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Better Health through Digestion with an Ayurvedic Diet |
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These are a few of our favorite recipes..... If you would like to receive a free copy, please click the “Get Recipe” Button. You will be required to register as a user and we will email a full copy of the recipe. If you would like to adapt this recipe for your auyurvedic needs then please subscribe to our dietary service.
Cranberry Sauce with Orange & Ginger
Zesty, tangy, bursting with red freshness. Sour, sweet and spicy!ayurveda notes
If the roof of your mouth is rough and dry after drinking cranberries, you've learned 'astringent' taste, one of the six fundamental tastes in Ayurveda. Astringent taste tightens and tones up tissues. It is cooling, reducing inflammation and pitta. However astringency is drying, aggravating Vata.
Cranberries are astringent. Their astringency helps them balance the dampness of their natural habit: the swampy cranberry bog. Cranberries are a strong diuretic. Their drying, cooling, and astringent properties were used traditionally for urinary tract infections. The strong sour taste leaves the mouth and GI tract with a gush of saliva and juiciness that directs vata inward and downward.
In this recipe, cooking cranberries a sweetener reduces their astringency somewhat. Pungent ginger opposes the cooling quality of the cranberry.
Mung Dal Kitchari (Vata Reducing)
A classic meal for those recovering from illness, kitchari's are Ayurveda's vegetarian answer to chicken soup. With hundreds of varieties, they are the congee equivalent of Chinese medicine. Technically, a kitchari is any dish combining rice and legumes. Typically, however, kitcharies use mung beans because they are the easiest legume to digest. This kitchari is especially suited to vata dosha.ayurveda notes
Together, rice and beans provide complete protein. A small taste of hing reveals it is a sharp and heating irritant that provokes and stimulates the tongue. The tongue is a mirror of the digestive tract. As spice stimulates the tongue so also spice stimulates the stomach. The body's effort to dilute the irritant spice increases blood flow and gastric juices to the intestines thus improving digestion. Patience with herbs and spices is the best way to experience their effects!
Hing and the other spices help cold vata people to digest beans. Excess hing can be too harsh for dry type vata people with a thin mucosal lining of the intestine.
Pistachio Pancakes with Cardamom
Experiment with sweet spices in pancakes, including cardamom, nutmeg, cinnamon. Discovered by chef Yashoda Naidoo at Annapurna, an ayurvedic restaurant in Albuquerque, NM.ayurveda notes
Pancakes with spelt flour and spices are much easier to digest and less sticky in the GI tract. Cardamom effectively destroys mucus in the stomach and breaks up the stickiness of wheat. Vata's with gas or weak digestion should be careful to sip warm water whenever eating pancakes or bread like foods which absorb too much fluids from the GI tract.
Sesame Seed Treats with Ginger & Ghee
It's basically a sweet and buttery paste. Sesame seeds give texture, good mouth feel, and a nutty finish. Ginger adds a little zing and flavor. Altogether simple and readily digestible for Vata.ayurveda notes
A vata tonic for dryness. Oleates internal organs and the digestive tract. The pinch of ginger aids digestion. Modified from Ashtanga Hrdayam.