Learning Spanish and Cooking

It’s the beginning of the month and time to set myself some new challenges.

I started my very first challenge at the start of the year – Dry January.

It never meant to become a series of monthly challenges!

But who doesn’t love a challenge, right!?

I figure that committing to a monthly challenge can only improve your life – whether that is physically, emotionally, financially, intellectually, spiritually etc.

I am genuinely excited about what can be achieved in 30 days and beyond.

So on to my new challenge(s)..

As last month was fairly easy to complete, I’ve decided to set myself 2 challenges this month.

They are not particularly demanding, but will certainly make a difference to my life.

Learning Spanish

Me and the wife have decided to learn a language.

Brits and Americans in particular, are notoriously bad at learning new languages.

You only need to visit another country in Europe and you’ll find everyone else (or so it seems) can speak at least 2 languages – usually more.

So after years of stop/starting, we’ve both committed to learning enough Spanish to ‘get by.’

Our commitment is 30 minutes a day for a month.

Now we’ve both already begun learning, but I for one, keep taking extended breaks from it, and find myself almost back to square one.

I’m thinking a good 16 to 17 hours (for the month) of solid Spanish, should give us a fighting chance to finally be able to communicate, when visiting Spain or a Spanish speaking country.

I realise it’s going to take longer than a month to get to any sort of decent standard. But if I can get through a month, I’m thinking I’ll continue through to next month.

Cook a New Meal Once a Week

Okay, I’m really excited about this one because I don’t cook anything other than very basic food.

My wife is too busy with her work to dedicate time in the evenings to cook anything other than ‘basic’ either.

I have half a dozen cook books in the kitchen, and probably cooked about 2 meals from all of them, in years!

Last week I knew I was going to set this challenge, and I have already cooked 2 meals from a recipe book.

The first was salmon fish cakes and the second was macaroni cheese with cauliflower.

Both turned out pretty good, even if I say so myself!

However, the monthly challenge of 1 new recipe a week, starts today.

Quick, Healthy and Pescatarian Friendly

These are the 3 mantras I want to try to stick with.

I’m not into spending hours prepping and cooking food which just gets eaten in a few minutes.
I want to find recipes that I can prep and cook in under an hour.
The meals need to be as healthy as possible i.e. little, or no processed food, and little, or no sugar.

Also my wife is a strict pescatarian – so no meat (other than fish) on the menu.

I might indulge in eating meat once in a ‘blue moon’, but on the whole I stick to a vegetarian diet or a diet with fish (pescatarian diet).

So these are my monthly challenges for February:

Learn Spanish for 30 minutes every day
Cook 1 new meal each week (total 4 new meals)

I’ll let you know how I’m getting on each week.

Update

Epic fail!

I started okay, but rapidly lost the will/desire/motivation to complete the challenge.

I probably spent around 3-4 hours last month learning Spanish. Not the 30 minutes a day I’d hoped for!

And although I cooked evening meals as usual, I didn’t cook four new recipes.

Why did I fail so quickly and easily?

I expect my motivation for completing this monthly challenge was not as high as my motivation for completing the weekly fitness challenges. (which is so far, a success)

Going Forward

I don’t think there’s any point in renewing the same monthly challenge. My heart isn’t in learning Spanish right now.

I may revisit the idea in the future, but for now it’s on the back-burner.

I still want to enhance my cooking skills (from being pretty shite to decidedly average) and want to persevere with the challenge of cooking one new recipe a week.