Should you be hosting, here are some steps to help you plan your meal and support your spread.

Create a welcome feast by considering the balance of your meal.

The traditional turkey and roast potatoes are all heavy, long cooked baked dishes.   If you want your diners to feel great after eating, energised and even still awake, I advise including lighter side dishes as accompaniments.

Raw or lightly cooked vegetable sides give a contrasting quality of freshness and helps bestow balance on the meal.  Make the flavour ooze with a tangy sour tune, so much the better!  The sour flavour really lifts a meal, conferring even more fresh aliveness.  Dress your salad or greens with lemon or lime juice, or the zest from a citrusy fruit.

Suggested dishes to go alongside your traditional feast..

• Fast cooked greens of brussel sprouts, broccoli, kale or cavelo nero.
  Blanch the vegetables in a pan of boiling water with a pinch of sea or rock salt.  The salt prevents the nutrients leaching out of the vegetables and turning the water all murky.  Cook the vegetables like this until they are tender.  For leaves such as kale and cavelo nero they will simply need a moment to submerge in the water and turn a vibrant green colour.  For sprouts and broccoli they will need a few minutes until a fork can pierce them easily.
• A leafy salad
  Rocket and watercress have a pronounced bitter flavour which will be a great flavour contrast to the rest of the meal.  A small amount of raw onion serves to add a little pungent taste.  Incorporate a tangy scent from lemon or lime in your dressing.
• One of my acclaimed pressed salads of coleslaw, cucumber salad or beetroot, fennel & apple.
  The pressed salads foster the good gut bacteria and serve as a digestive aid assisting the assimilation and absorption of a meal.
• Pickles
  Pickles produced in the traditional lacto fermentation style, like pressed salads, also harness the lacto bacilli and help the digestion of the rest of the meal.

Here are three of my favourite dressings permeating with the freshness of lemon juice.

Do let me know if you have any questions at all and I wish you delicious dining over the festive break.

Radiate health, transform your life and enrich your wisdom about natural food and health.

• The Healthy New Year cookery course will develop your repertoire of essential dishes to secure your healthy eating.  
• The professional Pure Cook’s Training Ecourse trains you over 7 modules to style plant cuisine into fabulous dishes, while integrating your learning for greater nourishment for yourself and others. Begins 29 January.

Serving the soup with the so easily prepared garlic croutons is a must.  I also enjoy using a mix of sweet white miso and brown rice or barley miso, but of course you could use either light or dark miso.

Ingredients: 

• 5-6 white onions finely sliced
• Dash sesame oil
• 1.5 litres water
• 3 tblspn miso diluted in a little cooking broth
• Shoyu or tamari
• Bay leaf
• Fresh rosemary sprig
• 1 inch strip kombu sea vegetable
• Hanful green leaves – watercress, kale, cavelo nero work well (remove any tough stems)
• 1 cube sweet rice mochi grated for garnish – optional

 Preparation:

Heat the oil, add the onions.  Sauté for a few minutes until the onions begin to soften.  Add the water, kombu and bay leaf and bring to the boil, then simmer for 30 minutes.  Add the rosemary sprig and cook for a further 4 minutes.  Add miso and then shoyu to taste and simmer for another minute.  Remove the rosemary sprig and add the green leaves.  Cook for another minute and then serve with grated mochi and garlic croutons.

Garlic Croutons:

• 3-4 slices rye, wholemeal or sourdough bread
• 3 tblsp Sunflower oil
• 1 clove garlic, peeled and cut in half

While the onions are cooking, slice your bread.  Put oil on each side and a sprinkle of salt and bake in the oven turning each side, until crisp.  Cut a fresh garlic clove in half and use the cut half to rub over the bread. Slice the bread into cubes about 1cm wide.

Radiate health, transform your life and enrich your wisdom about natural food and health.

• The Healthy New Year cookery course will develop your repertoire of essential dishes to secure your healthy eating.  
• The professional Pure Cook’s Training Ecourse trains you over 7 modules to style plant cuisine into fabulous dishes, while integrating your learning for greater nourishment for yourself and others. Begins 29 January.

I am delighted to welcome guestblogger Lilian.  Here, she shares her surprises from taking the Pure Cook’s Training and a lovely recipe creation to enjoy this Spring.  Lilian is based in the Netherlands and runs a special exercise academy internationally; www.doinacademy.com.

I have always been enthusiastic about nutrition and energy balance, and I felt it was time to go one step further.  So I attended Anna’s online Pure Cook’s Training. Indeed, though I had already a solid base in nutrition and Chinese medicine, she definitely taught me a lot. And inspired me in trying plenty of new recipes. This enabled me to implement the macrobiotic principles into the life of my whole family, including my little daughter who loves the natural food kitchen.

In January while the course began, my husband felt inspired too and started eating miso soup every morning. A beautiful surprise unfolded – the eczema he had suffered since childhood disappeared within days!

The macrobiotic way goes hand in hand with my vision on health and wellbeing, which I share as a Do-In teacher and teacher trainer on a daily basis. Do-In is an ancient, yoga-like, art of movement which has its origins in Chinese medicine. If you’d like to try it out, here’s a link to an article I recently wrote, sharing the essential meridian stretches.

