By Santosh Jha
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Copyright 2024 Santosh Jha
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License Notes
Thank you for downloading this free eBook. Although this is a free eBook, it remains the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be reproduced, copied and distributed for commercial or non-commercial purposes. Thanks for your support.
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Very early; may be thousands of years back, human intellect could decipher that we are all merely Puppets. The philosophies and spiritualities then ensued, as civilization and culture shaped up organized human wisdom, and they attempted to unravel the strings and sinews, which make humans do what they do, the way they do. This metaphor of puppetry actually underlines the core and basic reality of human life; in fact all lives.
Puppetry truly represents the embedded design of human life-living and the entrenched relationship between human Consciousness and Causalities of the world we live in. The human life as a ‘reactionary’ Media of Milieus was understood. Puppetry therefore, beautifully and amply outlines as how average human life-living is all about how it behaves and acts; mostly unconsciously and subconsciously; depending on how the unseen intuitive
‘strings’ are pulled. The philosophies and spiritualities since ages have therefore exposed the ‘strings’ and how they get pulled and have also warned against stupidities-hypocrisies of subconscious intuitive life-living.
Modern intellect, especially the 21st century science, has very successfully laid bare the structures and dynamics of all ‘strings’ that make humans a puppet, by unraveling the mechanisms of the Substrate, from where all
‘strings’ are pulled. It is a huge fortune for 21st century humanity that almost all Recipes of Realities have now been very clearly and beautifully decoded and explained, so that modern men and women are no more puppets. These Recipes of Realities not only liberate us from the Slavery of Strings but also make us stand as dexterous chef of life-living; cooking novel and alternative experiences-cognitions of realities, for wellness and prosperity. This book is a humble enterprise to talk not only about Recipes of Reality but also the Realities of Recipes. It has been written, addressed to
young boys and girls but the author very humbly feels; it should interest men and women of all ages. Thanks and all best…
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Before we begin to talk about food, taste and cooking; I humbly wish to tell you a story. Is it a real story? May be! You decide…
Mouth and Ears were once good friends. The Ears would lend their optimal attention to anything Mouth said. The Mouth always ensured; Ears were introduced only to the best of sounds. Mouth created the musicality; Ears imbibed them and turned the ‘beats’ into dance of body and mind. Life-living was one long journey of Song and Dance as their friendship blossomed. But; they couldn’t live happily thereafter… Why?
Mouth unconsciously tasted the sugar of Self-Consumption and cooked recipes of deception and hypocrisies. Ears unintentionally got hooked up to and binged on Fake Information. The close ‘neighbors’ drifted apart. Ears developed the big fat belly of Distrust. Mouth aligned with Cacophony and incurred the ulcer of ulterior attitudes. The body-mind stopped singing and dancing…
Mouth now asks all unreal Questions… Ears listen only to untrue Answers…
The Distrust and Disharmony has made Mouth and Ears avoid each other, even as they remain neighbors. They are now confined to their Smart Phones. They share emojis; only on birthdays…
Tragically, it all started and happened, as the once good friends tasted and cooked things, without caring what it could lead to…
At The Very Beginning…
There are questions and they are important because they lead to answers.
Very naturally; good and right questions alone can journey the destination of good and right answers. Intelligence is not only in finding answers; rather it is primarily in forming genuine and true questions. Questions are almost like the roadmaps and you reach right and well only when your roadmap is good and right. Then the inevitable question is – what is good and right? How can someone be sure about what is good or bad and what is right or wrong?
Cooking also has the same situation. There are questions, which need good and right answers but before that, you need to know the questions first.
Before you ask, what you should cook and how; you also must ask, why should you need to cook at the first place? Before you find answers about what is the recipe of the food you wish to cook, there are questions as, what is good and right food? You need to ask, what actually the idea of a recipe is?
Even before this question, there is a primary question as what food is and what taste, aroma and beauty are all about, which are essential parts of food? So, before we cook, we must have all right and good answers about food, taste, aroma, the aesthetics or beauty of the art of cooking, the science of body’s requirements from the food we cook and eat, what is the core construct of the idea of recipe and also about how and how much we need to eat and when?
Cooking, like other aspects of life-living, is both art and science. When we talk of art and science, we must also know about intuitive and non-intuitive realities. Art is mostly intuitive and science is generally non-intuitive. Do kindly remember the term ‘intuitive’ and its complementing word ‘non-intuitive’, as they are the most important basis of all questions you form and all answers you accept. They lead you to understand a very critical knowledge about twin layers of reality – Surface Reality and Substrate Reality. This knowledge shall ready you to be a genius chef of recipes of reality. We deal with them later.
