Áilín Quinlan: At last, I’ve found stress relief - it’s called Mindful Cooking

So, after nearly being reduced to a road-stain by a tractor, and after a severe allergic reaction to some gold-covered hazelnuts, and after my car was forced partway into a ditch by a speeding monster SUV, something needed to be done.

I just wasn’t myself.

I made an effort.

I walked a daily loop of four miles on different, quieter, and far nicer roads than the one I nearly got killed on.

I listened to calming music before going to sleep.

I took homeopathic remedies.

I read.

I listened to audiobooks.

I meditated. Well, I tried.

The dark knot of anxiety in my stomach remained.

Then, one day, I decided to make a dish called Armenian Lamb which I had found in an old Prue Leith cookbook.

This is a very nice lamb stew. The recipe, which featured quite a number of small specific steps, called for shoulder of lamb, which is quite bitty and fatty, so there was a lot of trimming involved. I found this to be slow work.

You couldn’t rush it or you’d slice a finger open with the very sharp knife that you have to use.

Twenty minutes in, I was still doggedly trimming away. As I focused on all those little pieces of lamb, I noticed that, for the first time in almost a fortnight, the knot in my stomach had melted.

Next, I had to wipe the meat dry with kitchen paper and brown it, one small batch at a time in a pan before removing the meat to a bowl.

A dash of water was then poured into the pan and brought to the boil. The bottom of the pan was scraped to remove any sediment, and this liquid was poured over the meat.

Three sliced onions, then two or three crushed cloves of garlic were sauteed in a little more oil.

After that came one ounce of flour, and half a teaspoon of mixed spice. A teaspoon of ground cumin followed. This was all gently cooked for two minutes.

Two tablespoons of tomato puree and half a pint of beef stock came next. Some salt. Some pepper.

The meat was returned to the pan and slowly brought to an ever slower rolling boil, before being turned way down and allowed to simmer for two hours. Another thing: I cleaned up as I went along, which contributed to the general sense of calm and order.

Strange, I thought, how much better I felt.

I later discovered that what I had unwittingly been doing was Mindful Cooking Meditation, which in turn is regarded as a form of Active Meditation.

The internationally best-selling author Marian Keyes wrote a book, Saved By Cake, about baking her way through a bout of depression and anxiety, and won an award for it.

I read about how cooking is a form of mindfulness in an article by Headspace, the Mindfulness experts.

I’d done it quite by accident and with an unfamiliar recipe, but it seems that if you approach preparing any meal as an exercise in mindfulness, it becomes active meditation.

By focusing on the recipe steps, and on the sensory details involved in carefully preparing food, you activate the parasympathetic nervous system, lower your cortisol levels, and induce a calm flow state.

With the lamb trimming, I was essentially grounding myself, focusing, staying present with the process, and experiencing a totally unexpected sense of calm and contentment.

Headspace explained that instead of using the breath to anchor the mind, as you would do in a normal meditation, with mindful cooking you simply allow your focus to fall on each particular step of the recipe.

Mindfulness meditation in any form is proven to, among other things, increase happiness, improve focus, and reduce stress.

Plus of course, when you’re mindful of the ingredients you use and the care with which you carry out each step, the end result will also be delicious.

A few days later, I decided to try some more of this new Active Meditation thing.

I’d always wanted to make nettle soup. Now, carefully gloved, I gathered a huge bunch of spring nettles. The buggers stung me through the gloves. I carefully snipped off all the leaves with scissors (the stalks are tough as old rope) and.dumped the lot in a big pan of boiling salted water for four minutes.

From there, they were plunged into a sinkful of cold water, which helps retain the strong bright green colour.

I sauteed onion, a diced potato, lots of garlic, a pinch of dried nutmeg and a pinch of salt.

Next, 500ml of milk and about 300ml of chicken or vegetable stock were slowly stirred in until it all reached the consistency of double cream.

The nettles were gently squeezed, tipped in and liquidised, before the soup was slowly heated up again (but not boiled).

Sustained focus was required because otherwise you got stung to bits. I got a few stings, but my stomach was calm and the soup was thick, hearty, fabulously green, tasty and crammed with goodness.

Plus I was myself again.

Next time, I made a rhubarb tart.

“Might a few queen cakes be out of the question,” my husband inquired. “With lots of sultanas?”

Active Meditation.

You learn something new every day.