felt like an utter failure.
Why I decided to Bake
I tried to relax.
I was given strict instructions to decide whether this job was worth it.
My now ex-husband simply did not understand.
I had to process.
My career, my relationship, my mental health and wellbeing.
I turned to M’s Kitchen
The emotions were raw.
M’s Kitchen became a place of refuge.
Talking to someone helped.
But it forced me to acknowledge that I had taken on too much.
Resilient as I was, I now had to come face to face with years of ignoring the state of my support system.
There were a lot of tears.
The baking helped
Slowly, but surely, I started working through it.
I had more counselling.
This helped me to understand that the island of one I was building needed help. I had to let others in.
My strength needed to lie in being able to ask for help.
MY journey continues
I never wanted to write about myself.
It was too personal and years of writing about others, made me extra conscious of how vulnerable this would make me.
I did not want to be vulnerable.
I needed to be strong.
Writing Naked Baking helped.
It made me put down in words some of the things I had to acknowledge and deal with.
It was a start, but it scared me.
I did it anyway.
I continue to bake.
It is a process as I embrace my own mental health and wellbeing.
I continue to be strong, resilient, brave, yet sometimes scared.
Yet every piece of baking coming through my kitchen makes me better.
The process of start, middle and end helps to unpack the many issues I face; makes me explore the available choices and above all helps me focus on something else.
It helps me to be in the room.
That way, the answers come when they need to.
When my mind is calm, when my hands are satisfied that I have created something unique. Just like I am.
Just like you are.
Come on a bake yourself better journey with me
As part of the Bake Yourself better series, M’s Kitchen offers regular classes for you and your friends or bespoke courses for groups of different ages and abilities.
Get in touch for more details on how M’s Kitchen can help with improving your Mental Health and Wellbeing.
Have a great week,
M.
Three Years of M’s Kitchen Live
Three years of live demonstrations of Southern African food on M’s Kitchen. What did I learn if anything? Here is a look back at where I started and why
The Original M – time to find out who she was
Maria Anna Claasens. Who was she and is she in fact the original M who started M’s Kitchen?
Southern African food cravings – why choose this taste adventure
The truth behind Southern African Food cravings
Still having Southern African food cravings? Even after years of living in the UK?
What is that all about?
Like so many who make the leap across the ocean, I found myself not in London, but in Wales 18 years ago.
The country known for its singing, rugby, hills, sheep and lots and lots of green – probably from all the rain.
Having grown up in Namibia, lots and lots of rain is something you dream about, but never really experience.
Then when you do, lots and lots of rain means less and less of what you love and are used to – the sun and being outdoors.
Fortunately I had the opportunity to sit down with a business mentor shortly before coming to the UK.
We chatted and as we did, I mapped out all the possible ways I could earn as I travelled around the UK.
This included M’s Kitchen
Armed with some of my grandmother M’s easy Southern African food recipes, I set off to this land where they spoke one of the oldest known languages in the world.
After just a couple of weeks of sightseeing, I was bored stiff.
Not because I did not like the country or all those green hills; I just understood that I was never going to be one of those ladies who lunch.
Even if I could.
So I got a job
Just a few months later, I was back doing exactly what I did in South Africa.
Thus the dream of greater flexibility and shorter working hours got shelved.
Fact is, I was never really homesick – two visits a year to South Africa made sure of that.
Then came the first little M and my own business.
Long hours, no holidays to speak off, but greater flexibility – at least on paper.
My coping strategy?
Bake myself better and lessen those Southern African food cravings
I started by making my granny’s recipes.
Then I found and adapted other Southern African classic food recipes too.
And so M’s Kitchen, although it was not called that for ages, was set into motion.
As I baked, I remembered my typical family Christmas.
I was almost always barefoot and in shorts; swimming, laughing and mostly not worrying about tomorrow.
It made me sad (still does when the Christmas ads appear on TV), but glad at the same time.
I had a kitchen to bake and make in.
What is more, I had memories and love and people I cared about.
I had and I have a lot to be grateful for.
As I stand in M’s Kitchen…
I make to give
I give of myself, my love and (hopefully) knowledge and passion for Southern African food and culture.
I give the only thing that is true to me.
My Southern African heritage, my memories, my emotions – happy or sad.
M’s Kitchen is so much more than Southern African food, it is a journey of self.
A love affair with who we are, where we come from and where we want to be.
Just like every recipe, there is a start, a middle and an end.
Just like life, it is not always perfect
So we adapt, we find better ways of doing things, but we always stay 100% real.
As for those Southern African food cravings – I still get them, I just know how to satisfy them.
Remember we do live demonstrations on Facebook where we show you how to make Southern African food recipes.
Please join us and help us share our love of Southern Africa by liking and sharing our page @FromMsKitchen (#frommskitchen on Instagram)