Mushroom Milano

You know what is great? Pasta. It may not be the answer to everything, but it is usually one of my suggestions and if it isn't the answer, it helps anyway. When we talk about 'comfort foods' we usually reference dishes that we had growing up as a child, that take us back to that feeling of warmth and safety. Mushroom Milano, for me, is a veganised adaptation of a delicious dish that a close family friend introduced me to in my mid teens. I like food, I haven't always been as big of a fan as I am these days, but tasting her milano for the first time was eye opening. It was the first time that I had eaten something in the comfort of home that tasted like fine dining. Not to say that the food I had at home wasn't good, it was great and I enjoyed it very much...but the intensity of garlic, sun dried tomatoes and cream with pasta just blew me away and now it is one of my go to meals for celebrating, having friends over, when I am feeling sad or just because its a day of the week that ends with a 'y' (eurgh that saying). Trust me, with minimal effort mushroom milano is a winner of a dish.

Ingredients
50g sun dried tomatoes (I use these Merchant Gourmet ones because they aren't in oil)
2 cloves of garlic
250 ml of vegetable stock
250 ml of non-dairy cream alternative
300g of mushrooms (any that take your fancy)
Pasta for 2 people - spaghetti/tagliatelle/linguine works best but all pasta is good (I am not judging you, have as much pasta as you want)
Fresh chopped basil
Black Pepper to taste

Anxiety Diaries

I am in no way an expert when it come to Mental Health. I am not a doctor, I have not studied about it, but I have certainly become a lot more self aware over the past few years. I have learnt a lot about myself and those in my close friendship circles. I have been very lucky to be around people who, are supportive and understanding and to a certain degree, empathise or somewhat understand how I am feeling and have helped me discover ways for supporting my own mental health.

This is something I have been meaning to do for a while; a series of blogs that focus on my mental health, my anxiety(ies) to be exact. I have never been to the doctors about my mental health, I have never been 'diagnosed' as having anxiety and yet I am fully aware that I do. Anxiety is something I had been dealing with long before I knew there was a word for how I felt, or what was stopping me from doing certain things and feeling a particular way. There are certain topics, activities and just general life things that trigger my anxiety; all of which I will attempt to explain in this blog series.  Writing, for me, is a creative outlet, it is something that I enjoy and find cathartic. Writing certainly helps me to understand my thoughts in a much more logical and clearer way and so I thought writing about what triggers my anxiety would be beneficial for my own wellbeing as well as helping those around me to understand what I am feeling.

Anxiety is triggered in different people by different things and I am sure I will no doubt cover a number of these, but the content and the experiences in these blog posts is mine and mine alone. It will not reflect the exact journey or life of everyone that has anxiety and my own experiences and ways of dealing with my anxiety will not work for everyone. I hope that by writing this blog series I will learn more about myself and educate others about some of the ways that anxiety can affect your day to day life.

366 days of #SoberSoph

If you personally know me then you will be fully aware that 2016 was a year of sobriety for me. After the realisation that I was drinking too much alcohol, having sleepless nights, forgetting and regretting too many of my weekends in 2015 I vowed to stay sober for 366 days (yes, just so happens 2016 was a leap year) and I even made myself my very own 'Sober Calendar' with drunken pictures of me from over the years to remind me of, well, just how little I remembered...oh and how bad hangovers really are. I also kept a journal which I wrote entries in every day in 2016; sometimes looking back situations can seem less intense than they were or you may have forgotten about problems that occurred so I wanted to capture as much of 2016 as I could so I could truly share what it was like to be 23 in 2016 and be completely sober.

I would be lying if I said not drinking alcohol was easy, but at some points of 2016 it actually wasn't difficult at all. A lot of research has been done on creating new habits/breaking old ones and the general conclusion I made seemed to be that after 3 months, my 'new' habit should be easy and come completely naturally, which to a degree it did. I certainly got to the point where I was happy to go out to pubs, or to parties or to a nightclub, and be in a situation where usually I would have alcohol and still have a really good time just drinking water. It is kind of sad that I linked being happy with a night of celebrating or socialising to the amount of alcohol I consumed, but I see how a lot of people in my life still do that, and I do understand it even though it seems to be something that people don't really talk about.