Summer is here!

Yaaay, summer is finally here - it's so wonderfully sunny and warm, I love it! The best thing has to be wearing shorts all day, every day, going out to fleamarkets and staying out late into the evening playing music and eating great food. I especially love going to fleamarkets in summer, because there are so many creative, happy people around. The smells, the colours, the sounds - my favourite fleamarket in Berlin is always pulsing with life. I went there with my friend V- on Sunday and it was so great!
(I didn't get to take many photos because there was just so much to see!)

 

I ended up buying a pair of shorts and a strappy top because my beautiful long maxi dress was just to hot in the sun! It was really fun chasing around the fleamarket looking for shorts, even though some people were laughing at me .... In the end I got a pair of great cut-off Levi's shorts, which made the sun much more bearable!

 

Summer cooking is so much fun, no fuss required for a delicious and simple meal in the sun: Avocado, tomato and shrimp salad and mozarella and tomato sandwhich.

Hope you're having great summer days, too! Love, x

Blueberry muffins

Last week I made some deliciously fruity blueberry muffins for Mother's Day. It's a really wonderful option to spice up breakfast, especially on a weekend. I made really small muffins with lots of berries in them that were wonderfully fluffy. A great surprise for a person special to your heart!

This recipe makes about 20 small muffins.

 Recipe: 

450 g flour 

100g sugar 

3 tsp. baking powder

3 eggs

450 ml milk 

225 g butter

200g blueberries

I creamed the eggs and the sugar together first, then adding the flour and baking powder.

Next, add the milk and butter and mix gently together until you get nice, creamy dough. Then put in the blueberries but be careful not to overmix because the dough might be stained purple. I needed to use frozen blueberries instead of fresh ones because there were none at the shop.

Now, get out your muffin tin and preheat the oven to 200 °C. Scoop in the dough.

After 20 minutes, the muffins were golden brown and wonderfully fluffy. Let them cool for a little and then serve them quite warm for breakfast.

So this is what they looked like up close - yummy, yummy, yummy! And tied in nicely with my goal to eat more fruit! These muffins are easy to make and a real joy to eat! Next time, I'll probably make them a little bigger because they turned out rather small, but the taste is delicious!

Love, x

Challenge your health! Challenge yourself!

Hello everybody! Okay, sorry for the weird pseudo-rhyming title but I felt the need to be extra obvious about my excitement for my new challenge!

Okay, so here's the thing. I love baking, I love eating, I love exercise. I am a really active person. But recently my life has felt so off-balance again, like I'm running all the time without stopping, eating bites of food here and there, mostly sweets and feeling unhappy with myself. I bet everybody has felt like that ... that thought cheers me up a little bit. But the truth is, my body feel so much weaker than it used to. Like, since I've stopped running and controlling my diet, something had unhinged in my body and was kind of blocking me.

Until I realised that what was blocking me might as well me myself. Being a perfectionist, I always seek out new challenges to get fitter, faster, smarter - anything really, just improving myself. Never being happy with what I have. I was a happy runner once. I felt great losing weight and having fantastic stamina, until everything became slightly too obsessive. Never allowing myself sugar, running every single day, even with a cold. In short, I did bad things to my body. Until it found the emergency break. I've never felt such pain in my hip. So it'll take years until I can go back to running, years of going without that great feeling.

Well, you know what it's like: stress at school, relationship problems, tension at home, everybody goes through all that stuff and you know that it can have a lasting effect on the body. I started eating my feelings. If I felt bad, I craved sugar and milk. I'd forgotten what it was like to find a healthy balance between snacks and real meals. First, I'd controlled every ounce of my sugar intake obsessively, now I was letting myself go completely. My body was completely starved for sweetness.

So that's the reason I started baking. I wasn't baking for myself, I was giving some of the love I pined for to the people around me. Instead of burying myself in unhappiness, I was making others happy. And me, too. I can never give up baking again. It's the most supremely relaxing, loving thing to do, especially if you're doing it to make someone else happy.

But I feel like I have to get my body back to a healthier weight and fitness level. I want to find balance in my life between pleasure and duty (and I can't travel to Rome, India and Bali to do that ...) I need more power and endurance for my life. I want to enjoy my life.

So I have compiled a list of rules for myself, to live by from now on, put together from every realisation I have had about food, life and exercise in the past years and the pieces of advice smarter and more experienced people have given me. I will stick to these rules for one month straight - join me, if you want, and tell me about your experiences in the comments!

I call this: Challenge your health - month

FOOD & DRINK

1. Have at least five portions of fruit or vegetables every day (one portion being the size of my fist).
2.  Drink lots of water
3. Eat something sweet one day, but not every day. (something sweet hereby meaning cake or chocolate, honey is perfectly fine)

EXERCISE

1. Spend at least 1 hour outside every day.
2. Exercise several times a week + walks  ( run, martial arts, yoga, horseback riding, whatever, as long as it gets me moving!)
3. Do yoga exercises to calm down my hectic mind at night.

LIFE 

1. Smile more.
2. Remind myself how lucky I am to be alive, to be healthy, to have people around me who love me. Appreciate life. Appreciate myself!
3. Try something new at least once a week (such as: try knitting a jumper, write a poem, take a dancing class, go to a museum, take a walk around a neighbourhood you've never been to, start studying a language, go scuba-diving, redecorate my room) 
4. Write down three good things that happened to me every day. Pin them to my wall and read them whenever I feel down.

I promise to stick to my rules for one month, from today, April 11, to June 11. I will if course keep you posted about my experiences!

Love, x

Freedom unfolding

How do I spend these days of freedom you may ask? How does it feel like to know you have months of leisure and enjoyment ahead of you after all the hard schoolwork is done? Well, here's the truth: it feels kind of weird. I'm still hovering in the in-between time, waiting for that final exam to be over. Working at the ice-cream parlour (awesome job for someone who loves food as much as I do), going horse-riding and swimming. Days are long and lazy, but I think I do not yet fully understand the hugeness of this freedom. It's like somebody hands you a voucher that says: just like this, I will give you five months for you to spend just like you would want.

So, right now, I'm still wrapping my head around the whole prospect of unlimited free time for almost half a year. Getting up when I feel like it. Reading. Writing. Just doing all the things I missed out on in the last six months of studying and agonosing over final exams.

That's how I feel at the moment, like a horse galloping. So here's a little poem about freedom unfolding in front of me:

Freedom unfolding,
thundering hooves, bounding ahead -
I spin in my rowboat,
blue skies above. 
Circling, circling,
am I flying?
am I drowning?

Freedom unfolding,
dancing, singing, on the horizon,
beckoning me, spinning around.
What am I now?
A bird, a horse, a spirit even?

Freedom unfolding,
nosing me gently:
"Hi, I'm freedom,
I'm here, I'm real,
I'm staying with you for a while."
Like a present before me,
scared to unwrap it.

The part about the rowboat is actually true. That's how I spent my free day yesterday. On a lake, in a rowboat, lying on my back and being spun around by the wind in a circle. The world seems so huge, you can actually see it's round. I never knew clouds could look so different from one another. Some look like snow, others like icebergs and some look like dots of frosting. Beautiful. I can't take pictures of these great moments, you just need to imagine them. Because the more time you take taking pictures, that's time lost you could be spending looking at it.

Oh, and I do enjoy spending time around horses. Most of my mornings are passed in the stables, grooming, exercising and going out for a little hack. It's heaven. 

Some nice baking coming up soon!

Love, x