The Natural Chef

The Language of Intuitive Cooking™

refer to The Language of Intuitive Cooking as a “living language.”That is because it serves the purpose of organizing cooking from any culture or all dietary situations through generations.

Published in 2007, this companion book can accompany you through the training. It has a different personality than the online classroom.However, the online classroom should be considered the latest greatest presentation of terms in the language. You might find contradictions.Hopefully you will see the evolution.

The language lives in the heart and mind of any natural cook. When students find a relationship with this language, it speeds up the organization of what is possible in whatever kitchen they are cooking in.It is not difficult to learn.Like a foreign language, or any art form, music, dance, fine art, we first have to understand our medium. What materials we are using, and what is their purpose?

It’s like writing a story. Begin with the sentence.

Highlights

Organizing ingredients by putting them into categories.

A system for positioning cooking methods helps create a balanced meal.

Theories of cooking engage intuitive cooking skills for measuring and selecting ingredients when no one tells you how much or what to use.

Theory of design applies traditional principles for using numbers and colors.

Several ways to approach fixing a dish that you want to change.

Understanding creativity and the two hemispheres of our brain, and how this applies to The Natural Cook training.

Visual Rhythm – Japanese Vegetable Knife Skills

One of the things I love about cooking and teaching cooking skills is to carry my dance experience into the kitchen. From first picking up a knife, students feel how it is connected to their body and how it moves through the vegetables without a sound, in silence.

The relationships of knife to chef, knife to board, and knife to the shape of the whole vegetable is what we study. It’s about these angles in relationship to each other, adding the motion of the knife, front to back, back to front, and how they all coordinate with the mind of the chef.  The final look of the cut vegetable is visually rhythmical.

One type of knife can be used for almost everything.  It’s a Japanese style vegetable knife formulated from three kinds of steel. The blades are wide and long, becoming an extension of the forearm.

Because we are cooking within the concept of wholeness, the idea of casting aside rounded edges to produce an evenly measured diced vegetable look is unconscionably wrong for everyday cooking. Just because a carrot at one end is tapered small and at the other end is tapered large, there is no need to discard parts of the whole.  Instead, look for finished cuts that give a sense of visual rhythm that suits the original shape of the vegetable—restful on the eye and energetically whole.

Highlights

Knives: Selecting, sharpening, and safety

Cutting: How to achieve common cuts and invent new ones

Vegetable Shapes: Understanding the appropriate cut in respect for the shape of the vegetable and the cooking method

No waste in the approach to each shape of vegetable

Proper positioning to protectthe cook from repetitive motion body injury

This unique topic is optional for all participants.

“Nutritional science” is a respected field of study, and because it’s such a vast topic, to gain a thorough understanding would be a journey beyond our goals to have to people easily eating well, easily. We designed this unique course material from a different perspective altogether.

There is actually nothing new about the principles in this topic of Energetic Nutrition. They  have been lived and taught through Eastern cultures since the earliest known written record of Chinese medicine, the Huangdi neijing (The Yellow Emperor’s Inner Classic) from the 3rd century bce.  The gift of Ayurveda came from the Hindu gods about 5,000 years ago.

Energetic nutrition principles actually pre-date Western nutrition, which took roots in the18th Century when western doctors were first looking at the link between isolated nutrients and what was missing in a sick person.  According to Wikipedia all the vitamins were discovered between 1913 and 1948.  Separating all the pieces of the human’s body systems is complicated.

This topic is about seeing how The Natural Cook training relates to wholeness, through Nature, which in turn helps people live well.  It’s about learning to see simplicity in the connection between food, earth, eating, digestion, activity, weather, and many more pieces of living.

Highlights

Definitions of nutrition and energetic nutrition

How variety is the KEY to good health

Clarification of Whole, Processed, and Refined

How age, activity, color, texture and the direction that food grows inform our decisions for balance

How the cooking methods and The Language of Intuitive Cooking are structured to support the Physical, Mental, Emotional, and Spiritual parts of human wholeness

A balanced meal is especially satisfying when using the nutrient-dense whole foods cuisine that you are learning here.  One can actually stop eating, and eat less, after eating a balanced meal of energetically whole ingredients.   

