We read a lot about intuitive eating, but just as important, and the first step in the process, is intuitive cooking.
Cooking by availability and intuition – shopping the market, choosing produce that looks fresh and appealing, and then combining it with ingredients on hand, according to taste and personal preference – is perhaps the oldest and most authentic way to prepare food. Our grandmothers cooked this way, without recipes or elaborate meal planning. They simply gathered vegetables from their garden, combined them with ingredients on hand, adding a pinch of this and a dash of that until it tasted good, making meal preparation less laborious and a lot more fun!
For Kelly, cooking is not about following the rules and getting it right, she rarely uses recipes. Rather, cooking is about being creative and enjoying the process, the journey is the reward. Kelly tends to get her food inspiration by spending time at various markets, traditional and farmers, slowly and deliberately perusing the aisles looking to see what’s fresh and glorious, creating menu plans on the fly and filling her basket with ingredients necessary for the dishes already running amok in her imagination. Kelly finds it great fun to discover unusual fruits or vegetables one might not find in a typical grocery store and figure out what to do with them.
Join Kelly on her culinary explorations and ignite your creativity by cooking with whatever ingredients are at hand ~ and see what deliciousness transpires! Sprinkled with multicultural food lore and interesting side notes, recipes are simple, encouraging experimentation and innovation with a focus on seasonal, organic and local ingredients, as well as some ethnic and exotic ingredients that are more readily available – creating dishes that not only entice all the senses but also provide a vicarious international experience.
With an emphasis on eating simply, a diversity of foods, we not only practice cooking; we make cooking a practice that benefits not only what is on our plates and in our bellies but what is in our hearts.
Note: Dishes posted to this blog may be written in the style of a recipe, but are meant to serve as guidelines – quantities are approximations dependent on how many people you are cooking for.