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Vegetarian cooking lesson 3

A cooking demonstration on preparing a Falahārī meal, focusing on Ayurvedic principles.

"Spices are a significant topic in Āyurveda and yogic life. Turmeric is like a pharmacy in miniature."

"The Falahārī diet consists of eating only fruits and vegetables, excluding grains, potatoes, and bananas."

Hemvati, from Zagreb, leads a cooking session at an international yoga seminar, preparing a multi-course Falahārī dinner. She explains the health benefits of ingredients like turmeric, sweet potato, and olive oil while demonstrating recipes for a beetroot and carrot soup, a vegetable kurmā with cauliflower, pumpkin seed bread, and tapioca kheer. The instructions are interwoven with Ayurvedic dietary advice, such as the proper use of spices for digestion and the benefits of the milk-based kheer.

Filming location: Vép, Hungary

Hari Om! My name is Hemvati. I come from Zagreb, Croatia, and today we are in VEP, Hungary, at the International Yoga and Daily Life Seminar. We are going to prepare a beautiful Falahārī dinner. I will speak in both Croatian and English so everyone can understand. Today we will prepare a few delicious dishes. First, a very nice thick soup that helps create fresh blood in the body, making it stronger and generating iron in the blood. We use chopped carrots and beetroot. We place the vegetables in a pot, add double the quantity of water, and then add spices. Spices are a significant topic in Āyurveda and yogic life. We will add some Himalayan salt and turmeric. Turmeric is a very important spice. It greatly influences liver function, improves digestion, and helps cleanse the body of toxins. It is like a pharmacy in miniature. It is good for each of us to take at least one teaspoon of turmeric daily, either through food or mixed with water or milk, to aid these preventive processes in the body. Now, the soup is cooking. The next dish is a nice vegetable kurmā. Kurmā is a traditional South Indian dish made with coconut milk. For this, we will use cauliflower and sweet potato. Sweet potato can be used in a Falahārī diet. As you know, the Falahārī diet consists of eating only fruits and vegetables, excluding grains, potatoes, and bananas. Sweet potato is from a different family than potato. It is rich in beta-carotene and vitamin E and helps fight cardiovascular diseases. For this vegetable kurmā, we will also use chopped cashews, coconut milk, and onions. In the Falahārī diet, you can use oil. People often ask, "Can we use oil in a Falahārī diet?" Of course, because some vitamins are absorbed in the body only with the help of oil. A little oil is good, but use unrefined oils like pure olive oil. It is good for the cardiovascular system and helps clear the channels in the body. You can fry with olive oil; the Mediterranean has cooked with it for centuries without issue. We will use a small karāī, a special Indian cooking vessel. First, we add a little olive oil. This quantity is for one person; adjust as needed. We have one sweet potato and half a cauliflower. To the warm oil, we add some black mustard seeds. Black mustard is a very important spice. It helps clean the body of toxins, opens all the channels, and stimulates our digestive fire, Jāṭharāgni, so that food is well-digested. First, we fry the black mustard. Then we add the chopped cashews, a little turmeric, a little salt, and mix. We add a bit of coconut milk and mix everything together. Coconut milk is very useful in the summer months because it cools the whole body. It has a natural sweetness that enhances the food. We let it cook for just a minute, then add a little onion. We do not fry the onions for long. As Vamījī said, when you fry onions, they become tāmasic. We do not want tāmasic food, so we immediately add the coconut milk, cashews, and spices. Now we add the vegetables: cauliflower and sweet potato, including the cauliflower leaves. We try to use all parts of the vegetables and waste as little as possible. Now it is cooking. In about 15 minutes, this dish is ready. If you like, you can add a little chili powder. Chili is very beneficial in the summer because it helps our skin sweat, which gets rid of toxins, bacteria, and parasites. It is also good for general acne, but do not add so much that it becomes unpleasant. It improves liver function and cleanses the body. We leave it to cook and move to the next dish. The next dish is a specialty, my personal favorite recently. It is made from pumpkin seed flour. We will bake bread with this flour. We need 200 grams of pumpkin seed flour and 100 grams of dried sunflower seeds. We mix them and add a small pinch of Himalayan salt, as the pumpkin seeds are already a bit