Marmalade and Kindness: Bringing Mindful Cooking to The Forefront

Adamantia Velonis, the founder, editor and food writer behind Marmalade + Kindness and HARVEST Magazine. She helps people to find mindfulness and creativity through the cooking process.

A member of the UK Guild of Food Writers, and an accredited mindfulness teacher she has been featured in a number of magazines and podcasts discussing the topic of mindful cooking, including Happiful Magazine UK. Her recipes have been featured in a number of magazines, including Vegan Life UK and Nourish Australia. 

We caught up recently to find out her plans for the next issue of HARVEST and how mindful cooking has supported her through lockdown . 

What is mindful cooking?

Mindful cooking is a form of meditation, a time to switch off and focus, immersing yourself to all your senses while you cook. Making cooking an enjoyable relaxing experience, rather than a chore.  

Mindful cooking (not to be confused with 'mindful eating') challenges us to bring awareness to the providence of ingredients, our intention during the cooking process, the rituals of sharing meals and ultimately the impact of our food choices on our body and the planet. It uses the cooking process to create a mental 'pause' - similar to a formal mediation practice - where you are focused on the task at hand and enter a ‘flow’ state. This is beneficial because it creates distance from negative thoughts and the space to process emotions, while the cumulative effects of honing our culinary skills, builds confidence that can be translated to other aspects of life.

What inspired you to create Marmalade and Kindness?

In 2019 I moved to the UK from Australia. The move was joyful but also presented challenges – mainly the distance and isolation I experienced from family and friends. During this period of adjustment, cooking became my outlet. While I was spending a lot of time by myself, having exciting recipes to prepare helped me to find some purpose. Exploring British cuisine and seasonal produce, helped me to understand the culture of my new home a little more. I also started becoming familiar with food production and farming practices which lead me to commit to taking environmentally sustainable action. I was finding that having new skills to master reignited my love of learning. For the first time, I was managing my tendency to perfectionism as I started to treat failed attempts, as ‘experiments’ not ‘disasters.’

But most importantly, cooking allowed me to connect with my family and my identity, by making family recipes and traditional Greek foods I used to eat as a child, but had forgotten since my grandmother passed away. By treating the experience of cooking with attention and being present in the moment, (what I describe as mindful cooking) I developed a newfound confidence and gave myself permission to be creative again. Reflecting on everything I had learnt along the way, I started Marmalade + Kindness so that I could share my UK adventure with my family and friends in Australia, and inspire others to explore the benefits of mindful cooking. Since then the platform has matured to include a magazine offering, HARVEST, which creates jobs for female freelancers and creatives. And there are exciting plans to launch brand partnerships with female artisan food makers.

So, how can mindful cooking help during lock down?

Yeah, I mean, it's really interesting, I've written a couple of pieces on that point. I believe that people have seen cooking as more than just making a nutritious meal, that actually there are therapeutic benefits to the process. I think a lot of the literature around food has always been around making recipes to get a particular result, as opposed to following a recipe to explore something and engage more with yourself. I think during lockdown, we've all been faced with a lot of different challenges and anxiety has been a really big one. Through the conversations I've had with a lot of different people, I’ve seen how cooking has been an opportunity for people to really pause. 

I think people are finding that little break during the day to switch off a bit so that they can come back to life by doing something in the present rather than getting so caught up in all the all the thoughts of what could happen. So, I definitely think cooking as therapy is getting a bit of a renaissance now and I have seen some studies that have shown that things like baking and working with your hands can support stress management. 

I do agree, as someone that suffers from anxiety, cooking is definitely one of my favourite outlets. Cooking, washing up - keeping busy doing definitely helps. 

You know, it's funny, one of my friends Elaine Beckett wrote a poem for The Poetry Review recently called ‘Thursday’. It was about mindfulness, it describes this feeling of when your brain is completely awash with all these thoughts and how just getting up, doing something practical, like boiling an egg can help. And it's so true, like when you come back to those practical things, like the cleaning, tidying up, just something physical, something that's right here right now in front of you, you can get a little bit of mental freedom.

So, what kind of things have you been cooking during lockdown, what have you enjoyed making? 

Oh. I think comfort foods, I mean, for me, I love soups - one I really love is Avgolemono, which I'm not sure if you've tried, but it's like a great chicken soup recipe. Have you come across it?