Spring Green Parcels with Shitake Mushroom & Kohl Rabi

Serves 6

dressing:

1. Start preparing the dressing:
   Warm the sesame oil, add the garlic and after a minute the ginger.  Cook for one more minute. Turn of the gas, mix the miso with the lemon juice, Tamari, and some water to get a good texture, add the lemon zest and stir. If preferred add some more lemon juice or rice vinegar to taste.
2. Now prepare the filling:
   Warm the sesame oil, add garlic and mushrooms, cook for a minute. Then add the carrots, kohlrabi and a dash of water.  Cook for five minutes. Add the sesame seeds and the tamari. Mix the miso and lemon in a bowl. Add to the pan, together with the shiitakes.
3. And for the greens:
   Steam the green part of the bok choi leaves. To fil them, place one leaf at the time on a plate, add a tbspn of the filling and fold and roll the leave into a nice little package.
   Serve with the dressing.

Radiate health, transform your life and enrich your wisdom about natural food and health. The professional Pure Cook’s Training Ecourse trains you over 7 modules to style plant cuisine into fabulous dishes, while integrating your learning for greater nourishment for yourself and others. Begins 25th April. Enrol today.

Seasons not only have a great impact on soil and crops but they also have a profound impact in our minds and bodies.

Chinese ancient traditions say that we are greatly influenced by the changes in climate and therefore should respect and live according to them.

We adapt naturally to each season but preparing for these changes can make these transitions more balanced and harmonious.  Choosing and cooking your food according to the seasons can be a  great way to take on this process.

Now is the time to store fuel, food to get all the energy to embrace the long and cold winter.

Pickling is a very easy and accessible way to store food during the Winter.  You don’t need many ingredients and it won’t take much of your time.  This year I have made pickles for the first time using cucumbers grown in our now stripped and empty polytunnels, some of our own shallots and some purple carrots that I had got in my own vegbox.  This made all the content in my jars look bright pink in just two days of fermentation.

I used a very simple recipe that I received while attending the Pure Cook’s Training at Whole Food Harmony. Basically you just need to boil one liter of water with two tablespoons of salt.

While the water comes to a boil cut all the vegetables and place them in jars.  Season your future pickles with herbs such as thyme or rosemary, you can use vinegar, lemon, garlic as well, or even cumin seeds and mustard seeds. Take the water of the heat and let it cool down to a lukewarm temperature before pouring it into the jars. After pouring the water close the jars as tight as possible and leave them to ferment for at least one week.

The list of the benefits of fermented foods it’s a long one  – they can be a great contributor to a healthy digestive system helping the formation of healthy bacteria, like for example Lactobacillus acidophilus, into the intestines, they also help the absorption of nutrients into the blood and regulate the levels of acidity in the stomach and intestines. Also, pickles can contribute to breaking down fat after heavy meals.

I wanted to make my pickles pungent and sour so I added garlic, ginger, rosemary and vinegar to the vegetables.  The sour flavour in foods will help in digestion to improve the dissolution of minerals, it can also serve as a solvent to break down protein and fat. As for the pungent aromatic flavour, this can be used to stimulate blood circulation and as a protection for the common colds so closely related to the season.

Now I know tomatoes are a nightshade and I use them sparingly in classes, but in the midst of summer this fresh, ripe harvest is a welcome treat.  At this time, the tomatoes are cooling and light.

Outside of their season, I am careful about heavy tomato indulgence.  Particularly I would refrain from tomato and other nightshade exposure for these with inflammation, auto immune conditions or poor health.

Tomatoes grow quickly overnight, as I have witnessed this summer!  Their sodium to potassium ratio is far different to that of our own cells.

Nightshades contain active alkaloids; solanine and solanadine.  These compounds slow the production of an enzyme involved in the transmission of nerve impulses.  This means that the nerve endings become overstimulated and this can lead to muscle weakness, muscle twitching, intestinal trouble and more.

For more on tomatoes and the other members of the nightshade family, see here.

Can we tell how well we are aligned with natures’ rhythm?

Autumn is a popular time of year when colds and flu can exert their presence.  In eastern medicine Autumn is indeed connected with the lungs.  When the lungs discharge and cleanse themselves, symptoms of mucus and phlegm may arise.  Perhaps we have indulged in mucus causing foods like ice cream over the summer, or we have lapped up sun on an exceptionally hot day sandwiched amidst the colder weather.

So we must wait and see how we get on in the next season, in order to assess how well we fared in the current season.

Try these two macrobiotic plasters to help the lungs discharge this Autumn:

Lotus Root Plaster
Lotus root is fantastic to get rid of mucus from the body, so it has great benefit used on the nose and throat areas, particularly in cases like sinusitis.  Grate fresh lotus root and combine with quarter tsp grated ginger and half tsp flour.  Apply to skin.

Mustard Plaster
This plaster works on similar conditions to the lotus root plaster.  The mustard generates a lot of heat so dont apply this one directly to the skin, apply on a towel first and then to the skin.  Make mustard powder by crushing mustard seeds and mix with enough hot water to form a paste, or simply opt for the mustard paste from a jar.  The mustard acts by dislodging stagnation and accumulation in the body and helping the circulation.  This plaster is a great remedy for congested lungs with conditions like bronchitis.