It has snowed again. Normally, I shrug off the weather. Once, standing on a small boat off the coast of Juneau, Alaska, getting beaten by the ocean water mist, a local said to me, “There is no bad weather. There are only bad clothes.” This was coming from someone who lived in one of the …
Tag Archives: Ayurveda
brothy soup for murky times.
Buckle in, because I’m going to talk about death, grief, and fatigue – but! There’ll be a great soup recipe at the end! Balance! I hesitated sharing this, because it would appear that I have already talked a lot about death on here. Sorry. Unless you’d prefer I’d talk about one of life’s other inevitabilities, …
tahini zen circles.
There is a meditation practice in the Buddhist tradition of drawing circles. Using a calligraphy brush, the Zen circle is drawn with one quick stroke. It exemplifies directness, simplicity, presence. A dubious ripple indicates an unsteady mind; an unfortunate ovoid betrays overthinking.
grapefruit season of life.
We didn’t grow up eating grapefruit. In terms of citrus, my family ate oranges, with maybe some mandarins here and there on special occasions. In fact, I don’t think I tasted grapefruit until I was an adult living on my own, and its sharp bitter sourness was initially so shocking that I couldn’t understand how …
slow down soup.
For someone who makes a living off of telling people to slow down and take their time, I feel like I have very little spare time. I am subject to the same pressures as anyone else – the pressure to perform, to hustle, to get this done, that done – you know the drill. Being …
ginger, rediscovered.
This past May we went on a long-anticipated trip to Japan. For three weeks, we walked, ate, observed, photographed, and talked our way through some of the major cities and smaller rural areas. We practised the little phrases of Japanese we had learned (I spent almost an hour trying to perfect my pronounciation of konbanwa, …
celebration.
Oh HI! It’s been a few blinks. Life piles on, and it doesn’t always leave room for chronicling it online, or more importantly, in my mind’s memory bank. For better or worse, significant moments seem to be marked by the food surrounding them. As I think of past meals, I am better able to recall …
navigating life, with cardamom.
This past September has marked eight years of teaching yoga, and fifteen years since I started studying food science formally. Over the years, yoga has been a template to help figure out how to live well, and food has been an equally interesting medium for that too.
summer in winter in January.
It has been an exceedingly warm winter this year. Well, it has been warm for the past week. Before that it was -40 degrees Celsius. I have the memory bank of a meerkat, apparently. More importantly, I have reason to participate in the futile art of complaining about the weather: I had really been enjoying …
a poultice of sorts.
When I was little, I was obsessed with the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, and the romanticized life of a settler: learning how to live off the land, to make do with what you had, and to be self-sufficient. It was a far cry from the concrete-laden cityscape that I traversed in my red-and-white Keds sneakers, …