From therapy to recipe… Welcome to my blog. Here you’ll find reflections, recipes and stories. Whether they’re stories that come from scientific studies or stories that come from my clients themselves, I’m always making connections back to food. Every dish tells a story, and kitchen lessons tend to be life lessons. So here, every other month, I will post a recipe for life. Each one is a life lesson inspired by therapy, sprinkled with a bit of psychology, and linked to a meaningful recipe. My recipes are generally quick, pretty easy, always tasty, sometimes a little bit different and inescapably Greek Cypriot in some way or another. My approach to cooking is simple: it’s about flavours and ingredients that ‘attach’ well together to create something delicious. I’m still a therapist in the kitchen – always trying to understand relationships between things, whether ingredients or people. And it’s noteworthy that wherever my blog includes any reference to a client’s story, I have their full permission to do so and their confidentiality is always maintained.
I hope you’ll be nourished in more than just the food sense.
Those were my words. I said them during one of my finals at Leiths School of Food and Wine. The exam required us to cook a classic of French cuisine: a supreme of chicken with a tarragon sauce, served with mashed potatoes and green beans. On that particular day, however, I found that simple fare…
They say that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. This was true for my client growing up. For her, breakfast was important for reasons other than the tummy-filling, get-up-and-go energy fuelling it was supposed to be. She was the only one in her family of six who ate breakfast: ‘Nobody else felt…
She did not mind her youngest child leaving the nest; she just wished she could have gone with her. My client described her 19-year-old daughter as beautiful and bright; she was a young woman who had vitality and curiosity, who wasn’t afraid to ask questions or to find what she wasn’t looking for. ‘The world’s…
Her friends had different homes. And different mothers, who cooked different dinners. Her friends had cheery foods, all yellow in family: golden chicken nuggets, giant corn cobs, chunky chips and eggs with sunny, hope-filled yolks. At their tables there was chitter-chatter and cheekily stealing morsels from each other’s plates and squeezing as much ketchup over…
I wanted toast after the session finished. Nothing else would do. This time, however, I found myself reaching for Marmite as my choice of spreadable companion to my toast, which was somewhat unusual for me. As was my relinquishing of tea; today was not about the soothing tag-team alchemy of tea and toast. No, this…
Every day at school, two bells would ring at 1 o’clock sharp. The school bell, with its loud, shrill ring, signalled that lunchtime was finally here and that it was time to take care of hunger – of one sort, at least. The other bell started quietly, inside my client’s head. It slowly and slyly…
This truly is a food love story; it starts with ‘I love you’. It also starts with a stew. And it starts a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. A father-son relationship is the backbone of both Star Wars and of this story my client told me about his own father’s Force-wielding,…
Our conversation had snowballed into Snowballs. There was no doubt we had been jingled some of the way here because Christmas was only a few days away. Therapy, like any conversation, changes with the seasons, just as food does. To eat or drink seasonally is to know what it’s like to long for something and…
It was the story of a little girl who used to defy bedtime on Fridays, with fierce fists and fiercer tears. She would wait, with both patience and pain, on the landing in the dark for her mum to return from work. Her little heart would skip a beat as she heard the quiet scrape…