At the very start, it is important that we briefly talk about and try to understand the very science and art of questions and answers in your life. It is truly very essential that you understand the significance of questions and answers very early in your life. It may help you understand what and why we can say something as good or bad and right or wrong. This shall then ensure that you grow up as a truly successful person, as you shall cook and taste all good and right potentials in your life to create the best recipes of happiness and robustness. Cooking and taste are in a way, a good and easy practical learning method to understand all aspects of realities in your life and living. This cook book very humbly wishes to help you cook and taste all realities, the best way they should, to optimize your life-living wellness.
It is hugely important that you realize and internalize your relationship with the outside world and the universe. This very word and idea called Relationship has to be understood deeply, holistically and as early as possible in your life. You are born and automatically; you stand in relationship with infinite realities, including your parents, siblings, family, society, identities, nation, earth and the very cosmos. Relationship is an invisible two-way wire or rope of Cause and Effect, which connects you
with others and everything else gets connected with you, in the big complex world you live.
As you grow and become an adult, your life journey unfolds in two related ways – first you consciously and conscientiously create new relationships with lot many novel and alternative realities and secondly; you continuously redefine and rebuild your existing relationships with all realities in this big world you live. This Relationship of You with Realities has to be understood.
To understand the relationship, essentially; you have to fully understand the Causes and Effects that connects you with outside world. This cause and effect together are called causality or causation. Every reality you perceive and live out, are patterns of causality. The big complex world is truly infinite patterns of causality. You are smart and intelligent only when you understand these causalities fully and objectively. Your actions and behaviors are shaped up and decided by these causalities and your wellness and destiny is decided by your actions and behaviors.
Cooking and taste are all about these ‘cause and effect’ connects. As you grow, evolve and begin to unravel life; finally, you shall have to understand, who ‘You’ are, what ‘Reality’ is and how they stand in causal relationship with each other. Cooking makes you understand this very critical idea and reality of causality well in simplest of ways.
It is neither good nor bad that most of the realities have already happened much before you happened. You were born and automatically, your relationship with realities happened as realities were already there, not even waiting and bothering for your happening. You find it tough to happily live past the minutes and hours of the day. The cosmos merrily passed 14 billion
years, before you were born. So, in a way, your life span has to journey the realities, as they stand in relationship with you as you happened.
We can say; life is largely about consciously having good and right ingredients and taste of realities all around you and cooking them to conscientiously create and recreate good and diverse recipes of beautiful, healthy and satisfying relationships with realities. How you cook relationships (cause-effect) with realities shall decide your health, success, prosperity and happiness. So, you can say; you need to be a great chef of life, cook it well and eat your way to health and prosperity.
The reality you accept and believe, are real only because they stand in relationships with you. In actuality, there is no independent reality, if they do not stand in relationship with you. This is very important and you need to very clearly understand this very early in your life, as you grow up. You, Realities and their Relationship with you are primary learning and knowledge.
As we talked about it earlier, you are born with many relationships with realities, which you may have to consciously revisit, redefine and rebuild, as you grow and mature. You shall also create many novel and alternative relationships with realities to drive you to new experiences and ideas. That is why, you have to understand and accept that unlearning old is as important as learning new is and both unlearning and learning must go together all along your life. We shall talk in detail about it later.
You must beforehand have complete and perfect knowledge of ingredients, taste and food, before you even begin to think of cooking and eating. It is therefore important that you always ask good and right questions to your parents and teachers about all these. There shall be different answers and
you shall have to keep learning and unlearning them, as you grow in age and information, about realities and their relationships with you and others.
The universe and world outside you only has Information. They are not Reality. Reality happens only when you cook and taste ‘Relationship with the Information’. The world, you journey as you grow and live out, only has Information, which you decipher and accept as Reality, through the tools of questions and answers. The questions happen as you were born and naturally, you seek to know and understand your relationship with information, already there, billions of years before you are born. The questions happen because you experience new information and seek to understand their relationships with you and your life. You cannot have questions if you don’t experience. You may have as many questions as much you experience. The questions you have shall lead and prompt you to seek answers, which in turn shall create new experiences.
