How to get inspired and be happier

We can argue endlessly. Still, at the end of the day, we need someone or something that can inspire us to go on. Music, people, stories that make us thrive and feel happier, more accomplished, stronger . More compassionate. A better version of ourselves.

When I cook a new dish, I get inspired. I enjoy deeply the focus that bringing to life a new recipe can give me. The wondrous suspension of time that putting together ingredients, manual labour and knowledge always brings to me. The outcome can even be poor, but the process is always rewarding. To get inspired I don’t need complicate inputs. Simple is just fine with me. I love essentials. The fun comes when a taste, the color of a spice, the smell of fresh lemon peel hits my senses and triggers memories or connects the dots between perfumes and flavors.

A while ago I discovered a book that has a lot to do with the fun I experiment in my kitchen. The book is “Design the life you love” by Ayse Birsel. She is an industrial designer and she was named by Fast Company as one of the 100 Most Creative People in the World. Her book is the result of the application of a lifelong method to the discovering of new solutions for clients’ requests of new products. And it’s surprisingly effective even applied to different fields: from products to strategies, from food to life. The process of going through four different stages is requested to reach the searched creation: deconstruction, point of view, reconstruction and expression. The last one, expression, is the coveted one, since “Expression is the Art of giving form to an idea”.

Beautifully said, isn’t it? A bit hard to achieve, though. Especially if you want to have a major shift in your life.

But Ayse leads you step-by-step even in this ‘perilous’ journey, if you are up to do it.

I apply Ayse’s method to recipes and I must confess: I have a lot of fun doing it. The results are not always enjoyable, but always worth trying. Still the method in itself is key to a healthier feeding system on a daily basis.

Changing my dieting habits had been one of the first shifts I had to make once I was diagnosed with cancer. Abdominal fat and inflammation are enemies and must be faced with knowledge, patience and somehow determination. This is a fact I soon realized that cannot be skipped. And it’s a lifelong endeavor. Being a gourmet and a food storyteller, it was particularly challenging for me to reinvent my approach to food, cuisine and gastronomic journeys and thanks to Birsel’s method I found a way to achieve this goal in an entertaining way.

The first recipe I chose to submit to the Birsel’s Method is an evergreen of the Tuscan Culinary Tradition: panzanella.

It is a delicious dish that can be roughly described as a “bread salad”. In mixing together stale Tuscan bread, fresh red onions, salt, some red wine vinegar, a few spoonfuls of extra virgin olive oil, ripe red tomatoes and fresh leaves of basil, letting all ingredients sit together for a few hours, (half a day it’s even better) is what does the trick in order to have a rich, intense yet multifaceted flavor. I never met anyone who didn’t like panzanella so the idea of changing it came to me more as a challenge than a risk: what could possibly go wrong with such a strong base to start from? I felt on a very solid and well known ground. For my first time, I wanted to play kind of safe. And I did. I deconstructed a typical panzanella in its components: stale bread, tomatoes, onions, salt, vinegar, fresh basil leaves, extra virgin olive oil and water. I considered what I wanted to change to make it more palatable and I decided to ditch the vinegar that tends to be too strong for my liking. I picked lemon juice to replace it. And since I was dealing with fresh lemons to get the juice from, I decided to add some finely sliced lemon zest to the dish as a final touch, so to give a more vivid color and flavor to the panzanella. And it was a good move. My ‘new’ panzanella was delicious as the many I cooked previously, but with a really pleasant twist. A twist that made it more personal. More mine.

A twist that I loved.