The Essentials Certificate Immersion
An efficient, personal way to integrate The Natural Cook training experience.
Full online classroom
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- library
- support forums
- video lessons
- workbook & charts
Weekly lab/lesson
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- in your kitchen
- specific curriculum topics
- connection with teacher
- group sharing
Julianaa Satie, founder/director speaks about the benefits of The Natural Cook training founder/director
Essentials Certificate
The Essentials Certificate program integrates core topics
WHAT
The 12 week, 3 month Certificate program includes content on:
All Core Essential topics
Teacher mentored lead study of The Language of Intuitive Cooking™
Combination online self guided + virtual labs and lessons with teachers
Experience of food as healing with weekly dishes you invent to taste good to you
Creating a sustainable relationship with food and cooking all diets
Understanding more than knowing what to eat, learn new way how to cook it well
Save money and time in the kitchen reaching nutritional goals
Certificate of Completion awarded for qualifying participants.
We arrange cohorts of 1 person up to a group six students
WHO SHOULD ENROLL
This program is designed for individuals seeking to improve their own personal health
Chefs, who want the to embellish their understanding of plant-based ingredients, and their creative potential
Teachers, Writers, fitness trainers, entrepreneurs, healthcare professionals and healthy life-style coaches who want at 12 week personal focus integrating a whole-food, plant-based experience.
HOW MUCH TIME
Allow 15 hours a week to study the in the classroom, practice in your kitchen and participate in live, weekly lab/lessons.
Sign up and select session/dates and time. Access to the vast online classroom.
A calendar inside this classroom with links and information to join the live lab/lessons weekly session.
WHEN
3 month duration in the group sessions
9 months to work in the online classroom
30 hours live, virtual lab/lessons (2.5 hours each week)
Select a start date and time of day from the schedule below.
If you can meet more than one option for the time of day, please list multiple options.
If you prefer to create your own group and session date/time, let us know.
PREPARATION
Although this training is online and the open classroom can be accessed 24/7, it is important to be prepared for the rhythm of scheduled, live, weekly 2. 5 hours lab/class sessions.
The catalog provides details of preparing for the labs sessions and how to organize your study schedule.
Select Session – Start Date
LENGTH
3 MONTHS
SUPPORT
LIVE TEACHER LAB/CLASSES
FORMAT
100% ONLINE
24/7
EFFORT
MINIMUM
15 HOURS A WEEK
LABS
VIRTUAL
READ
CATALOG
AWARD
CERTIFICATE COMPLETION
ACCESS
9 MONTHS
Core Essential Topics
Details and Inspiration
click on the topic to learn more
Intuitive Cooking
The Language of Intuitive Cooking
Overview
This material is the opening class topic and is used throughout the entire curriculum. You will be integrating five critical theories of cooking. Your kitchen setup will match the terminology of the language and prepare you to use a regime of organization and order to be efficient with time and costs as you utilize the Natural Cook® system.
Origins
When Alfalfa’s Market in Boulder, Colorado asked me to open a cooking school for them in 1983, I hadn’t used a recipe in over a decade. This was a serious grocery store for the time, a leader in the evolving natural food industry. I asked myself, “What could I bring that had vision and value for a burgeoning culture that was asking for healthy, whole foods both at home and in commercial settings?”
My thought process to solve this problem went like this:
1. Teaching from recipes would be boring to me and insulting to the intelligence of a cooking school.
2. If I don’t teach from recipes, what’s left? There were only two pathways that I could see.
A) Use recipes and then teach how to change them, or
B) become a mentor the way I studied, the way Julia Childs studied.
A mentorship is ideal for students, but not commercially viable for a grocery store. Personal computers were just a blink in the marketplace, but I could feel life speeding up, people ready to demand that information be downloaded quickly. The idea of an apprenticeship or mentorship was impractical and outdated.
3. I would just have to use my understanding of “the creative process” that I was given at birth—and hope for the best. Okay, this was to be the path; exciting enough to get me out of bed at 4 a.m,, and to keep me awake until I slept at midnight. As far as I knew, teaching cooking without recipes had not been packaged. I would choreograph the essence of cooking, the way I choreographed dances. So, I asked myself, “What needs to be communicated?”
Once I had made the commitment to create a cooking school for this beautiful store, things unfolded easily. Students were eager. I loved sharing what I had been studying in my personal life for ten years. The only problem was that the effort it took to explain all the possibilities of infinite potential for creating delicious dishes was exhausting for me, and overwhelming for students!
4. This material needed form. It needed a logical structure as a container to hold the process of what happens inside of a natural cook—that is, someone who doesn’t use a recipe and who doesn’t need to be told what to use or how to put the dish together. I needed to access the former dancer inside me to observe what my body was going through when I cooked. I observed and thought deeply discovering the defining results from each step I put the food through. Where was I free to make choices, and what was the common denominator that held the structure?
