We all need nourishment of one sort or another to thrive. With that in mind, check out this month’s recommended ways to feed the mind, body, and soul.
If you have a recommendation you think we should check out, send it our way – we’re always looking for new and interesting recommendations to share with our community.
Laura Calder’s Chickpea Soup is a super simple (or soup-er simple!) comforting dish for these cold winter days. Her recipe calls for dried chickpeas (which you soak and cook before adding to the soup) but to make it extra-speedy to prepare, you can use canned. Cumin and paprika are listed as optional in the ingredients list, but in our opinion they elevate this soup into something sublime, imparting pleasant notes of warmth and spice. The chickpeas make the soup feel luscious, creamy, and substantial making it hearty enough for lunch or dinner. And we love that it’s uncomplicated – just a few ingredients, a little stovetop time, and a blender and you’ve got yourself a tasty meal.
Back in 2017, writer Gretchen Rubin published the book The Four Tendencies, which argued that people fall into four categories she calls Tendencies: Upholders, Questioners, Obligers, and Rebels. Rubin argues in her book that our Tendency shapes every element of our behaviour, and that understanding this framework can help with everything from making better decisions to meet deadlines to suffering less stress and burnout. Rubin and her team have developed a handy little quiz that can help you develop useful self-knowledge about your Tendency and how you respond to expectations, and it’s well worth the few minutes it takes to complete it.
Last month, Apple introduced its Journal app – a handy little tool to help you record your thoughts, feelings, and reflections and capture life’s special little everyday moments. We love that it allows users to integrate location information, photos, videos, and audio recordings to make their journaling experience richer and more colourful. To help prompt reflections, the app can remind you of special moments or activities you’ve done by spotlighting images from your photo library or recent podcasts you’ve listened to, for example. It also offers private, personalized prompts to inspire journal entries, as well as customizable notifications to help you build your journalling muscle.
You Are What You Eat: A Twin Experiment is a documentary series on Netflix. It follows groups of participants in an 8-week study conducted by Stanford University that put 22 sets of genetically identical twins on opposing (but healthy) diets: omnivore and vegan. It examines important changes that our food and agricultural systems have undergone over the decades, considering the impacts on the modern North American diet. It raises some important questions about how we eat, who has access to health food, and some important factors to consider when we make decisions about what we put into our mouths, and it’s definitely worth a watch.
