A sweet treat for your heart
Ciao, it’s Sunday again and I am trying to stay connected to my creativity and my intention to write. While I am writing, I am eating some delicious homemade pancakes for breakfast with a milk chocolate pistachio spread. It’s simply delicious.
It felt really good last week to just share my thoughts and questions about food, and I am so grateful to have read so many thoughts about what food means to you, and started so many conversations and trains of thought about memories, upbringing and different universes around food.
Feeling your support from the other side of the screen made me also more willing to consciously create more time for me and my writing. Creating more time often feels like such a huge task. But just like with food, if you create time, it’s always worth it.
Because after a while it becomes a habit, and because it makes you feel good about yourself, you just keep doing it.
But to be honest, sometimes I get confused about this. We also do things that are not good for ourselves, but we have an illusion, briefly, that they make us feel good, and that’s why we keep doing them. Like eating sweets.
I am not sure that I believe that certain things are bad for ourselves, even though society brings us more in that direction.
I believe, though, in moderation.
I believe that certain things are good for us if we use them in moderation.
But how do we learn moderation? From where?
That’s a question that pops up in my mind quite often, and I came up with an answer lately.
We learn moderation through experiences, from learning, from awareness.
And this can be applied also to sweets.
I often hear people struggling with sweets and moderation.
Families find it difficult to let their children have a slice of cake without feeling guilty about the sugar rush, other parents find it difficult to put boundaries around sweets, and some others use sweets as a rewarding system.
I honestly don’t have a sweet tooth, but I also don’t see sweets as such a treat.
Probably because I believe in moderation.
I grew up in a place where sweets were considered a rewarding system, and a way to celebrate moments.
And while I don’t agree with some of it, I like the idea of using sweets as a way to celebrate, as much as other foods.
After all, it’s not a birthday without a cake, isn’t it?
But then I can’t help but wonder, why be so strict with children?
How can we teach children moderation if we don’t even fully understand what it means?
When parents come to me and ask me for help with sweets, I ask them first: what is your relationship with sweets?
How do you feel about sweets? Why are they different from other foods?
I can’t help but wonder, while I taste these delicious pancakes, if there is another way of thinking out there.
How could it be if instead of zooming in on sweets and situations, and labeling them as good or bad, we could just zoom out and perceive them just as what they are? A delicious moment of celebration.
I love making sweets for the people I love, I absolutely adore changing ingredients and pushing my boundaries around the imaginations and perceptions I have of sweets.
Using different ingredients than usual, because yes, sugar is not always that healthy, I agree with you here.
But there are so many different magical ingredients out there that can’t wait to be discovered!
So many flavor combinations, ready to be used as a celebration of us and our loved ones.
It all sounds so inspiring to me.
And having all of these sparkling realizations around me makes it easy to understand moderation. It feels almost like a necessity to balance out all that we can experience through sweets, and yes, food in general.
One of the biggest gifts in life for me is being able to experience all of this with children.
Combining all of these flavors and trying all these combinations with them, while you feel carried away by their enthusiasm, helps massively to learn about moderation.
Cooking healthy food with children helps me understand moderation and simultaneously show it to my children, using curiosity towards new flavors and recipes, and it’s just so magical. It feels like music.
It’s so fun and delicious!! And if we consciously put the intention out there to create time for it, after a few times it will be so rewarding and joyful.
I like this train of thought. It feels hopeful.
Joyful.
I finished my pancakes and I am very satisfied with the flavors. I used protein powder in the batter too, to fool around and feel a bit sporty this morning.
Sweets can be amazing, can’t they?
I hope you enjoyed reading my food thoughts today. Like always, I would love to hear your thoughts too.
Send me a messy email if you feel.
In the meantime, I leave you here as a present: a recipe for my beetroot pancakes, a crazy nice combination we randomly discovered with the children during one of my classes.
I hope you will make it with the people you love, creating messy yet delicious memories with it.
A sweet treat for your heart
I would love to hear your thoughts, memories and stories about food. Feel free to send me an email, I would love to read them.
