Reinventing our culinary practices

During these first weeks at Vegetarium, it is clear that my lifestyle has changed drastically, and especially my diet. Indeed, I first learned how to balance my meals, knowing what is good to eat at different times of the day or, on the contrary, what to avoid at other times. Becoming aware of how our bodies work and the needs they have, that we generally ignore, requires us to take a hard look at our habits and find great motivation to change them.

To take this dietary rebalancing further, I also learned to recognise, collect and combine plants that have incredible health benefits ; I discovered the proper methods of storage and cooking to preserve the beneficial properties of food in general ; and I explored how to replace salt, sugar and fats with all kinds of spices and seeds. I must say that it is not an easy learning process, but these are practices that encourage you to take care of yourself and your health in the long term. The culinary experience that made the biggest impression on me was discovering how to prepare some basic elements of our diet by ourselves: bread and dairy products. Rediscovering a connection with raw ingredients and becoming aware of the time and expertise required to produce the foods we consume every day was a truly interesting and educational experience.

After collecting milk from the neighbour’s flock, we boiled it and mixed it with an old yoghurt preparation containing the lactic ferments needed to make new yoghurt. We then carefully wrapped our jars in cloth to let the mixture rest overnight. The next day, we tasted it and kept some of the mixture to make our own cheese ! At the same time, we cooked a spiced bread by mixing einkorn flakes, water, the sour dough we prepare regularly to let it ferment, and lots of spices : caraway, red pepper, cumin, coriander and white pepper, to vary the flavours. After letting the dough rise, we baked it, and even took care to add patterns with a knife. This bread was a real success !

Maya