salty. We add a little turmeric and can also add a little cumin powder. We mix it nicely. You can add a few drops of olive oil, not too much. Then comes the special ingredient: psyllium. Psyllium is a plant used all over India as a digestive aid. It helps create good bowel movements when used with water. For us, it is essential because it binds the pumpkin seed flour and sunflower seeds together; the mixture would not bind without it. We use one and a half spoons of psyllium and mix it well. We add water slowly and mix. The psyllium grows and connects the mixture. We have a bread mold. It is very important to put the mixture into the mold immediately. We use our hands to press it in. You can see it becomes very compact. We leave it for five minutes to set, then bake it at 180 degrees Celsius for 30 minutes. Our kurmā is nearly ready. I must tell you a little about the Falahārī diet. It is very beneficial for all of us. Swāmījī has been recommending it for years. I myself followed the Falahārī diet for two years. From an Āyurvedic point of view, it is beneficial for each person to consume one deciliter of cow's milk daily. Milk influences all the tissues in the body, building them, and is very beneficial for our joints. The milk should be organic or at least pasteurized, but please do not use homogenized milk. The next dish will be tapioca kheer. Tapioca is a nice plant that grows in India and Africa, from the manioc plant. These balls are made from it. Tapioca is also used in Falahārī. You can also use a little yellow mūṅg dāl in a Falahārī diet, and occasionally a small quantity of tofu. No grains or other lentils are used, except for a little yellow mūṅg dāl. I have read from the Āyurvedic point of view that yellow mung dal is very beneficial for building all tissues in the body except fat tissue. It gives energy and good protein. So, our last dish is tapioca kheer. The first step is to soak the tapioca in milk for at least one hour. Our soup is also ready; it cooked in 20 minutes. We put the soaked tapioca to cook and add more milk—at least twice the amount, because the tapioca dissolves into the milk. We add cardamom powder, which is very beneficial for the heart and lungs, creating strength in these systems. If you want to add a natural sweetener, you can, or add a little honey at the end. You must stir it from time to time so the tapioca does not stick to the bottom. You can add a little more milk as needed. We cook it for half an hour to get a nice kheer. It is very good to add saffron as well. Now, back to our soup. We will blend it with a mixer to create a nice, thick soup. In the meantime, we prepare the spices in another way: by making a tarka. We fry the spices in olive oil and add them to the thick soup at the end. You can use a small pot. For the soup's tarka, we use garlic, a spice very familiar and healthy in our countries. We crush the garlic, warm a little olive oil, and add ajvājn (ajwain). Ajwain is a famous spice that cleans the mucus and toxins (āmū) from the body and works against gas and bloating. We add one teaspoon of ajwain and one teaspoon of jīrā (cumin). Indian cumin is very good for Jāṭharāgni and aids the absorption of vital elements from food. We fry the garlic for just a few seconds, then add everything to the soup, which we have already blended. At the end, you can garnish with a little coriander or parsley leaves. Today we made the bread, the kurmā, a nice thick soup for improving the whole system and creating good blood, tapioca kheer, and we also have a green salad. For the salad, we only put olive oil, a little salt, and lemon juice instead of vinegar, which is a much better combination according to Āyurveda. That's it. I would like to show you our prepared meal, which we made a little earlier for you to see. Here is our complete meal: the thick soup for creating good blood, the tapioca kheer, the salad, the kurmā, and the bread. You may ask how to eat it. According to Āyurveda, you can start with what is heavier to digest, which is either the salad or the sweet dish (kheer). Then you can continue, combining all the flavors. Hari Om! Thank you very much for your attention. We are here at the Summer Yoga and Daily Life Seminar. You are free to join us; we are here for at least seven or eight more days. We will see you soon.

This text is transcribed and grammar corrected by AI. If in doubt what was actually said in the recording, use the transcript to double click the desired cue. This will position the recording in most cases just before the sentence is uttered.

The text contains hyperlinks in bold to three authoritative books on yoga, written by humans, to clarify the context of the lecture:

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