02 — Essentialist Cooking
Everything is there for a reason.
Let’s be less concerned about purity or place, but set our sights on orientation and direction.
Essentialist Cooking means everything is there for a reason. We celebrate Health, Happiness, and Harmony, and create food that reflects these virtues.
Food is an essential need. If we plant seeds of health, happiness, and harmony into the daily ritual of eating, we cultivate feelings of security, connection, autonomy, growth, and purpose.
Let’s be less concerned about purity or place, but set our sights on orientation and direction.
Essentialist cooking isn’t minimalism. It asks the questions:
- Is our food making us healthier?
- Is our food making us happy?
- Does the experience bring harmony to people and place?
Essentialist Cooking celebrates:
- Seasonality
- Locality
- Nurturing our health
- Connection
- Special Occasions
- Freshness: The Power of Eating Sunlight
- Aging: Ferments
- Crop Diversity: Diversity on the Plate
- Waste Reduction
- Compassionate Consumption
- Living in Harmony with Nature
- Distinction & Unique Offerings
I am a Plant-Based Chef, because it aligns my compassion, our health, and living in harmony with nature.
Sourcing locally and seasonally is delicious and fresh, is optimal for our health, connects us to our local growers and producers, makes the seasons feel like a special occasion, encourages crop diversity, and helps us to live in harmony with nature and the land.
To taste and experience the seasons is grounding. We can keep one foot on our land, to support our reaching for the stars.
Diversity on the plate can make a meal a journey. The food industry provides profit for shareholders by processing a few foods in great quantity for maximum shelf stability. Nature provides breathtaking biodiversity to support life, and humans alone consume over 1000 different vegetables, sometimes growing a hundred different cultivars for each plant, such as the tomato. Instead of depleting the soil to grow monocrops which need industrial processing to give them flavor, we can celebrate the spectrum of biodiversity, and eat with a sense of adventure, curiosity, health, and abundance. We don’t fear nature’s flavor palette.
Harnessing aging to transform surplus foods into ferments brings immense health benefits, waste reduction, and invests in our future. It’s always a special occasion to sample and prepare the miso you’ve been aging for 6 months. The transformation from surplus beans and koji to richly flavorful umami feels like alchemy, and by committing to your food future, you elevate your conscious understanding of time.
You’re giving your future self a gift, planting a seed of hope, creating a superfood, and ensuring you are going to have rich, delicious, umami rich broth to keep you healthy and happy all year. I’ve made and enjoyed hundreds of misos and umami ferments to keep healthy and well fed as a vegan in a Chicago winter.
I focus very intently on capturing the essence of sustainable, celebratory cooking that elevates our health, happiness, and harmony.