ƜєƖcσмє тσ MуƘιтcнєηLαв

kitchen where the time stops and daily experiments take taste buds into a journey around the world

In my kitchen there are no limits for creativity and no need for a cooking skills. What you need to enjoy a journey in my kitchen is a good recipe, reading skills, a bit of patience and some curiosity. And if you also have determination, you will be able to make any recipe I will share with you and enjoy the same or even better taste 😎

I have now four years of proper kitchenlab experience and my favorite cuisines at the moment are Polish, Italian and Spanish. But I am still trying new recipes and experimenting with different flavours on a weekly basis. Sometimes it comes to an accident or an explosion, but it only makes my lab to be more colorful.

Most of my food creations are healthy dishes/desserts, but I also don’t forget about balance and cook with passion any traditional meals/bake cakes for weekends or special occasions.

Apart of passion to food and people, what has brought me here is my mission:

1. To share inspiration and get inspired from others
2. To promote healthy and active lifestyle
3. To support the Steemit community and Blockchain technology

Now if you are interested to get to know more about me, carry on reading and I will share with you a few interesting stories.

How I became a Lab Technician in my own Kitchen

The story starts in my family house. As much as I liked all cakes made by mum, most of food she prepared for us and to get messy by occasionally mashing up the shortcake or shaping cutlets, as much you would never find me in the kitchen when there was a time to actually make the food, set the table or wash up after a meal.

It didn’t make the difference to me if it would be just cooking the pasta, chopping the vegetables or frying something. And for some reason it was ALWAYS 🙄 my task to peel the tons of potatoes which in effect left my fingers all in pain! You can then imagine that as much I loved to eat, as much I hated cooking with passion.

I used to hear all over and again from my mum: "you need to learn how to cook otherwise you’ll end up like me when you get married; being with me on the phone for hours because you can’t even make a simple meal!" She told me her story a few times and to be honest she had a very good reasons to put pressure on me. When my mum was younger, she was not bothered about cooking at all, so when she actually got married and moved to the village on the other edge of the country, she could not even cook a simple soup (bear in mind her generation has rather no access to internet). She had some recipes book, but anyone who has cooked even once in life, knows that recipe book isn’t everything.

If you don’t have A GOOD RECIPE or ANY BASIC KNOWLEDGE - you won’t be able to make an edible meal 😉

So my mum used to regularly phone her mum to ask her all possible questions. Looking on how long it took me to learn some things, I think it must have been a long and frustrating process of learning. And my mum cooks amazing to me (not talking about a few things that I just don’t like), so I really understand why she was forcing me to learn how to cook. Unfortunately her attempts made me rather to dislike cooking even more. Perhaps also because I was totally useless in cooking at that time and I would burn even a rice, pasta or a scrambled eggs. It just wasn’t for me and I would rather spent all that time reading my favourite books. To be fair, at that time I had a lot of insecurities and was very nervous and chaotic and believed that I will never learn to cook.

So what has caused the change?

I have found in the turning point firstly when I got to see some of Ewa Chodakowska's recipes. Ewa is perhaps the most famous personal trainer in Poland. You may like her or not, but this is a fact, that it was originally the sandwich made using her recipe which made me think that eating doesn’t have to be boring and some other ingredients combinations can be good, too. That’s when I also got some awareness about food’s impact on my body and decided to lose a few kilograms by applying healthy choices to my everyday life. It was not long before my A-Levels and that’s when I started making my first baby steps in cooking.

Just after A-Levels I have moved out to a city five hours away from my home by train. Life has literally forced me to cook – I realized that if I will not do it, nobody else will wither. I had no family nearby and neither my work colleagues or flatmates would agree to do it. As I didn’t want to eat rubbish and couldn’t afford dining in restaurant, I decided to learn to cook. Just like this.

And you know what? I made it. When I first started I was searching through internet for different recipes and I would spend hours on that and almost half of my free time in the kitchen. Sometimes my meals would turned out to not be as healthy or fit as I planned, or not as tasty as I would wish. But step by step I was doing the progress.

Year after I moved to the UK, I already had some basic experience, belief in my skills and the awareness, that I will have to cook for myself anyway 😉 However, circumstances have been adverse as I had to move quite frequently. I shared kitchen with messy boys who would occasionally steal my food, I would not have the required cooking tools, kitchen was tiny, finally I was working so hard that I didn’t have any energy to cook…That was difficulties I had to face and probably half of my meals at that time could not even by considered as healthy, but I was very determined to find an accommodation which would meet my needs and expectations better, and finally after a year of a different stories I ended up renting a room in a three bedroom house with shared, but very spacious and tidy kitchen. I absolutely loved it, and the 1,5 year I spent there was a time of fantastic cooking adventures to me.

I got very much into a healthy world and fallen in love in all types of smoothies. Luckily for my current husband and fiancée at that time, I was also very keen to try some traditional polish recipes - as you can imagine, he was the one I would test my ‘products’ on. That’s how I did my first "Gołąbki", "Rybę po Grecku", "Piernik" czy "Kapuśniak". I also started baking my own bread, as the one I could get In the UK I have found unhealthy.

At some point I just realized, that I AM ACTUALLY GOOD in cooking and baking.

What a surprise it was to me and how proud I was to see the results of my hard work and progress from nothing to this stage!

Today I am skilled and knowledgeable even more. I am known at work and around friends for making interesting, healthy and delicious food. Sounds fantastic, right ?! Looking back on how much ‘untalented’ person I was.

But this is what I have realized – THERE IS NOTHING LIKE A COOKING / BAKING GIFT.

There are just people who are more interested, encouraged and have access to relevant knowledge. That’s it and that’s all. Nobody gets born with these skills, this is something you learn as you go along and you are the one to decide how good you want to be and take appropriate action.

Now I have shared my story with you, I want to say that

THIS IS APPLICABLE TO ABSOLUTELY ANYONE.

IF I'VE DONE IT - SO CAN YOU.

And together we can more and we can better, so I am here to share with you some of tips which has helped me and inspire you with my own ideas.

If you’ve enjoyed reading and found this post valuable, and if you would like to see more of mykitchenlab posts, then don’t hesitate to follow me and share your comments! Looking forward to hear your opinions .

With love,
MyKitchenLab