Category Archives: Guest post

Alternative cooking schools

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A guest post by Brian Jenkins

Are you interested in becoming a professional chef? There are numerous quality culinary arts programs to choose from, including programs which focus on healthy cooking. Besides cooking techniques, many of the programs also teach the business aspects of the profession. Training at a prestigious culinary school increases your chances of succeeding in the traditional food service industry.

The nation’s top culinary schools include Le Cordon Bleu, The Culinary Institute of America, and the College of Culinary Arts at Johnson & Wales University.

While those schools focus more on gourmet European cooking techniques, several institutions have made their mark with alternative food preparation from both inside and outside the U.S. Most emphasize healthful, healing, or animal product-free cooking. Here are a few schools offering this kind of culinary education. Continue reading →

Are schools focusing on healthier food options?

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This guest post is contributed by Cindy Cullen, who writes on the topic of culinary art college. She welcomes your comments by email.

Obesity and disease are more evident now than ever before; the numbers are rising as the days go by, and health is no longer something we can take for granted. Unless we take steps to preserve it and nurture it from childhood, we risk falling prey to illness and poor health as we grow older. We all know that the key to holistic health and wellbeing are diet and exercise – watch what you eat and work out five days a week. However, we fail to encourage our children to adopt this way of life, and because of this, we fail at providing them with a healthy life. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Cooking Indian with Jane

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Indian food

Thank you to graphic designer, painter, and cook Ellen Cornett  for helping me kick off the new year with this story. Stay tuned for more on resolutions.

All last week I was asking people about their New Year’s resolutions. It was a mix of idle curiosity and looking for some suggestions. I hadn’t yet finalized my own.

As I was thinking about this, my daughter, Jane, and I spent much of a Sunday morning and all afternoon crafting an Indian dinner. We both love Indian food—I think it’s our favorite. We set out to make coriander almond chicken, cabbage with split peas, raita (a yogurt condiment), basmati rice, and naan. Some of the ingredients were difficult to locate and it was tricky finding an Indian grocery store that was open on Sunday afternoon. But perhaps the biggest issue turned out to be my apparent inability to understand what I am reading.

The cookbook we worked from was an impulse purchase from Costco—big and lovely with gorgeous photos of India, of the food and of preparation steps. But it would seem that one photo of a chicken dish looks pretty much like any other. We had decided on this coriander almond chicken, but I managed to read and direct us through the many step preparation of a marinade for cardamom chicken before Jane figured out I was on the wrong page. I hit my head several times, we rinsed off the chicken, and went ahead with the coriander almond recipe.  Continue reading →

Guest Post: Bio of a raw foods chef

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Squatting down, hands clasped together, radiant blue eyes wide open and looking up, beaming a smile. Hair flowing down my back, feeling the breeze, sensing the vibrations of Mother Earth, and embracing life is me, myself, and I! I go by the name of Alynn Davis and I live by my personal motto ~ “Life is GRAND, so LIVE it!”

Life is grand. Life is beautiful. You are given a life to live in this lifetime. What more can you ask for? Who cares if you have blue, hazel, or brown eyes? Who cares if you’re tall or short? Who cares if you’re big or small? What really matters is how you’re living your life. Love life and embrace it! Take it to heart and grow! Blossom! Show your beauty! Be the person that you are! My eyes, my mind, my emotions, my SOUL had been shifting to a new level since I became 100% raw in October of 2003. The darkness has drifted away, the cloudiness, the negative forces of energy faded into space. Living Raw is not just about eating raw foods. It is about living your life in an optimal way. It is about choices, it is about becoming something you never thought you would become. Continue reading →