By Laurelle Walsh
A new cookbook titled The Nourished Cook: 101 ways to feed your belly and soul is being developed in the Methow Valley by digestive health specialist Sharon Gray.
The book will be “both a cookbook and self-care guide in one,” said Gray. It will feature crowd-sourced recipes with “chapters woven throughout the book on how the practice of putting time and love into cooking can change your life,” she said.
The recipes will be one-pot meals that don’t take a lot of time to prepare, she said, recipes that use “real food” ingredients, as unprocessed as possible, without chemicals, preservatives or unnecessary additives.
The goal is to “integrate self care into our lives with more ease and joy,” Gray said. “I want to help people cultivate the ability to get nourishment from life.”
A different relationship to food
Gray is a licensed acupuncturist with a background in Chinese medicine. And while keeping it in the background for this project, she can’t help but look at life “through the lens of Chinese medicine; it’s integral in what I do,” she said.
Gray began planning the cookbook about five years ago at a time when she was busy with her Seattle practice. “The cookbook is an extension of my practice,” she said. Since moving to the Methow Valley a year ago with her husband, Hellerwork practitioner Jason Rumohr, she has been on sabbatical while shifting her focus to the cookbook, she said.
Working with clients over the years, Gray said she noticed that people “knew they were hungry for something.” She also found that “most people are not only unaware of what they need, they don’t even recognize they have needs. They’re not connected to how to take care of themselves.”
Some people even see food as an unnecessary nuisance, as the rising interest in Soylent and other “complete meal” drinks would indicate. Grey recalls one of her clients, a former Microsoft employee, who came to her and said, “I wish I didn’t have to eat.”
“Over time she developed a different relationship to food,” said Gray. “She started to recognize not only what she got from food itself, but her whole relationship to it.”
Through the cookbook Gray hopes to reach “people who tend to other people’s needs more than their own: moms, caregivers, community volunteers, people who focus on work more than their self. … There’s so much we have to do in a day that food can take a backseat,” she said.
The Nourished Cook asks the reader to ponder the question: “What nourishes you?” It invites readers to slow down, tend to their needs, and recognize and respond to what their bodies are telling them, Gray said.
Submit a recipe
The recipes in The Nourished Cook will take about 10 to 15 minutes of preparation, plus cooking time, Gray said. “These are the most basic, do-able practices that anyone can try,” she said, particularly good for someone who thinks they can’t cook or are too busy to cook.
A sample recipe called Lentils Gone Wild on the cookbook website, thenourishedcook.com, introduces the basics of one-pot cooking and includes “helpful hints.”
“Once you learn the basic techniques you don’t have to think about it,” said Gray. “I’ve never seen a one-pot recipe fail.”
Gray invites cooks from the Methow Valley and around the country to share their one-pot recipes for possible inclusion in the book or on the blog: thenourishedcook.com/blog. “I see it as a montage of all these real people sharing what nourishes them…as if we were all gathered around a big table talking about what nourishes us,” she said.
Guidelines for submitting recipes are spelled out on the website under the tab: participate.
Gray and select recipe testers will test all the recipes submitted, and make suggestions for modifications if necessary, she said.
Back to basics
The Nourished Cook encourages cooks to go back to basics and begin to ask themselves, “What do you need?” — a question some may be unfamiliar or uncomfortable with, said Gray.
“The question is, how good do you want to feel? How worth it is it for you to take care of yourself?” asks Gray. “It’s a constant practice, but not hard. The rewards make it unquestionable.”
Looking into the future, Gray plans to start a publishing company that focuses on simple, practical tips for self care, she said. She also has another book “gestating,” she said.
For more information, email sharon@thenourishedcook.com.
