A New View of Healthy Eating: Daily Healthy Recipes by Melanie Albert: How to get Started with Intuitive Cooking and 2018 Week 1 Recipes

by Melanie A. Albert, intuitive cooking expert, author, speaker, Founder & CEO Experience Nutrition Group, LLC

Today has been a full day of fun focusing on recipe creating and testing for the Final Project of the Plantlab Culinary Cooking course I’m currently taking . While working today I was intuitively creating my recipe directions, so I decided to share with you the concept of intuitive cooking and how to easily get started to shop and cook intuitively.

Excerpt from “A New View of Healthy Eating”: Cook with Intuition.

With intuitive cooking, we use recipes as guides. We first learn simple, basic culinary methods and techniques (such as raw, steaming, or roasting) to prepare real whole foods with recipes as our guide. Naturally, over time, we learn to trust our own intuition to cook foods we desire using cooking techniques we’ve learned. Over time, you will not need to rely on recipes; you’ll trust yourself and your culinary skills to create your own healthy dishes with local, seasonal food.

For instance, we learn the culinary technique to steam carrots in a bamboo steamer and use our recipe to finish the carrots with walnut oil, toasted cumin seeds, fresh lemon juice, parsley, and a pinch of sea salt. After learning the bamboo steamer technique to quickly steam veggies, we cook other steamed vegetables (such as asparagus, broccoli, cauliflower, and peapods) and finish them with different oils, spices, and fresh herbs.

“With intuitive cooking we also naturally cook more mindfully, meditatively enjoying the rhythm of chopping veggies or the mindfulness of massaging kale or grating fresh spices.” – Melanie Albert

4 Steps to Get Started with Intuitive Cooking

Step 1: Shop at a farmers’ market without a shopping list and purchase a few different veggies and fruit the local farmers’ in your area are growing. Intuitively choose foods that are beautiful to you.
Step 2: When you get home intuitively reflect on how you’d like to cook the veggies. Will you prepare a simple saute, a salad, or roasted veggies? Just use your intuition. Is it is warm outside and you’d like a cooling salad? Or, is it is chilly outside and you’d like warming roasted veggies or soup?
Step 3: Get your mise en place set. Chop your veggies. Get all your other ingredients, such as olive oil and sea salt ready. Gather the kitchen tools your need to cook: saute pan, flat cooking sheet, parchment paper.
Step 4: Enjoy intuitive cooking and mindfully eating your dish.

2018 Week 1 Healthy Recipes

Now, let’s take a look at the healthy recipes this first week of 2018. Hope these recipes and culinary techniques give your ideas to cook a few healthy meals with real whole foods.