Hi! My name is Martina, I´m 18 years old, and I am currently in my first year of occupational therapy in the Universidad de los Andes in Santiago, Chile.
A significant occupation for me is cooking and baking. I don’t mean cooking because I have to, you know, so I can eat every day; I mean trying new and different recipes.
I love baking bread, cupcakes, cakes, cookies and trying new recepies for pasta, potatoes, pizza and much more.
I started cooking at a very young age, helping around the kitchen with my mom, grandmas and aunts. They started teaching me family recepies and getting me to help with trying new ones too. And each time I fell in love with cooking more and more.
At the beginning I only did it with my family, to spend more time with them. Now cooking is my way of destressing and to let go and let myself feel my feelings in a way. I basically cook when I´m really stressed or when I am really sad, or really happy, so in conclusion whenever I have a really strong emotion. It´s also kind of a way to express my feelings. It helps me with stress, because it is something I can control, cooking and baking is basically a science. It helps me a lot to know what comes next and to know that I am the one in control and if it doesn’t go well, I know what I can work on for next time I try the recipe.
When I was younger, I only baked, I didn’t really like cooking in general. Now I love experimenting with cooking and baking equally.
I, of course, cook in my kitchen mostly with a kitchenaid standing mixer that was gifted to me from my parents. They gave me the mixer once they realized that I spend a lot of time cooking and that it was something I really loved doing and wasn’t just a fase in my live.
Once I started to really get into baking and saw that people liked what I made I started selling cookies and other things at school, to my classmates and people I knew from other grades, just to make some extra money.
I do cook every day but trying new recepies or cooking because I’m stressed or need a way to cope with something, it is normally once a week at least, especially now in university.
I believe my role is as an amateur and as a family member.
And now I will insert a couple of pictures of things I have cooked.