Cooking has the same process. You experience new ingredients and inquisitively seek to know how they can be used to create new recipes and new recipes shall create newer experiences of tastes. A recipe is a model or pattern of cause and effect you create with different ingredients and their proportions. Novel and alternative experiments and experiences of tastes shall lead you unlearn and learn many more recipes. This way, essentially, you cook novel and alternative relationships with the reality of foods and tastes. In a way; you cook ingredients of information into different recipes of realities by creating different relationships with your experiences of taste and beauty.
Therefore, we can say; the right and good questions are those, which make you understand this crucial Relationship between You and Reality. The right and good answers are those, which make you experience and
understand that there are only independent and objective information but no independent and objective reality. Reality is the type and choice of relationship you make with information.
Therefore, questions you formulate and choose, the answers you accept as reality and experience them very consciously, to convert them into memory, decide you and your destiny. The questions and answers are all about your relationships with reality and information, even outside and independent of what you accept and believe as reality for you. The same processes are true and right for good cooking and healthy eating.
This idea of Relationship has to be understood clearly. Let us understand it with an example. You love your mother so much. There is a person, who stands there for you as your mother. But, this person you accept and love as your dear mother, is not actually a person but a relationship you have automatically created as you were born. Many other relationships happened automatically as you were born and many others shall happen as you journey your life. These relationships with Information in the external world or milieus you move out form Realities for you, which you experience.
Before you happened, she was only a person and not a mother. Even after you were born, she still remains a person for many others. This person you know and call as your mother, always stands in so many different relationships with many others. Your mother is a wife for someone, a sister or daughter for other, an employee for someone else and so on. Still, she remains a person, even while she also happens to be in a relationship with herself as an individual.
As a person, your mother is just Information but she is never independent of a relationship as she is constantly figured out and referred to as realities
of many relationship identities of mother, sister, daughter, employee, etc.
Very naturally, as she is a mother to you, all your questions to her happen because of your relationship with your mother. You also subconsciously accept only those answers, which fall within the domain of this relationship. However, a person – both you and your mother, are much beyond this relationship. Very naturally, all your questions as well as answers must also not be confined and restricted only to your relationship with her and should ideally go beyond. Both you and your mother have to accept this uncomfortable reality.
As you grow and mature, you and your life journey have to understand and accept many questions and answers beyond this relationship with reality that you have cooked and tasted for years, without bothering to know and accept that realities transcend relationships and you. It takes knowledge and courage of maturity to accept that beyond realities, stand Information and you and your cooked realities are only recipes of those bits of information, you wish to taste. There are infinite recipes but you have few tastes and too little time (life span) to cook. They all beckon you to experience them. This in short exemplifies the science and art of You, Reality and Relationships.
The science and art of you and reality are the same in all aspects of life-living, including food, taste and cooking. Therefore, when we now begin to talk about cooking and realities about food, taste and related ideas of eating and joys of recipes, you just need to keep in mind this critical Information about the relationship between you and reality. Also, we need to be always aware of the idea known as Relationship.
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PREFACE:
Much before you begin to even think of cooking, you need to fully understand some realities, which are primary and fundamental to the very idea of the need to cook. There are two realities, which largely decide why you cook, what you cook and how you cook. These two realities are Taste and Aesthetics (Beauty). All cooking are done to create a desired taste and appearance, out of available ingredients. But then, beyond that, there is a far more basic and core reality of Health and Nutrition.
You already know that you don’t always need to cook to get health and nutrition. In fact, in most of the cases, cooking compromises with the health and cooking even kills the nutrients available in raw ingredients. Taste and beauty of cooked food may not always be guarantee of good health and nutrition. But then, food you eat must always have good potentials of health and nutrition and cooking should ideally enhance and augment the potentials of raw ingredients.
Therefore, before we begin to talk about cooking, taste, beauty of the appearance of foods and recipes; you need to understand them all in details.
It is essential, so that you learn-unlearn and optimize the potentials of good and right cooking and eating practices.
What you need to learn very specifically is that primary and core purpose and utility of eating food is to provide good and right ingredients to the mitochondria of trillions of cells in your body, to produce energy, which your body and brain needs to survive and work. Ask your parents and teachers about cells and homeostatic role of mitochondria in it. It is vital learning for your lifelong wellness.
You are made of 30 trillion cells and the mitochondria in every cell; which can number up to 2500 in a cell; are the master chef that cooks energy for life of cells and does other important things to make you live well. Then there are over 35 trillion bacteria in your gut, which help you in metabolism and immunity. The mitochondria also have bacterial ancestry. You have to take good care of your mitochondria and bacteria. As you grow, you may like to have a very exciting career in microbiology, molecular or evolutionary biology and help humanity by researching life.
