w/Crispy Roasted Chickpeas + Anything Goes Green Goddess Dressing
Surprise! FLAVOR is healthy.
The invitation to join dear friends on Hornby Island this week was a very easy sell. An entire week to ride mountain bikes, pick berries, cook and polish up a top-secret project I’ve been working on? SOLD.
Hornby is a tiny island, two ferry rides and many kilometers from Vancouver, British Columbia. There aren’t many stores or restaurants, but there are miles and miles of berry bushes, more road-side honor stands than any dream could fathom, a lovely bustling farmers market and ample coastline and trails winding through the woods to work up an appetite. For someone in my profession, I’ve had my work cut out for me!
This trip required all of the usual packing tasks: breaking down and packing a mountain bike, packing a selection of layers to be ready for warm days in the sun and cool evenings on the shore, putting all of my toiletries into tiny bottles, bringing a passport. But it also required a little meal planning. Since we weren’t sure what would be available on the island, or when (Wednesdays? Saturdays? 8am to 11am? or is it just the 9am hour every other day?) we made sure to bring the staples plus some so our cooking parade never had to end.
We arrived a few days ago, with the car packed to the gills and the requisite baskets of berries, bags of oysters, coolers of fish and boxes of farm fresh lettuces picked up along our journey wedged in between the suitcases and, as we unpacked the car, my friends turned to me and asked where the recipes were to fulfill the menu that I’d designed.
“Recipes?!” I surely chortled. “We don’t need recipes.”
They looked at me as if my nose had grown four sizes before their eyes.
“We’re going to let flavor, and color be our guide.” I said straightforwardly. And dove into the boxes we’d pulled from the car.
In the next hour, we whipped up bbq’ed oysters, a fresh garden salad, a gorgeous creamy pasta with summer squash, and grilled fresh fruits for dessert. With full bellies, my friends turned to me and relinquished all of the “recipe development” for the week to me. I nodded my head in understanding, and with glee. Everything we made that night was part of a meal to remember, and the entire meal was “Ayurvedic.”
It’s absolutely possible to create a delicious meal from any old recipe – many of them are designed to create flavorful, fun meals. We love to ask ourselves whether or not the recipe we’re working from is “healthy.” But the answer is that any recipe that prioritizes flavor over macronutrients IS healthy because flavor does far more than make our meals fun – it makes our meals powerful, satisfying and nourishing.
With a few simple guidelines, this is a superpower that you can harness for yourself: creating something delicious, nutritious, and out of this world with whatever ingredients you have on hand, far more impressively than any internet recipe will.
In the loose recipe below, I teach you how to use flavor as the guideposts for creating delicious, healthful meals from anything (and a dressing that works with whatever you’ve got.)
Whether you’ve been here for some time (thank you!) or you’re new (welcome!) you’ve read me discussing how flavor is more than just fun. The breakdown of flavors in the ingredients I share for each recipe is one way that I hope to draw your attention to the notion that the foods we eat are far more important than their nutritional information, and that the reasons that I’m including them isn’t because of their macros.
To be sure, macronutrients are important. We all need a balance of fats, carbohydrates and proteins to function properly, to perform our best. But we’ve grown entirely too fixated on “fitting in the macros,” and have grown as a society to almost completely ignore the bio-individuality of ingredients, the importance of their “wholeness,” and the energetic importance of flavor.
In Ayurveda, we measure a *healthy,* balanced diet by flavor – not by macronutrients. A meal is balanced and beneficial when it includes all six flavors that our systems can perceive: sweet, sour, salty, bitter, astringent and pungent.
When put together, these six flavors ultimately create the flavor phenomenon that modern culture calls “umami.” These foods are highly craveable and deeply satisfying to our taste buds, and not just because they’re decadent; these foods contain phenomenal energetic and nutritional value to us.
A juicy burger (veggie or meat,) on a toasted bun with lettuce, tomato, pickled onion and avocado is an excellent example of the six flavors in combination. A bowl of ramen, an everything-seeded bagel with cream cheese. A bowl of pasta with traditional bolognese contains all six flavors. A ballpark hotdog with relish, mustard and ketchup. Are you starting to see a trend? All six flavors in combination create a wild, mouthwatering party; this is the body’s way of encouraging us to eat a variety of foods that give the benefits we need.
Each of the flavors that we can perceive provides the body with a different biological benefit. When we pump our meals with ingredients that provide all of the benefits, we amp our systems on a whole new level AND we get to enjoy our food on a whole new plane too.
To be clear, I’m not telling you that everything you crave is good for you.
And, I’m certainly not telling you to go out and subsist on burgers and hot dogs alone.
While we don’t honor the function of flavor in our Western food ways, we certainly capitalize on it, capturing flavor without the nutritional or energetic value. Packaged and processed foods have found ways to use non food ingredients to create umami flavors that make their products undeniably delicious. But that doesn’t mean they’re “good for you.”
Flavor is functional, powerful and SO GOOD for us when we eat whole, real foods – not foods from packages. Understanding the flavors, what foods we find them in is our first building block towards using flavor in our favor in the kitchen. (This, oddly, also helps us to sniff out non-foods that have borrowed flavors without bringing along the nutrition, and makes it easier for us to avoid flavorful nutritional pitfalls.)
Let’s learn about these flavors, where to find them, and how to bring the nutrition with the fun.
When we put a food into our mouths, our tongues taste it – sensing the flavors, and comprehending the energetic and nutritional value it provides. Then, the digestive system (tongue) sends a message to the gut and tells the microbiome, and the system at large to start manufacturing enzymes to break down these specific foodstuffs, and sending them through the system to break down that specific flavor. Here’s what our body perceives when we taste each of the Six Flavors:
We have cravings for each of these flavors – together and separately – and when we start to incorporate all six of the flavors into our meals, it becomes much easier to tell when one is missing. Practicing adding an ingredient from each of the flavor categories is a great way of rethinking how you build your meals, create your own favorite recipes, and nourish beyond macronutrients to complete, total health and edible joy.
We understand that to really build healthful meals, we have to bring the flavor.
We understand that including all six of the flavors is a surefire way to make any meal “healthy” (and, Ayurvedic.)
And, so now we just need to know what goes in the bowl, right? RIGHT.
The little lists below are some great general examples of which ingredients carry what flavors. You’ll quickly see that you no longer need to think very hard about whether you’re ‘getting your macros,” because the flavors cover it for you. AND, have the added benefit of actually making something delicious.
So, when I went to build our meal the other night here in Hornby, I took inventory of three things:
And I headed into the kitchen.
For the salad that I shared below, I did the same and added another component: what did I have in my pantry/on hand? Building a pantry filled with functional flavor is another post for another time, but for today I’ve written out all of the ingredients in the flavor box below with their corresponding flavors.
You’ll notice that the dressing contains ALREADY CONTAINS FIVE FLAVORS. This means you could make a simple salad, add grains and protein for sweetness, drizzle on the dressing and have a simply flavor-balanced meal just by adding it! You’re almost to the recipe!
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