Author: Adriana

Something as Simple as Walking can Bring Great Change

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My walking journey started on the 2nd of February 2023. Why I remember it so well? Because I made sure I went back and marked it in my calendar, after just a few days. I knew it’s going to become an important date for me. It was a cold morning in South West London and I decided to break the daily routine and go for a walk first thing in the morning. I am morning person, my best productive hours are probably between 7am and 4pm, so I was up as per usual around 06:30 – 07:00 and was getting ready to start working from home. While the coffee was brewing I looked outside and thought – “what a miserable day”. It’s rainy and windy. I realised I haven’t been properly out in days because I always start work very early, eat lunch quickly and finish work when it’s already dark. I remembered reading somewhere that is good to challenge yourself sometimes and do the exact opposite of what you think is comfortable. I didn’t …

Fail At Something Every Day

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It took me a while to write this blog post because until now I actually didn’t understand how important it is to fail at doing something. I have always been really bad at dealing with things that I am bad at. I always felt embarrassed or awkward if I didn’t know or I couldn’t do something. And that is the worst way to tackle a challenge. If you are not comfortable with being bad at something you are going to avoid learning and you are not going to progress. For example I used to get frustrated when I played golf that I am inconsistent and I stopped playing for a while. I realised that I just wasn’t putting the time and wasn’t eager to continue the lessons because I simply didn’t like not being good at it. Which is really silly. How else should I become better? After I got over myself I went back into playing golf and I am still not great but I am much more consistent. Failing used to have a …

How To Increase Your Ability To Focus

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Everybody seems to be writing lately about how the online world have shortened our attention span. The amount of information that we process daily is forcing us to switch context rapidly. You have probably experienced plenty of that yourself. I have recently read in an article that one of the new expressions in the Swedish language (I am studying Swedish) is “popcorn brain”. You would say that someone has a popcorn brain if they switch focus way too often. The type of person that watches tv with the phone in their hand, switching their attention between the two and keeping track of various pop up notifications as well. I found that hilarious that Swedish felt the need to describe a person in this way but I actually agree with this. This expression is super useful. Sometimes I have popcorn brain myself. A few years back I really struggled to focus for long periods of time. Focusing even for 30 minutes at a time seemed like a challenge. At the time I worked as a technical …

Give Yourself Time With Yoga

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Everyone is struggling to find time these days, too many things are keeping us busy. Besides the job and home responsibilities we also have an entire online world to explore. Sometimes maybe we have the time but we don’t have any energy left to use it on things that we love doing because we are exhausted after a day of work. You take and you take until you feel like you are actually not in control of your own time anymore. I felt like this for quite a while. I live in London where things are always taking a long time because of the distance between things. Especially when I used to commute, at the end of each day I was looking back at how I spent my time and very little of it was for myself. And even having couple of hours for myself didn’t leave me with enough energy to go to the gym for example or go for a run. So for a long while I was in this state of blaming …

Creativity Means Hard Work

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I am in holiday at the moment and I woke up this morning thinking that I should work on writing a short story. It’s been years since I said I want to start and do some writing. What did I do towards this? Well, I enrolled myself in an online class about how to write short stories but then in the middle of it I slowed down, I didn’t allocate enough time for myself to do the exercises in the class and I eventually abandoned it. So clearly I wasn’t ready to put in the work. I found all kind of excuses and questions like this: – I have no good ideas about short stories, it seems like staring at beautiful sunsets doesn’t do anything for me. Ideas just don’t come to me, I am broken! – I have only written texts for myself before, there seems to be a lot of rules and tips for writing shorting stories, I feel overwhelmed now. Too many video tutorials, too many classes online, I am completely lost. …

Mediterranean and Middle Eastern Meze Platter

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Week 10 – 2021 This is another post from the series “I tried something new this week”. Not every meal needs to be complicated to be delicious. Sometimes you just need to remember about flavours that make you happy. Maybe food that reminds you of home or holidays, maybe something that you ate in a restaurant and always wanted to try to make. That’s exactly what I did this weekend. I went to the market to get bread, olives and some tapenade and then did some dips to go with that. It turned out to be a delicious platter of food. This is what I made to go with the delicious market food: Smoked aubergine mix Hummus My version of tabbouleh Ingredients For the aubergine dip: aubergine brown onion salt oil For the hummus: 1 x 400g can chickpeas 60 ml lemon juice 60 ml tahini 2 tbs olive oil 1 garlic clove 1/2 tsp ground cumin 1/2 tsp salt 45ml water paprika for serving For the tabbouleh: cucumber tomatoes fresh parsley leafs olive oil …

Gochujang Chicken 65

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Week 9 – 2021 This is another post from the series “I tried something new this week”. For this recipe I used a lot of chicken so it will yield about 4 big portions but I guess that is what happens when you defrost an entire pack of chicken breast and get really excited about a recipe that you wanted to try for a long time! Ingredients (4 portions) For the chicken batter: 600g chicken breast 2 tsp salt 2 tsp chilli powder 2 tsp coriander powder 1 tsp Garam Masala 3 tsp grated ginger 3 tsp grated garlic 6 tbsp plain wheat flour 4 tbsp lemon juice 3 eggs oil for deep frying For frying and coating the chicken at the end: 3 tbsp oil 2 tsp cumin seeds 2 tbs chopped garlic 3 tbsp Gochujang paste 5-6 dried chillies 15-20 curry leafs Method Step 1 – prepare the batter and marinate the chicken Dice the chicken breast into 2 cm cubes and add to a large bowl. The add all the ingredients for …

Chicken & Egg Salad

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Week 8 – 2021 This is another post from the series “I tried something new this week”. I like doing simple recipes for lunches and this week I did a salad that I wanted to share because it’s so simple but it’s delicious. Especially now when I am working from home all the time, is important to have go to lunch recipes that I can make quickly and which can offer enough variety in my diet. This one is definitely on my go to list. Ingredients chicken breast egg radishes plum tomatoes broccoli balsamic vinegar olive oil salt & pepper butter Method Grill the chicken breast using your favourite method. I picked some chicken breast wit skin for this recipe and grilled it in the oven with a bit of melted butter on top, salt and pepper. Steam the broccoli and boil the eggs. I tried with hard boiled and soft boiled eggs, they both work very well. If you like leek you could also steam some of that, in my opinion broccoli and leak …

Slow cooked Pork Ribs

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Week 7 – 2021 This is another post from the series “I tried something new this week”. This recipe takes about 7 hours on low temperature in the slow cooker but it’s very easy to prepare, it took me maximum 10 minutes. I have a slow cooker from Russell Hobs with 2 settings and I used setting 1 but I am sure that other slow cookers have similar settings, just use the lowest one for best results. Ingredients (2 portions) 2 packs of pork ribs of approx 600g each (about 4-5 ribs per person) 300g bbq sauce 1 tbs Worcester sauce 2 cloves crushed garlic cayenne spice Method Add the ribs in the slow cooker. Prepare the sauce by mixing the bbq sauce, the Worcester sauce, the garlic and a bit of cayenne spice. Add the sauce on the ribs and coat them by using a brush. Set the slow cooker on low temperature and leave the ribs to cook for about 7 hours. I really enjoy the ribs with just a salad and I …