What you have to unlearn as early as possible is – what you seek to eat is what your body-brain needs to survive and work well. It is a golden rule of life-living – what you want is what you seek but what you seek is not
always what you need. This unlearning of the very popular idea about food you love to eat is very important.
Usually, most people eat the type of food they love and relish the taste, aroma and appearance of. However, we all must remember that what we eat should always help us enhance our health and nutrition. If taste and beauty of food we eat are additionally available with health and nutrition then it is ideal. This doesn’t happen as most people eat only for taste and beauty and ignore health and nutrition. You need to understand why it happens.
The crucial question and critical answer must be understood. Why it is that what we seek is not always what we actually need. This difference and conflict between our desires and needs must be clearly understood. To understand this, we have to understand the terms intuitive and non-intuitive.
We have already talked about them and their importance earlier. This knowledge is essential for understanding your relationship with reality.
This awareness is singularly vital for your lifelong wellness not only for health but overall success in all walks of life-living.
Broadly, intuitive is what you feel and believe as true and right, without any external evidence, just because it makes you feel good and happy. Non-intuitiveness is often contrary to intuitive feeling, based on objective facts as sufficient scientific evidence; even as it does not feel the way you like and want. Often, what you feel, what you want and therefore seek, is intuitive feeling, the evidence of which comes from your own body and brain. Therefore, you don’t even bother to entertain any other evidence, different to what your body-mind tells you. Contrary to this, what you actually need may be available to non-intuitive perceptions, the evidence of which is available but you have not yet known and therefore you do not entertain.
This idea about intuitiveness and non-intuitiveness, its inbuilt conflict and value of it was handed over to me by my father, when I was only ten years of age. I grew up to experience the true value and different aspects of the idea and I am still experimenting with it. When you grow up, you shall clearly see as why intuitive desires and wants, which mass majority of people seeks in their lives, are root cause of loads of stupidities, hypocrisies and unintended (subconscious) wrongs most people do. My father saved me from most of them by introducing me to non-intuitiveness!
Taste, aroma and beauty of food are intuitive experiences and true and right only to you, as your own body-mind gives you the proof of approval.
Different people shall have different desires of taste, aroma and appearance, as per the proofs given by their body-brain. Health and nutrition of food is non-intuitive reality, as it is singular and common to all humans. The evidences of true and right health need of food are common and available to all but you have to learn them. They don’t come automatic to you like taste and beauty of food you desire.
Health and nutrition needs are clearly defined by proven scientific evidences that it is required for energy to your 30 trillion cells and support to 35 trillion bacteria in your gut. That is why, what you seek is not what you always need. Reality is not only intuitive but a mix of intuitive experiences and the conflicting non-intuitive facts. The conflict between your desires and actual needs shall remain because of ignorance of facts.
Knowledge ends all conflicts as it makes all your needs to stand as what you begin to seek.
That is why you should always make a balance between your intuitive and non-intuitive feelings, perceptions and experiences about truth and worth-utility of not only the food you eat but everything else you choose for your desires and wants. That shall help you seek those, you actually need.
You need to understand that taste and beauty, to which we assign so much importance in cooking processes and always seek, are only experiences and they are what you want only because your perception, belief and cognition were made to evolve since your early childhood to accept their utility and worth. You want to experience only those, which your perception assigns utility and worth. But your perceptions and beliefs about good and right food and eating experiences were decided very early since your birth, not by you but by your parents and the cultures, in which you were born.
This means, your desires were decided for you, much before you could actually be in a position to decide what you desire. This means, as you grow up, you need to unlearn many old and existing experiences and learn new ones. Therefore, we first need to unravel the science and art of experiencing. Understanding the idea and importance of experiencing is critical for your life-living wellness as it usually restricts your journeys to novel and alternative realities. Experiencing should ideally be your
conscious tool to expand your encounters with different dimensions of realities.
What is an experience and experiencing process? You need to ask yourself, why you experience what you experience. This is an easy question with very difficult answer to understand. To understand the answer perfectly, you shall need non-intuitive perception, different from the usual intuitive perception, with which everyone is born with. To develop this very essential non-intuitive perception, to unravel many important experiences, you shall require years of acquisition of diverse scientific information about your body-brain and different realities, which the brain creates. However, I try to make you understand this all now with a very simple and easy example.
