About This Blog

Let me confess: Cooking bores me. And elaborate cooking bores me elaborately. I often tend to blanch when someone tells me they spent 40 minutes just preparing for a meal. I am not yet at that point of life where cooking is therapy, nor do I think I will ever be.

This blog is all about no-fuss, no-mess eating and mostly is about drinking your nutrients raw rather than have a stove destroy them. The 4 S Diet that  I speak about is, as you would have guessed, a combination of soups, salads, sandwiches and smoothies. I took a little liberty with the last to include my all-time favorite juicing recipes.  As you will see, I am an unabashed juice junkie.

I have named this blog Green Turmeric in honor of a very unique Indian  herb-spice. While the world is slowly waking up to the health benefits of turmeric, it is prima donna in most Indian kitchens.  If turmeric is The Golden Spice, then green turmeric (the young  plant harvested with the rhizome ) is green gold. If you have seen and savored the green turmeric, you will know what I mean.

Most recipes in this blog have a cooking time of 30 minutes tops, unless otherwise stated. Of course, this does not involve oven time or the hours spent on soaking lentils etc. Whenever possible, I tend to skip the stove altogether.

Luckily for me, I was born a vegetarian and the southern region of India where I come from teems with food ideas that continue to inspire and are so open to improvisation. It is hard to miss the Indian influence in most of the recipes here as is the gusty mix of spices. Some recipes here are adapted from other blogs and some come out of my own kitchen, and I have made all efforts to acknowledge my sources.

Some day, I dream of living in a house with a huge backyard where I can grow my own organic produce. As a journalist, I count among my friends a dedicated bunch of composting enthusiasts, some of whom even grow their own earthworms! The apartment I live in now does not allow for a compost pit, but I try to make my kitchen as close to zero-waste as I possibly can. The pulp from all my juicing, for example, goes into making vegetable stock or baked goods and whatever is still left from all this, ends up in a small pot that I keep in a corner of my kitchen for mulch. When my organic garden becomes a reality, I plan to unleash an army of earthworms to do my work for me.

The 4S is not a diet plan in the sense that there are no hard and fast rules, except for this one: make vegetables 80 percent of your diet, mostly raw vegetables. Follow it up with cooked vegetables, fruits, beans and whole grains.  Trim down your dairy and go in for only a very rare indulgence of processed foods.

I am not going to insult your intelligence by laying out a case for the amazing health benefits of plant-based foods. You have probably read and heard enough of that, not to speak of all those super-fancy detox diets that so completely inhibit you into taking even the first step. You will  not need me  for all those.

Suffice it to say that I take great pride and pleasure in my  vegetarian way of life, having been born into it.  I also completely vouch by Dr.Fuhrman’s Nutritarian Pyramid, as against conventional food pyramids. And yes, you are right, this is the same good doctor made famous by the by-now-iconic movie, Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead. Take a quick look at the Nutritarian Pyramid and see what you have been missing so far:

                                                

                                                

So, let us keep it simple. Eat and drink vegetables and fruits, in whatever way you can, how many ever times you can.  And stay away from the stove, as much as you can.

Which is why, 3 of the 4 S-es—the salads, sandwiches and smoothies—are so simple to live with.  You cut down on all that stove time and save a bunch of pennies in the process too. Less kitchen time = more family time and more of an incentive to eating in than dining out. And the fourth S here, the soups, also have very little stove time, if you invest in a good slow cooker. Most of it is simmer time with a couple of minutes of sauté time. See what I mean?

 

Here is a quick take on 80 of the healthiest foods ever, courtesy Ross Bridgeford’s great blog on high-alkalinefoods. So, where do you stand in this? Happy 4 S-ing!