Ayurvedic Cooking for Self-Healing [antikvár]

FOREWORDSome of the fondest memories of my years of Ayurvedic study in India involve the Lad family. No sooner did I meet Dr. Vasant Lad in January 1974 than he invited me home for dinner, a dinner which inaugurated a veritable procession of future meals. When classes were in session at Pune's Tilak Ayurveda Mahavidyalaya, Dr. Lad frequently would insist that I share his lunch and soon I was consuming many of my meals in the Lad home, a practice which continued during most of the six years I spent at the college. Whenever I would arrive at her door, Usha Tai (Mrs. Lad) would offer me some freshly-prepared tidbit. If the cupboard was temporarily bare, apologetically she would begin to whip something up from scratch, no matter how vociferously I might protest. Even when I was living on only milk and fruits, a glass of milk was always waiting for me, day or night.Like many Indians, Usha Tai genuinely loves to cook for guests, because every guest, indeed every living being, bears the spark of divinity That I had arrived in her home meant that I should be fed, not as some grudging obligation but from the love of cooking and feeding. Every morsel fed to that visiting incarnation of God is a morsel fed back to the Creator as an offering of gratitude for Nature's bounty; and since the scriptures remind us that "food is indeed God," to feed the hungry is to serve God to God. Food creates the rasa, that juicy nutritional essence which nourishes the body's hungry tissues and pleases and satisfies the mind and the senses. This nourishment and satisfaction are the blessings that Annapurna, the goddess of food, has awarded to all sentient beings, and the Lads have believed always in sharing their blessings freelyAs I watched time pass in the Lads' kitchen, I had ample occasion to see first hand the sort of attention Usha Tai lavished on the food she prepared. I watched her shop and select, grind and chop, sauté and boil, and imbibed that rhythm of food preparation which makes the victuals begin to cook themselves as soon as they enter the pot. Her culinary preparations were a practical demonstration of what I was being taught theoretically in the college, namely that the standard linear logic that serves the physical