You already know that your body needs four ingredients to survive and work and all the foods you eat in whatever tastes and appearances of different recipes, they have these four ingredients in different combinations.
These four ingredients are – Carbohydrate, Protein, Fat and Minerals.
First three are called macronutrients as they are required in bulk and the fourth is micronutrient as it is required in small quantities. The macronutrients are essentially macromolecules, made out of different combinations of four basic chemicals called Carbon, Oxygen, Hydrogen and Nitrogen. Your body needs the four macromolecules of Carbohydrate, Protein, Lipid and Nucleic Acids to survive and work. Ask your parents and teachers about molecules and polymers.
Now, you need to know that what we call experiences, are essentially information, arranged in a certain relationship to fulfill specific body-brain purposes. Molecules of carbohydrate, protein and lipid (fat) are all information relationship and they are coded in specific combination of
chemical ingredients of Carbon-Oxygen-Hydrogen-Nitrogen, to fulfill specific purposes for the cells. Likewise, taste and beauty are experiences, expressing certain information to our brains for purposes crucial for your body. Similarly, molecules are like experiences, expressing required information for the cells in our bodies.
Experience therefore is expressions and communication of information, formed in different combinations of relationships to express realities, which help us survive and work. Experiences are tools to process realities for your brain to decide on follow up action-behavior. Molecules are recipes of realities, made out of raw ingredients of chemicals, creating experiences for communication of information within the cells. The mitochondria within every cell, uses these different experiences of molecules to produce energy and also perform many other roles to survive a cell. As you grow up, you shall understand very well as how not only our body but the entire universe is complex web or plexus of information and their processing. It is important that you familiarize yourself with the idea of information and importance of experiencing as a medium for processing reality.
Now, what you need to understand is the specific purpose of experience in our lives. Experience can be very much understood as the sentinel or security guard that stands at the gate of your apartment or house to screen who should be allowed in and who not. In another way, experience can be understood as barcodes that you see on most products. The barcode has all information coded in them. A scanner reads them and if they match the details the scanner is programmed to check, they flash the information on the computer screen or your phone screen.
Taste and beauty are very much like these sentinels or barcodes. They are all information. These information coded in an experience is scanned and
read by your brain. If the information of the experience matches with the set of information already programmed in your brain, it allows the food carrying this specific experience to go inside your stomach. The same ways, molecules are like barcode and the cells scan them to allow entry inside to be used by mitochondria.
What you have to very clearly understand is the fact that experiences are only the screening of utility and worth. The actual worth is in the ingredients that the screening allows to enter. Taste and beauty screen the worth and utility of the food you eat but the true worth is in the ingredients your food has. Molecules are true information but their actual worth and utility is in the chemicals of Carbon, Oxygen, Hydrogen and Nitrogen they reach out to cells. Taste and beauty are experiences that carry information to your brain to allow the food to go inside your stomach. If the taste is bad or the food looks messy and clumsy, your mouth and gut shall reject them as your brain shall signal them that they are not fit for consumption.
Here, I very humbly wish to tell you that it is very important to understand the similarity and parallel between cooking and living. I accept it is neither easy nor interesting to learn about them. I very sincerely request you that you should spare your attention and interest to know this very core and critical reality about life. You may kindly take help of your parents and teachers to understand it, if you find it difficult. I try to make it as easy and interesting as possible.
You already know the chemical composition of carbohydrates. The generic chemical formula for carbohydrates is Cn(H2O)n. The protein also has carbon, hydrogen and oxygen but may have additional Nitrogen, Sulphur and Phosphorus. The chemicals common in carbohydrate, protein and fat are carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. They are primary ingredients or
elements, which in different relationships of combinations create realities, your body cells use for survival functions.
Similarly, there are five core emotions, which you have as basic and primary ingredients of all the realities you experience. These five elements are – Fear, Happiness, Anger, Surprise and Disgust. These five ingredients in different relationship of combinations form all your experiences. These experiences then go on to form your memory, which is very much like the data base of your brain to scan the utility-worth of all experiences you have in your life journey. In a way, your memory helps you journey your life safely but also restricts your journeys in novel and alternative paths. As we have talked earlier, you need to constantly learn and unlearn to make your memory your best guide to reality.
Scientists say, there can be more than 35 such combinations, known as sub-emotions, which you may feel and your brain processes for suitable actions and behaviors. These elements have been used to train your experiences of tastes and sense of beauty and all other worth-utility in life by your parents and society since your birth. Your memory is a rather unkempt warehouse of experiences you have since your childhood, most of it are those you acquired subconsciously, without your choices.