I’m vegetarian, but yes, my husband loves it!

Oh, beautiful. Yeah, it's one that my grandmother used to make for me as a child and it's one of those recipes that is so simple. It just produces something so wonderfully healing. So it’s definitely a favourite, particularly over the winter.

During this particular lockdown I've really been getting into things that have been hydrating - so, again, soups, smoothies, juices and things like that. I've been finding that the air has been very dry, so just trying to stay hydrated has been really important. I've been really trying to focus on a lot of fresh, uplifting ingredients like fennel and blood orange. I think with citrus particularly, the smell is quite amazing and lifts your spirits.  

So, your Greek heritage has inspired a lot of the recipes on your site - what was the first traditional Greek recipe you ever made?

I actually don't remember. I have fond memories of watching my yiayia make phyllo pastry from scratch. 

I've still got her plasti -- a really long, thin rolling pin which whenever I use at home, it brings back that memory of being two or three years old and sitting up on the bench, seeing my grandmother kneading dough and being the one to sprinkle the flour onto the bench top for her - and it makes me feel like she's sort of still there when I  use the physical rolling pin that she used to use. It's just a really nice way of connecting with that memory especially when you've lost loved ones. You’ll usually go visit them where they're resting but she's buried in Greece, so it's not like I can get up and go. So, it's that opportunity to have a conversation with her in my head and feel like she's still there because I can remember those first memories of seeing her cook at home.

Yeah, I know what you mean. I think smells, textures and things like that really tie in with sensory memory, like when you're cooking and something reminds you of someone or something, giving you that warm and fuzzy feeling inside. 

And I was reading something the other day around the fact that smell and perception of taste is actually so caught up in very early memories of foods, which is why it's so important to give children a really broad selection of things when they're small and open that tasting and smelling vocabulary, because how we perceive things in later life is actually so affected by those memories of first tasting it, like really early on. So it's really fascinating how much of it is mental, because I think often we think about palate and taste as being static or being objective. But actually it's not, every time we're tasting something, we're bringing all of that history to that present experience, which is just extraordinary.

You recently released your first issue of Harvest Magazine, what should we expect from your next issue?

Yes, the Spring issue is coming out 1 March. Spring is my favourite season. Absolutely. Hands down. So we're going to be celebrating Easter, and exploring the traditions around, feasting and fasting, which I find really, really interesting, particularly now that plant based diets and flexitarian diets, are becoming very mainstream. 

You can expect more incredible food writing from Sam Bilton and Kathy Slack, both also on the UK Guild of Food Writers, poetry from Gill Barr and illustrations from a really beautiful illustrator from France, Blandine Pannequin. The recipes will be very focused on supporting our bodies through the seasonal transition. So, yes, really, really exciting.

I read the last issue you released last month and it really takes you on a journey because of the way that you've laid it out. I especially love the recipes and I'm really looking forward to the next issue.

Well, this will be bigger and better. So very excited.  

You have a good mix of recipes on your site. How do you decide what goes up?  

Yeah, it's a bit of a mix.  

I mean, I think for me, it's very much inspired by what's in season. I’m living in Oxford at the moment, and I'm really, really lucky that I'm close to 2 North Parade Store, where I also spend a few hours a week working there with Pete and Vicky. They bring in just the most incredible organic food and a lot of it's quite local. So for me, I think that seasonal inspiration is a really big one. And I think memories. Psychologically we're so driven by how we want to feel through a particular food experience. So, for example, the winter recipes. I'm really craving freshness. I'm really craving hydration. So that's driving the recipes. There is very much an emotional resonance that I try to build into that experience. I really think about the psychological angle and also what’s in season.

How do you figure out what you want to include in the following season?  

To be honest, when you're running a publication, you do have to kind of be a little ahead of the curve, so I do take that into consideration, but I like to work using more creative processes. I'm definitely not developing recipes all the time, but there might be a weekend where I might just be on a roll and develop 10 new things that I absolutely love, and it just kind of just comes easily and there could be other times when I know I have a deadline and I just feel completely blocked - not happy with how things turned out so I keep working on it and keep developing it until its just right. So, I think once you're in that creative space, it's important to just keep running with it, but to also respect when you need downtime. Even when I'm kind of in those during downtime phases, I'm still thinking and inspired and collecting ideas. I always have a notebook with me where I jot down memories of things or new experiences of things I've tasted. So, I think keeping that conversation with myself going, even if I'm not physically coming up with new recipe ideas helps.

