We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Tami Wolff. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Tami below.
Tami, so excited to have you with us today. So much we can chat about, but one of the questions we are most interested in is how you have managed to keep your creativity alive.
Some people say that their meditation is prayer for them, while others engage in guided meditation, and my meditation is cooking and food. meditation is, in its definition, a practice of mindfulness, or focusing the mind on a particular object, thought, or activity to train attention and awareness, and achieve a mentally clear and emotionally calm and stable state. My creativity through cooking is my meditation.
My passion and creativity comes from watching my mother cook and be interested in delicacies. She devoted her life to her garden and we ate from scratch always. She was a environmental activist and dedicated her cooking to eating pure. We ate healthy fats (unsalted butter, never margarine or crisco) and rarely had processed foods. Through watching her cook, I became a cook myself and challenge myself to create meals, snacks and desserts from pure ingredients.
I keep my creativity alive through the awareness of herbs and plants and what benefits they bring to my dishes, and because I come from a hunting and fishing family, we often eat our own wild game and fish.
Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?
The name of my company is called “Beets and Sweets”. The name is my husband’s idea because I create hearty, soul-filled food with pure ingredients. We love beets and their earthy smell and taste, and my signature food that I sell is my granola made with maple syrup from my friend’s maple sugaring farm in Wisconsin (hence the “sweets”).
There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
1. Be willing to put yourself out there even if you’ve never done the thing before. I always wanted to have my cottage foods license, and when I finally obtained it and registered for my first Farmer’s Market, it was my small way of following through on a dream of mine. I just want to share good food with others. 2. Research, research, research… whatever the “thing” is you want to do, read about it. Read what others have done, use them as examples, try what the experts have done, and then, when you are ready, make it your own. Whatever the “thing” is that you want to do, just practice and fail, and practice some more.
3. Passion. Of all the qualities, tap into your passion. It will guide you.
Alright, so before we go we want to ask you to take a moment to reflect and share what you think you would do if you somehow knew you only had a decade of life left?
Honestly, the balance between being a teacher and the increasing demands on teachers, being a friend, mom and wife balanced with the time it takes to cook from scratch is my biggest challenge. I want to reach others and help them find the time to become ingredient-only cooks, but other people don’t have the time either.
I cook for the week on Sundays, and have tried making videos to help people, but many people are also time-bound.
We are what we eat and I think if more people saw the relationship between their health and over-processed food, they would find the time to eat and cook for themselves. But we all have time constraints!
So, I make time! My reward to myself on the weekends is to practice my meditation- my cooking- where I can practice mindfulness and train attention and awareness to the most important part of our health: our food.
