A healthy friendship
My four best friends since childhood and I sit around the little garden table next to the cherry tree, the weather is humid but a light breeze blows through the leaves of the tree. It smells like freshly cut grass. The cat stretches on the ground next to the red tulips, soaking up sunlight. We are now university students studying in different countries, our gatherings are rare and filled with love.
There is plenty of food on the table. Baked potatoes with parsley from the garden, banitsa that my mother made for us, salad with tomatoes, olives, and feta cheese, and the one thing our gatherings are incomplete without — my banana oatmeal cookies.
During my early high school years, I didn’t have a healthy relationship with food. Dieting was something natural to me and being extremely thin was equal to being beautiful. My everyday life consisted of skipped meals, obsessive thinking about calories, and checking myself in the mirror to make sure I looked thin enough for my standards. The worst part was that I believed I was doing something good for my health by not eating junk. Food was nothing more than an annoying distraction that was keeping me away from my goal of being thin and beautiful.
I was anxious about gathering with my friends during this period. I loved spending time with them but the thought of the food on the table gave me severe anxiety. I spent most of the gatherings watching them eat the delicious food and think about how to eat less so I don’t feel guilty when I get home later. Too many temptations. I was never fully present in the conversations and nothing there was ever considered healthy enough for me to eat. My friends have known me almost all my life and they were aware of what I was going through. Despite their constant attempts to help, I spent most of my high school years living like this.
This continued until my senior year of high school when I started building a more healthy relationship with food. I was learning a lot about nutrition and food was finally becoming a friend. I realized that self-worth and beauty are not measured by how many kilograms you weigh or how many meals you skipped last week. With the support of my friends and family, I slowly started allowing myself to eat different foods and re-build my perception of health and beauty. My new favorite activity was to experiment with healthy recipes. Vegan cheesecakes, chia seed puddings, quinoa salads. I was enjoying my healthy experiments and my friends were happy for me but they always considered my food ‘’too light’’ as they preferred eating heavier meals and deserts.
I was determined to find something healthy that they will enjoy. Before one of our gatherings, I found a recipe for banana-oatmeal cookies with just four ingredients. All I needed were oats, a banana, some honey, and vanilla extract. This recipe is the simplest thing in the world and the cookies are amazingly delicious. You really can’t go wrong with these.
‘’Emma, it smells like heaven here, what is it?!’’ This is what I heard when I welcomed my friends for the gathering that night. The smell of banana and vanilla filled the house. They were amazed by how something healthy can taste and smell so good. The entire tray of 50 cookies finished in less than half an hour. I felt proud that I finally cooked something healthy that my friends loved.
My oatmeal cookies took a leading role in every single gathering we had from that night on. They are always on the table even now when our gatherings are just a few times a year. I can proudly say that my friends helped me overcome this tough period of my life and in return, I influenced them to try something healthier. The smell of banana and vanilla will always remind me of our gatherings and how much our friendship means to me.
Recipe for the Banana oatmeal cookies in 4 easy steps:
Ingredients: 250 grams of oats, 1 ripe banana, 3 tablespoons of honey, and just a few drops of liquid vanilla extract.
- Preheat oven to 180°C
- In a large bowl, add the mashed banana, honey, and the oats. Leave the bowl in the refrigerator for 30 minutes.
- Make round balls out of the chilled cookie batter. Place onto a baking sheet and leave at least 2–3 cm distance between cookies.
- Bake for fifteen minutes until the cookies are lightly brown. Voila!
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Emanuela Kerencheva is a Sophomore student at AUBG majoring in Journalism and Mass Communications. She believes food is one of the best things in the world.