At 3:00 a.m. on May 12, 1987, the direction of my life “did a 180.” It was a thought, a message, an idea accompanied by the feeling of being “hit on the head” to wake me up. I was preparing to be a student at an acupuncture school in New Mexico, and hopeful to study a career path that I felt would make a difference in people’s lives.
But whatever inspired idea came into me early that morning, the following two-year journey became the book Amazing Grains: Creating Vegetarian Main Dishes with Whole Grains (published H.J.Kramer Inc., 1989). This was my attempt to put down on paper the mystery of what goes on inside a cook who doesn’t use a recipe. The publisher insisted on recipes but allowed me to create a style of written chat about “the creative process” and leave the required recipe itself in the sidebar. It was a beginning. After one season, the idea of opening Alfalfa’s Market Cooking School had been traded in for a second store and The School of Natural Cookery took over the culinary education program. Still fascinated by looking for tools to explain what I now felt confident was a worthy subject, I knew I would need to write about beans and vegetables too. Romancing the Bean (published by H.J. Kramer Inc., 1990) attempted to follow the success of the first inspired grain book. But it wasn’t until 2007, seven years later, that I had observed enough—in my own kitchen, and with my students in their kitchens—that I understood the structure that had been evolving.
Instead of a book centered only around vegetables, I wrote Intuitive Cooking from The School of Natural Cookery (Book Publishing Company, 2007) for my students. I was now able to explain a complete structure for understanding all cuisines, all diets. It became a functional language, and one that has been proven to work.
The Language of Intuitive Cooking is the bones—the framework—of the entire Natural Cook training. As with any language, with practice this efficient, accurate and functional language becomes fluent, as an integral and authentic part of the student. This language requires authenticity, efficiency, accuracy and the option to stay in the mystery.
I am your mentor. The teachers I train are your mentors. Eventually, The Language of Intuitive Cooking becomes your mentor, too.
Kitchen Setup
Setting Up a Natural Kitchen
Setting Up a Natural Kitchen
Highlights
Visual Rhythm
Visual Rhythm: Japanese vegetable knife skills
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
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 rhythmical, visually.
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 vegetable—restful on the eye and energetically whole.
Energetic Nutrition
Energetic Nutrition
Overview
Throughout the training, an understanding of energetic properties and nutritional contributions of the ingredients and cooking methods helps us know how to cook for the variety of season, ages, and activities of our lives.
Details and Inspiration
The creative force of reproduction is one core principle of energetic nutrition.
When I planted a bean in my garden, one seed grew tall and bushy. Then it started to reproduce. One seed gave at least thirty pods. Each pod averaged five more seeds in them. I’ve given birth too, and the amount of energy it takes to reproduce is no small feat. The blueprints in all seeds command my respect for their great power to reproduce and re-create. Ten tiny seeds grew enough kale to last a year. One stalk of millet harvested, and cooked well, might feed a five to ten people or more.
Plant-based cuisine relies on the quality of soil in which seeds are nurtured. As seeds grow, they digest earth’s raw materials, transforming them into nutrients for earth’s people and animals. I’m always stunned when people ask if SNC uses organic ingredients. We have never considered anything else when the options are present.
If a seed doesn’t sprout, it is probably genetically modified (GMO) or grown with stimulating chemicals pushing over-production. When seeds are genetically modified, they do not reproduce.
Where is the plant growing in relationship to air, water, earth, and fire?
What are the characteristics of a seed that grows vertically versus a seed that grows along the surface of the earth? How does this impact our cooking methods? Learning how a food grows and it’s anatomy is integral to being a natural cook.
Energetic Nutrition is revealed by Color, Taste, Smell
I’m drawn to the color of an orange, its shape, and to feeling the weight of its hidden juice when I pick it up in my hand. Then I lift that round orange ball to my nose and inhale deeply—all while hoping I only get the smell of “orange” and not of chemicals. I’ve been known to sample a twig of parsley while shopping only to find the bitter fullness be repellent even through the flavor of parsley lingers sweetly. The theories of intuitive cooking guide our body’s response reading the energetic qualities of ingredients and food combinations. Babies are like this as they begin to choose their first foods. Train them with incremental variety. They know what they need.
Energetic Nutrition of Cooking Methods
Fire is a nutrient. This translates to cooking methods and how long ingredients spend with fire.
The pressure cooker has been hailed as a time saving tool in the kitchen. And that it may be. But I like to think of the pressure cooker as a centering tool. Like when I work a ball of clay on the potter’s wheel. The force of energy it takes me to transfer a simple ball into a balanced clump that appears ready for transformation reminds me of what happens to the seeds in the pressure cooking method. The energy of fire, water, and air, compressing the ingredients so intensely that the process transforms the little grain and bean seeds. Previously undigestible, inedible, powerhouses are not only rendered digestible masses of nutritive power, but a satisfying texture that only comes from a pressure cooker.
