First of all, there are LOTS of new readers this week and I just wanted to say welcome! I’m so glad you’re here, and I hope that you find all sorts of tasty goodness in this little weekly newsletter drop!
For most of the past few months, if I’m not in the field cooking for athletes, I’m in the field being one myself, or home creating recipes to fill all our bellies when we’re out there crushing it. And in all the spaces between , I’m in Ayurveda school, or head stuck in a book – probably written in Sanskrit, learning about the holistic methods, natural principles + ancient practices that can help me, and all of us, regain balance after all the professional + personal hustle-bustle.
It’s been overwhelming. And AWESOME.
The most fascinating – and mindboggling – learning acquired as I work towards my Ayurvedic practitionership is – as if I didn’t know it before- that everything matters. Each tiny detail. When it comes to how our bodies and minds feel and perform, to our inner and outer wellbeing, everything EVERYTHING is a contributing factor.
And not just the foods we eat. Every single element of our environment, of our daily experiences, plays a role.
For example, the reason that eating too much cake gives us a bellyache is absolutely about the ingredients in the cake.
Not just what they are, but where they’re grown.
How they’re interacting with other things we ate that day.
The time of day we ate the cake.
The very specific flavors of the frosting.
The ambient temperature when we ate the cake.
The way our mother feels about us eating so much cake.
The way we feel about how our mother feels about eating so much cake.
All the qualities of us, of our environments, the company we keep, the foods we eat., where we’re going, where we’ve been..all of it is swirling together to make up US. Each of us.
And that’s a pretty stupendous thought, right?
As if we weren’t hard enough on ourselves already.
There’s one way I’ve learned to cool my brain off when adding math of all the qualities, all the factors starts to feel like an elephant squashing my brain: I remember that opposites balance each other.
When life is rough, all we need to do is smooth it out.
When the world feels cold, all we need to do is warm up a bit.
And when we’re being hard on ourselves, we need a little softness to bounce back to balance.
In a busy, hard, hot, movement-overloaded summer, this bowl of Zippy Coconut Noodles w/Sweet Squash is the silky, easy, cool, slow-twirling dish that’s been a great remedy for me.
Doesn’t sound so bad, right?
I said before that our “modern” problems are just human problems….and they are…but that’s not entirely true. The modern manifestations of our human problems is a bit different than ever before, and that’s worth mentioning.
Seven-thousand year old Ayurvedic texts reveal that for as long as time, humans have found themselves pushed by the factors of their lives away from nature a bit, in such a way that makes it difficult to tell exactly how to live their day to day lives in harmony. Forever, we’ve been moving too much, working too hard, over-indulging, undersleeping, and generally overdoing it. And, for as long as time we’ve sought to find the magic ticket for how to heal and rebalance ourselves. Only, now we have *another* factor to blame for our natural dissonance – technology.
Before modern medicine gave us medications with a list of side effects a million miles long, the only thing we had to heal ourselves from our plights were the plants and products around us. Food was all we were ingesting (because we hadn’t figured out how to make plastic or fit it into our food yet,) and IT was our only medicine. And, I’m learning, that if we listen closely enough, our bodies still know how to ask for what they need to heal what ails them.
Even if it’s just a chronic busy day.
The notion of “comfort food,” was not born with boxed macaroni and cheese. Food actually IS comfort, and shunning it as such isn’t going to help anyone, as it turns out. Tuning into this reality, embracing it, and choosing our bowls of comfort wisely is a better answer.
And this is where pasta comes in. If you’ve ever just craved the idea of sitting down to a bowl of noodles, twirling them up on your fork and unwinding at the same time, you’re onto something good. Namely, your brain has latched into a physical craving for a bowl of sweet, soothing flavors to smooth out a rough experience, interaction, or day. Opposites balance each other, remember?
For athletes, and other overachievers reading this – myself included – we need that goodness. We need that smoothness, that calmness, that sweetness to balance out the big workout, the big day of meetings, the overactivity of our brains on Zoom all day. Carbohydrates (like noodles) are sweet in flavor, and sweet flavors — in Ayurvedic medicine and in Western medicine– are responsible for fueling, building, and nourishing every single cell in our bodies. So, when we tune out that craving for a big bowl of twirly noods, and eat a rough, cold, light salad (when all our bodies are asking for is some grounding,) we’re really not listening at all.
For much of the summer, I personally have been struggling with how to keep my body cool. I’m a firey personality, and my constitution is marginally dominated by this same element, which is to say that I easily engulf in flames (proverbially speaking,) when I burn the candle at both ends. Lots of movement, excitement, passion for projects and people and life and WHOOPS, I have a hard time sleeping, feel a little swollen, and start to notice my internal fire in external ways.
When all of those things ignite, it makes it tricky for me to feel good, to perform well, to even think straight. And what’s saved me has been leaning into big bowls of noodles for dinner.
I add loads of cooked veggies, a favorite protein of some kind, and then I add spices to boost the flavors of these beauty bowls (and to aid in my digestion as well.) I twirl it all together and make myself a little bowl – note that I didn’t say dive headfirst into the pot of noodles – and dig in. As my fork turns, I can literally hear my little brain thanking me for this act of kindness, my belly saying “HALLELUJAH” after running around all day burning through everything I put in with my exercising and thinking and DOING.
It’s the edible hug I never knew I needed to give myself.
And, I have a feeling a few of you out there are the same.
This bowl of noods is some fusion between Thai-style rice noodle bowls, fresh summer Italian bowls, and the stuff that gets mixed up in my brain. To make it, you take a very healthy handful (basically, a whole bunch) of cilantro, or basil, or both, blend it up with a nub of ginger, a couple cloves of garlic and some coconut milk and you have an instantly flavorful sauce. Coconut is the secret ingredient that makes this particular bowl of noodles so cooling, grounding and soothing; instead of an acidic and antagonistic tomato sauce, or a heavy cheesy garlic sauce that can feel too much like a quilt on your gut, the coconut is light, easy to digest, boosted by flavor and also versatile — this bowl is delicious warm, at room temp or chilled just a little bit.
From there, squash it in. In the several times this summer that I’ve made this dish, I’ve used it as a place to hide an overabundance of zucchini squash, but as the season is turning I’m using chunks of early fall squash like delicata, butternut and acorn too. The only difference is that they’ll need a bit more time to simmer in the coconut sauce — no biggie.
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