Healthy and environmentally friendly food intake within our industrialized society has become a challenge for food-conscious people and parents. It starts with the shopping and continues with the cooking. Adopting plant-based cooking needs some nutritional knowledge, lots of curiosity and a bit of creativity. Just eating ‘sides’ and dropping the meat and fish will not make you happy and will definitely not satisfy our palates!
But before you start to cook, I want to mention a couple of other, very basic factors which play an important role in a meal: The first and most important component of a good meal is the company of others. The joy and pleasure of conviviality doesn’t just turn a meal into a happy event, it actually stimulates one’s digestion! (A fun celebration dinner is easier to digest than a sandwich eaten in front of the computer.)
Once you have your friends invited for dinner, and you chose your ingredients, you should think about the following:
- Use as much organic food as possible
- Select seasonal, local and ripe ingredients
- Buy fresh food – avoid industrial and processed food.
When it comes to the preparation itself:
- Be generous in you cooking, but keep the portions modest.
- Individualize, if possible, the dishes according to the taste preferences of the others.
- Compose a meal with raw and cooked food. Raw food is best in the summer, at lunch or at the begining of a meal.
- Add as many flavors as you can to a meal: sweet, salty, sour, bitter and unamo.
- Add as many textures as you can to a meal. A mix of chewy- creamy – crispy – watery and firm textures make a dish very rich and satisfying.
Enjoy the cooking, the magic of transformation!!!