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Complete - Independent Study
The Complete Course of The Natural Cook training provides serious and curious students the entire content presented in all topics. Independent study courses are set up to support students who want to study topics, lessons, and practice sessions at their own pace. No pressure, no exams, just support to meet questions and goals as needed.
Once in the Core Essential classroom you will be able to access all lessons and topics.
The benefit of this commitment is to be able to respond to the seasons, cuisines, and diets that arise over a lifetime.
This is a good option when independent, creative students apply the knowledge and skills from The Language of Intuitive Cooking found in the Core Essentials content. Then they can move easily between all additional topics with deeper understanding.
Your access info and welcome letter will follow in separate emails.
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Support is easily available.
Organize or be spontaneous, but know that the platform has available to you.
Prepare your kitchen. Look at our store for ideas.
Set a few hours a week to study and practice, download the workbook.
Whatever you need, just ask. js@naturalcookery.com
Each lesson provides an instructor-monitored forum.
Access included for the Drop-in Tuesday Talk Group Q/A
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 of Intuitive Cooking 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 ie: music, dance, fine art, we first have to understand our medium. What materials we are using, and what is their purpose?
We begin all the training programs with this root understanding. Before writing a story, we want to construct meaningful sentences. Before a dancer can dance, they need to be aware of shifting body parts when they walk. Before making a meal, we want the dishes to be good, aesthetically pleasing and digestible.
This language provides continuity and structure for all cooking going forward throughout your life. You can study the language, or just look at the cooking methods. It’s really up to you how much you want to learn.
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.
Organic is good, but it is not the only issue these days. Paying for the term “Organic” is an expensive cost to farmers who may already be growing bio-dynamically or other natural farming techniques which are superior to organic fertilizers. We need to support the “real food” movement too.
Tools and equipment requirements and links to purchase suggestions
Pantry set-up with all ingredient categories lists and charts
Virtual lab equipment suggestions
A library of information describing the quality, growing style, and function of oils, cooking liquids, herbs/spices, and salts
History and perspective on Whole Dish-Grains (GF) and Bread Grains
Understanding vegetable how to select, store, and families by growing style for cooks
Classification and identity of Plant Protein
Natural sugars—which are more whole than refined
Living Food Cuisine ingredients and equipment
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 connected to their body and how the knife 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.
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.
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 protect the cook from repetitive motion body injury
“Nutritional science” is a respected field of study, but it’s a vast topic. Western nutrition took roots in the18th Century while western doctors were first looking at the link between isolated nutrients and what was missing in a sick person.
To gain a thorough understanding of that subject would be a separate journey beyond our goals here.
Our significant goal is to have many people easily eating well. Our process with the focus on Energetic Nutrition facilitates and supports this goal.
According to Wikipedia vitamins were discovered between 1913 and 1948. This practice and science of separating all the pieces of the human bodies’ systems is complicated, deserving a depth of study to be proficient.
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. And pre-dating this history, there is an intuitive process built into humans from the beginning, not unlike what animals do when they forage and discriminate what they eat and don’t eat.
Energetic Nutrition is laid out to compare the components in our training to the elements creating 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.
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
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 all the entire curriculum of all programs. It starts with simple design and advances to more complexity.
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
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.
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
When we understand how vegetables grow, we are able to select the right amount of cooking liquid; which intern informs how long the food can be in the fire.
Charts organize the thought process, providing information on the best practices for selecting and storing vegetables, treating vegetables for optimum results (when to cut, and when to keep whole), and even what to keep on hand for those days when going to the store is not an option.
To me, vegetables are angels. If I had the choice of eating a beautiful carrot, a juicy beet or a brilliant pea instead of eating dirt and rocks, it would appear that earth had turned into a delicious angel. I notice that when using a variety of vegetables, which have been transmuted by the power of healthy soil, dishes are very simple and satisfying.
We explore this brilliant food group just as explorers give attention to their surroundings. Some vegetables have a “gang consciousness.” They are wild, tough, domineering and complex; these gangs often rely on the friendship of others. Then there is the “soloist.” The star of the dish. Our guidelines prevent chaos in complex combinations and when faced with the potential of infinite possibilities.
Designing vegetable dishes
Vegetable families defined by how they grow
The best use of oil
Cooking methods taught to clarify confusion in any culinary terminology
Teriyaki Baking
Pressure Cooking Slow-Cooking
Pressure Steaming Stir-frying
Steeping Tempura
Braising Pickles
Refrying Pressing
Roasting Dehydrating
Blending Marinating
SNC approaches plant-based whole food protein by understanding how to stage the cooking methods for proper cooking, and storage. Working with whole beans as protein also teaches us how to place this group of ingredients in a meal’s composition to avoid the chaos that could result, both visually and digestibly.
Like grains, beans are a beautiful canvas for expressing color, taste, and forms. But, unlike either grain or vegetables, how we handle the cooking process (yes, we cooks are doing the processing in bean cookery) is critical to have the beans meet the human body without disruption. We learn to coax, care, and “romance” the bean into its best performance.
