Tea time

How have your holidays been? Mine were great. In the last few days of the year, I always look back at the past year. For the last few months I'm very busy with my cooking classes. I enjoy giving them and get a lot of energy from them.
I get inspired from the lessons and from my meadow and get a lot of creativity from it.
My concept is clear: cooking form scratch and the ingredients that I use, I want to make sure that they are as sustainable as possible. And the vegetables that are in season and growing in my meadow can be handpicked by my students.
And the recipes that we use do have to be appealing, seasonal ingredients and easy to make. And off course they have to taste great.
Off course when I have a course the recipes I've taken with me do have all the aspects I want. And luckily the people who take my cooking classes are very enthusiastic to.
For my meadow I'm still learning. I've got a lot of veggies and fruit last year, but also problems. Rabbits are very common in this region and they do like a lot of my greens to. In the permaculture course I'm following there are no eco-friendly solutions, except put a fence around my vegetable beds.
And a fence is not very practical with guests in my meadow.
I'm thinking of solutions for the upcoming year. I'm also making my plans for what to grow. I can't wait for spring (and yet winter has just begun).
I did cooking demonstrations to let people taste what the possibilities were at the classes or with the ingredients of my supplier. And I got media attention. An article in a newspaper. A lot of positive attention from that to.
A downside of all of this is that I don't blog as much as I did in the past. Simply because there is no time or the recipes I'm testcooking are for the classes and they don't get published on my blogs (yet).
That's something I want to do more in the next couple of months.
So my new years resolution will be:
Blog more: recipes and pictures of my meadow. Change the appearance of my posts a little bit: Just one finished photo instead of four because that takes a lot of extra work and sometimes great recipes don't make it to the blog, because I've only got the end result picture.
Do expand my concept for cooking classes: the concept is expanding further.
Lately making your own high tea is popular.
And have fun! Because I think that is the most important part of the success of the classes. When you have fun, you get energy, you get inspiration, you get creativity, you get better and have better recipes, give better classes and so furthermore.
So my motto for next year will be FUN.

Hope you did enjoy my looking back on last year and hope to see you in the new year. And for my one picture of today, I choose to take a photo of a part of the small bites we can make at our high tea (but as you know, recipes change with season!)

Have a great new year!