So what are some of your favourite things to cook?

At the moment my Spinach Soup - I love its velvety texture and I feel like I’m really nourishing myself. 

Other than that I think a lot of the Greek favourites. I mean, it's interesting because I think a lot of people perceive Greek food as quite heavy and meat based, but actually there are lots of plant based recipes. I've been trying to focus more on plant based eating and whole foods.

Yeah, you've got some really great vegan and vegetarian recipes up on your site, which I love. Some I’ve actually made before, like I've made the spinach pie and now I’m really looking forward to trying the butternut squash tart.

So I make that like every autumn, every year without fail. When we were in the office, I would bring it for bake sales because it was such a favourite.

Do you always follow the recipe or do you like to experiment and create something new?

Um, yeah, it's a little bit of a mix. When I'm trying to learn a new technique or if I'm baking, then I think following the recipe is great, it gives you that sense of focus, you kind of get in, read this thing, follow it, do what you need to do. 

And then there are other times when I just want to be free and play with something. It doesn't matter if it doesn't work, I want that freedom. 

The best example I can give is my signature dessert - strawberry and yuzu icecream with pistachio dacquoise. It's based on a jam that I tried when we were in Paris. Like, no one else can come up with it because it's so specific to your experience and I love that idea of being able to come up with a recipe that can take me back to something that's really special and just very personal and share that with other people. So I think there's something really cool and creative about that aspect of it. 

Definitely, I like to experiment now and then - sometimes I'd find a recipe and just tweak it, to my personal taste. 

Yeah. And you know what? I think this is the thing I really want to promote with the platform is that. I don't want people to feel like it's about following the recipes that I necessarily share. I do actually want it to be something that allows people to say, hey, I can get confident around cooking enough to know what my palate enjoys and how I would play with this to come up with something new or how I can connect with my own family recipes or my own tradition. 

I think that's kind of the greatest gift of cooking, is having that freedom and that confidence around what you like and I think coming back to that earlier point, it's not objective. Cooking isn't objective. It is an entirely subjective experience and so grounded in memories of early experiences and taste. It's about identifying where you sit and what tastes great to you, what tastes great to the people that you're cooking for.

What advice would you give someone who is learning how to cook for the first time?

I'm really lucky because I come at it from the perspective of someone who saw cooking at home. Although, I've got to say that when I was at uni and living in Sydney as a corporate lawyer a lot of that went out the window, and I didn't come back to it until much later as an adult. 

Also, I felt like the whole corporate lifestyle made me focus on what I should be taking out of my diet and on saving time, rather than seeing cooking as an activity that's worthwhile in and of itself, because it’s actually about self-care and self-worth. It's not about being a Michelin star chef overnight or whatever, it's a process and it’s about enjoying the process of picking things that you'd like to make, picking things that are achievable that you can connect with. I think a lot of the time when we're choosing recipes, we're making things because we think we should make them as opposed to something that we necessarily love and personally want - I think a lot of that ties into dieting culture. Keep practicing and don't be discouraged if something doesn’t turn out perfectly - it’s ok.  

Another great thing to try are those recipe boxes like Hello Fresh, I know a few people who were new to cooking that found them helpful. 

Do you think Marmalade + Kindness could one day become a cookbook? 

I would love that! I think for me the thing that really inspires me at the moment is plant based Greek cooking -  so, I would love to create something like that and tie in the elements of the poetry and food writing that I have on my site. 

Finally taking a leaf out of your own book, can you tell me a life lesson cooking has taught you?

Cooking has taught me so much! I don’t know where to begin… For me I feel like cooking is this little micro universe where I learnt so much about myself. One thing I've learnt is patience and bringing that back into my daily life. Things don’t always have to be perfect, failure is ok and it takes time to get to that level where you can execute something perfectly. It’s about progressing and learning new skills incrementally and understanding that it's all part of the journey - there are building blocks. Slowing down and understanding good things take time, like when you have to wait 48 hours for the sourdough starter. Also, creativity, having something to turn to in your everyday life that, gives you that outlet and that opportunity to explore and translate that creativity in other areas of your life.