Energetic Nutrition and Love
When I step into the kitchen, I like the ritual of putting on my apron. The apron strings around my waist signal me that alchemy is about to happen. Then I begin with just one ingredient and listen how to support this ingredient to become a satisfying dish. The lightness of being that ignites my creativity makes the dish delicious. Thousands of meals at my table have shown me that this kind of love is a powerful nutrient. Years have taught me it’s all about paying attention to the food as it goes through its transformation. If dishes are not prepared well, they can’t release their nutritional imprint, and if they don’t taste yummy, who will eat them enough to be healed by the satisfying ritual of healthy eating?
Meal Composition
Meal Composition
Meal Composition
Overview
A balanced meal is especially satisfying when using the nutrient-dense whole foods cuisine that we study. 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 other training topics. Exercises in theories of meal composition are woven throughout the entire Natural Cook Training. As the program goes further, the meals become more complex.
Details and Inspiration
The concept for this topic was inspired during an interview with a client as they talked about the dinner they were asking me to cook. A brown paper grocery bag* was nearby and I used it to sketch the meal, the way one might jot ideas that just can’t wait, on a paper napkin. Each time the client lit up with an idea, it went into a category on the brown bag. Dishes outlining textures and shapes that the client told me they liked, formed and were placed into the developing chart. Their tastes and flavors were fashioned into the protein, grain and vegetables of their choice. Often an unspoken topic drove the menu design. But I knew what to look and listen for. Once the structure of the meal’s macronutrients was charted, the missing elements could be filled in while cooking. Leaving some things unsolved in the chart allowed in the moment adjustments to colors, tastes, textures and the actual ingredients that would show up for the meal.
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 put the techniques of the curriculum together to create meals, his wise words filled my chart and rule book. Today, SNC has a very clear chart, with rules to help organize the mind and possibilities, and clarity on where to change or be flexible within the good design.
Exercises in theories of meal composition are woven throughout the entire Natural Cook Training. As the program goes further, the meals become more complex.
* This was the beginning of my career as a Private Chef in 1980. The brown bag was just the beginning of the evolved chart now available for students to take into their careers.
Amazing Grains
Amazing Grains: Art & Creation
The art of creating main dishes with whole, non-gluten and pseudo grains.
Overview
The goal of this process is to study infinite possibilities of cooking dish grains, maintaining their whole form.
The process includes learning how to manipulate the elements of texture, taste, and color with quinoa, millet, rices, buckwheat, amaranth, oats, and others, to create original dishes.
Details and Inspiration
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 this neutral-flavored ingredient. Rice only provided a background for something more colorful, more “meaty.” Rice was simply 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.
A few years later, I worked for the company that first brought Quinoa to the USA. My responsibilities included managing the scheduling and training of people to set up demonstrations about Quinoa, 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 that standard wasn’t good enough. Rice cooking was often boring, bad technique, and had the wrong water ratio.
Unlike rice, the first hurdle in gaining acceptance and enthusiasm about using quinoa was that, unlike rice that has a sweet taste, it has an undeniably bitter taste. How will America, land of sugar-laced breakfast cereals, embrace the bitter taste if they are hooked on the sweet carbohydrate of refined grains? If both coffee and chocolate—two extremely popular high-profile foods that had clearly proven a bitter taste could be popular both unsweetened and without adding too much sugar—there had to be a way for quinoa to shine. Now, today, almost every deli serving quinoa makes it into a salad. That was our demo in 1982.
I love the personal flair and daring of the dishes prepared by our students because they demonstrate a bold, confident, on-target assembly of technique and flavors. There is nothing boring about quinoa, rice, buckwheat, amaranth, oats and millet dishes. On the contrary, these whole foods are full of potential. These grains are cultural heroes, too. Stories of their history are embedded into the library of our school’s classroom.
Earth Angels
Earth Angels – The Art of Vegetable Cookery
Overview
Twenty-two different cooking methods highlight amazing versatility of vegetables and sea vegetables. This topic studies how vegetables grow, which informs the cook how to go about selecting the right amount of cooking liquid. 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.
Details and Inspiration
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 earth, cooking can be very simple and satisfying. There are choices to be made about whether the vegetables need to be cooked with, or transformed by, sauces. We explore this brilliant food group just as an explorer gives attention to the surroundings. Some vegetables have a “gang consciousness.” They are wild, tough, domineering and complex; others need to be the first, the best, the soloist. Some are more challenging when asked to be eaten alone, preferring to merge easily with any ingredient. Vegetables have the flexibility of being either the star of the dish or a chorus member. The dish possibilities are infinite. The guidelines prevent chaos in complex combinations.
Romancing The Bean
Seed Protein:
Romancing The Bean
Overview
Romancing a bean is easy with The Language of Intuitive Cooking. All the most important technical information is in this training plus applying the creative process produces dynamic, satisfying and somewhat seductive unrefined protein dishes.
The approach for protein in The Natural Cook – training is to understanding how to stage the cooking methods for proper cooking, and storage. Understanding whole beans as protein is also knowing how to place this group of ingredients in a meal’s composition to avoid chaos visually and digestibly.