Design principles are the same for simple meals to the most complex and exotic. In this topic, artistry relies on detailed study from the Core Essentials training topics.  We challenge students with imaginary meals in order to practice theories of meal composition.   Then we apply these design principles adding topics of soup and dessert, living foods cuisine, bread and spreads, and world cuisine.

As a young person, when my dad was at the dinner table, he would turn dinner-time into a presentation of the principles of art and design.  He was an artist and a teacher.  We listened, and chewed our peas. When it was time to have my students create meals, his wise words filled my chart and rule book. Today, SNC has very clear guidelines to help organize the mind and the possibilities. Flexibility in the moment and clarity on where to change are all part of the training.

Exercises in theories of meal composition are woven throughout the entire Natural Cook Training.  As the program goes further, the meals become more complex.

Highlights

Designing a balanced meal for any diet

Weather & climate

Age & activity

Variety is the key

Color & shape

Taste & flavor

Texture & substance

Complex & simple

Where to begin the composition

Time & organization

The creative process we are teaching here is to recognize that there are infinite possibilities for cooking dish grains, maintaining their energetically whole form.

This process includes learning how to manipulate the elements of texture, taste, and color to create original dishes with quinoa, millet, rices, buckwheat, amaranth, oats, and others that we may not know about.

In 1980 USA, eating grains in their energetically whole form was rare. It was easy to find white rice on a restaurant’s menu, and “brown” rice was starting to appear in Chinese restaurants and health food stores and restaurants. The possibility of manipulating color, texture, and taste was not yet even a thought for cooks preparing rice, with a label of ‘boring.’  Rice  showed up to be a background for something more colorful, more “meaty.”  Rice was a filler.

And I, as a consumer interested in health, was not supposed to notice that brown rice was usually bland, pasty, or dry—because it was “healthy.” But…I did. And for me, it was never boring.

A few years later, I worked for The Quinoa Corporation, the company who first brought Quinoa to the USA. My responsibilities included managing the scheduling and training of people to set up demonstrations in every kind of grocery store—both health food stores and regular, large chain supermarkets.  In this position, I created recipes for the demonstration staff to cook and offer samples to each customer that had enough curiosity to step up to the table. “Cook quinoa like rice, boil it” we told the customer. But my cooking experience checkmated the standard answer that “boiling” is the only method.  Words started to organize in my mind for more interesting ways to prepare dish grains.

Highlights

Understanding the anatomy of a dish-grain and a bread-grain

Selecting and Storing Grains and Beans and Vegetables

Rice Family, Buckwheat, Quinoa family, Oats, Millet, Amaranth, Teff, and Job’s Tears

Creating textures

Boiling and Steeping

Excellent method for whole grain pasta

Grain salad technique

Shaping

Croquettes

Patties

Free form color infused

You will begin to master the art of creating exciting vegan soups and sauces with the simplest, most flavorful techniques.  Every soup, in every cuisine, falls into one of the five styles of soup in this course.  The single binder sauces that we study alone, before combining them into complex binder sauces, follow the same principles as the soups.  The perfection of one informs the technique of the other.

At first glance, I could not understand why French sauces seemed so complicated. Maybe it was because I didn’t speak French. When I did learn to speak French, a bit, I realized that the sauces were categorized not too differently from the styles of soup and sauce in The Language of Intuitive Cooking. 

The organization of sauces in plant cuisines are less complicated, because of the ingredients.   Our methodology for these forms—soup and sauce—is developed specifically for working without animal broth, eggs or dairy products.  When soup and sauce techniques are studied from the plant perspective, there is understanding about how and why one could include the animal product ingredients. But animal products are not in this training.

Highlights

Spice stock

Vegetable stock

Roasted vegetable stock

Clear broth

Clear starch sauce

Creamy vegetable soup

“Loose” vegetable soup

Stew

Bean soup

Croutons