You may (or may not) have noticed my usual fortnightly email didn't come out yesterday. Life has been in session this week. 😩 A number of things have pulled the rug from under me and I have cried a lot. 😭 Perhaps you may have experienced this kind of week sometime yourself. If so, I salute you. It takes something to allow yourself to experience it and then get back up again.
What I am going to share may come as a shock. During this time, the kitchen was my sanctuary and the dinner table was my salvation.
Over the years, I have developed a deep-seated friendship for all aspects of feeding my family. The kitchen is a place that allows me to smile, dance, laugh and create nourishment for my family. The kitchen is my disruptor from the rest of the day. The dinner table is my safe place - I'm with my favourite people connecting. Sharing the ups and the downs. It's the punctuation mark for the day.
I am so grateful that years ago I went to work on learning to make friends with food and all the things it takes to feed my family. This has become the very thing that gives me peace when the rest of the day or week has not been kind.
I can honestly say I have a great friendship with food now. It makes a massive difference to how I feel about the significant role food plays in our health.
I know from my recent survey of this community, that what I have just shared probably feels so far fetched from their reality. What the mumma's who responded shared could be summarised as:
- the kitchen and feeding the family is a big stressor in their day.
- food was more work on top of their work they have already done for the day.
- food consumes vast amounts of thinking power - what's for dinner?
3 Snacks Made In About 1 Hour
I turn to the kitchen for solace. Last night I needed to destress from the week so I looked at the ingredients I had in the house and thought 🤔 mmm what can I cook with these ingredients?
I could have cooked so many things - breakfasts, lunch, dinners, snacks, desserts - because as I tell the kids "when you have good ingredients in the house, you can always turn out a multitude of meals."
Then I remembered I am working our basketball fundraising stall at the markets on Sunday, so I chose to make 3 different snacks that we can sell. All of this was made in about 1 hour, with some slow time of watching Netflix as I played in the kitchen. Here's the recipes:
🍪 The Best Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies
Think Subway cookies - that's what these are sort of like.
I started with these because the batter needs to rest in the fridge for 30 minutes, so whilst it was resting, I moved onto the other 2 bliss ball snacks.
Indrani found this recipe through TikTok a while ago. She made them and they were great but over the top sweet. I reduced the sugars by half. If I was to make these for the lunchbox, I would make them half the size so I would get more cookies out of the batter.
🍫 Chocolate Protein Bliss Balls
These are always my go to bliss ball for the lunchbox. At Christmas I make them smaller in smaller balls. We pop them in a brown paper bag with a tag called reindeer poop and they are given to school friends as gifts.
You can keep these plain, add in some food grade peppermint oil for a peppermint burst or make them jaffa flavoured by adding orange zest and the juice of one small orange.
Grab the recipe here.
Dr Libby's Lemon Balls
These are one of Ril's favourite. They are made on cashew nuts so ensure your school is ok with nuts if you make them for school.
The recipe called for figs but I only had dates, so I popped in 3 extra dates to the recipe because figs are usually a bit bigger than dates.
The creaminess of the cashews blended with lemon juice and lemon zest, along with the sweetness of the dates makes for a delicious snack.
Visit Dr Libby's site here for the recipe.