Protein from beans
History of beans
Storing
Cook’s family of Beans – categorizing
Short term
Medium term
Long term
Properly cooking beans
To soak or not to soak
Ten minute dishes
Technical exercises
Bean Salads
Bean Patties
Refried Beans
Falafel
We study single binder sauces, before combining them into complex binder sauces. These 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.
Spice stock
Vegetable stock
Roasted vegetable stock
Clear broth
Clear starch sauce
Creamy vegetable soup
“Loose” vegetable soup
Stew
Bean soup
Croutons
Through cooking, we process soybeans, whole wheat and whole spelt. They go through several consecutively arranged cooking methods to create interesting and memorable “comfort food.”
This topic will apply combinations of 15 cooking methods with creative processes to further manipulate texture, flavor and taste. Once these proteins are fully designed into a texture/color/taste/flavor profile, they are then ready to be incorporated tastefully into beautiful dishes with vegetables or grains, and/or sauces.
The information in this topic is valuable when inventing new, plant-based food products and menus designed to replace traditional animal protein dishes.
Making Tofu & Tempeh from the whole bean
Making Seitan from the whole grains
Storing
Creating dishes that focus on texture, color, taste
Placing these proteins into meal compositions
10 cooking methods for plant-based seed proteins
By understanding the form we are creating and the function and action of how to work with quality, whole as possible, sugar, fat and binders, we are able to expand our creative process similar to our experience in savory cooking. Following the techniques as a roadmap, students will design sensually satisfying, whole, nutritionally valuable desserts.
Studying dish-grains (GF) in the Core Essentials prepares students who want to develop gluten free desserts, by learning how these grains become dessert binders. Whole sugars, whole fats, and a myriad of quality binders easily come together to lay the foundation of most desserts. Thus, you will accomplish the basic dessert forms of cookies, bars, pies, cakes, muffins, clear and creamy custards, frostings, and fruit desserts.
Cookies: drop, bars, pie crust
Health cookie (no flour)
Cakes: coffee style, quick breads, muffins, cup-cakes
Creamy frostings and clear glazes
Clear custard (natural “jello”)
Creamy custards
Mixed Binder Custards
Based on The Language of Intuitive Cooking, this portion of the curriculum adapts cooking methods and techniques for creating beverages, soups, sauces, main plates, and desserts using whole grains, nuts and seeds, fresh fruits and vegetables.
Meal composition theory that aligns to a living foods diet informs on how to design satisfying menus.
The Natural Cook training delivers the experience to sustain a life-time of working with living foods. Rather than relying on making this a strict dietary regime, here it is intended as a part of a healthy, balanced diet, where living food methods embellish life. Studying this topic with the purpose of shifting a personal diet is, however, a great opportunity to feel its power.
In addition, this topic includes preservation methods for food storage and an environmental contribution of sustainability eliminating waste.
Transformation without using a cooktop
Methods used to energetically release and preserve
All seed-based ingredients: grains, nuts, seeds, vegetables, and fruits
Real food oils: olives, coconuts, seeds, and nuts
Real food binders: sea vegetables, sprouted grain, soaked nuts and seeds
Plus: All menu planning forms—— soup, sauces, salads, main dishes, and desserts
At The School of Natural Cookery, we see grains as occurring in two main categories, “Bread Grains” and “Dish Grains,” according to how they grow.
Bread grains (ie: wheat, corn, rye, spelt, barley, kamut, and more) grow differently from dish grains (ie: quinoa, millet, rice, amaranth, buckwheat, oats). Because bread grains are exposed to nature’s elements and they have no protective hull, their skin is tough. Unlike “dish grains (GF),” which are usually cooked and served energetically whole, Bread Grains are most often milled into flour to make crackers, breads, and pastas. Although the grain flour is called “whole,” milled bread grains are not “energetically whole” when we eat them. Eating is the key. Because its our saliva that helps digest the grains. Flour products need not be chewed as much, therefore less digestive enzymes to break down the grain in human bodies.
Bread Grains may be prepared with the same techniques as Dish Grains to soften their tough skin and manipulate their texture. But the focus of this topic is about bread forms and not main dishes.
Additional lessons in this topic are companions to bread forms. Advance sauces use combination binders and the vegetable/beans paté form is very exotic and deep. Great when served as a spread with bread, crackers, and fresh vegetables.
Techniques and tools
Sprouted bread
Commercial yeast
Natural sourdough
Natural rise
Mixed binder sauces
Spreads & paté
In this section we study classic recipes but we practice recipe translation into The language of Intuitive Cooking. In other words, we are inspired by classic cuisines and upgrade their quality to “wholeness” and plant-based, without compromising the well-known flavors, personality, sensuality or nutritional benefits of classic dishes. It’s amazing to see students cook an entire meal with dishes from a foreign cuisine without having ever seen or tasted it before.
As a student, this caps your training to have the confidence to both invent dishes and to translate classic dishes, without having to have eaten them before.
American Comfort
Middle Eastern
Thai
Japanese
Southwest
Italian
Persian
East Indian
$2,240.00 — or $398.00 / month for 6 months
Reg Price: $2,240.00
or $398.00 / month for 6 months