You can easily remember how since your very early childhood, your parents and others told you to do things and not do things by making you either fear them or making you feel happy about them. They stopped you from doing things by making you disgust it and prompted you to do things by making you happily surprised about them. Your parents and teachers show angry faces to stop you from doing certain things and behaving in a certain way. You show them back too! Your memory is full of experiences.
These five primary ingredients of emotions are very similar to the chemicals of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen, as both are primary means and tools to create a relationship with available information in your world of living to make you experience a reality. Mostly; reality stands in some relationship with experiences of the five emotions. This is causality and reality is all about understanding the causalities.
My apologies if I have complicated things for you. What I very humbly wish to share with you is two core ideas – first is Information and second is what is known as Substrate. It is very important that you familiarize yourself with the two ideas as almost all life-living questions and problems have answers and solutions in these two ideas.
What we have been talking about is the world you live, is full of information and reality happens to you as you create recipes of relationship with these information. These information reach you only when the sentinel or barcode of experiences allow them inside your brain. The processing of reality for you is very much like cooking a recipe.
However, the information are processed for use by your body at the level of the cells and mitochondria of your body. The cellular layer is the Substrate, where actual processing of information happens. The experiencing of information is at external layers of sensory organs of your body, which is guided by five emotions. The processing of information happens deep at the substrate of cellular milieus. The experiencing is Intuitive and very much realizable by your sensory organs. Therefore, intuitiveness is screening or security check for you and it saves you but also in turn restricts your spectrum of novel and alternative information as you journey life.
However, information processing happens at cellular levels and you simply cannot realize or experience them. The substrate processing is Non-
intuitive, which you can’t experience. There must be great symmetry and symphony between realities at experience and substrate levels for life-living wellness. All realities you accept are relationships of information but this information is unraveled to you both intuitively as well as non-intuitively.
Therefore, you must always be aware of and be responsible for information handling both at experiencing levels as well as substrate levels. All realities must be accepted as holism or combination of Intuitive as well as Non-intuitive information processing. This is the singular mantra for life-living wellness, whether it is cooking or living.
If I live my life only intuitively, guided solely by my very localized and restrictive experiencing and experience-led memory, I am being stupid and hypocritical. If I live my life only non-intuitively, guided solely by my knowledge-backed memory, I am stupid and hypocritical again as I close and deny myself the joys of the artistry and inventiveness of experiencing.
Memories lead your actions-behaviors but it should always be an idea warehouse of both conscious experiencing and objective knowledge.
Now comes the artistry of life and living as you know the science of life and living. As your body cells are presented with different recipes (molecules) of core chemicals of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen and they break them down to use them for creation of energy; your world of living also similarly presents you with different recipes (experiences) of core emotions of fear, happiness, anger, surprise and disgust to use them as energy behind all your behaviors and actions. If molecules are recipes of realities that your cells encounter, experiences you have of realities are like these molecules. Now it is up to you how you cook the recipes of realities as you know the ingredients and how they in combination (causality) create the taste of realities you experience.
As we have talked earlier, as you grow and mature, you have to unlearn many realities and learn novel and alternative realities you shall consciously cook yourself. As you mature and evolve in time, you do this unlearning-learning by the twin processes we have talked earlier – you consciously revisit and rebuild your existing relationship with realities as well as create new and alternative relationships with realities. This you do by consciously choosing what ingredient of the five emotions of fear, happiness, anger, surprise and disgust you shall use to cook your realities.
As we have talked earlier, cooking is about choosing your right ingredients and putting them in right combinations to create different shades of experiences of taste and beauty. The right and good is set of information and you have to acquire them through combination of intuitive and non-intuitive perceptions and thinking.
Let us understand it by an example. You as a child are not allowed to climb a tall tree as it is too high and you may injure yourself as you fall. You begin to fear height. The recipe is cooked for you as you assign the emotion of fear to an innocuous information of ‘height’ you shall encounter everywhere in your living world. The information of height in itself is neither good nor bad. You experience height, as good or bad, depending upon the basic ingredient of emotion you choose to create a relationship with the information of height. If instead of the emotion of fear, you choose to assign the emotion of surprise or happiness to the information of height, your experience of height changes.
And how you consciously change the choice of your emotions to recreate or rebuild your relationship with a reality and cook new experiences? You do it by having full knowledge of the information itself. If you wish to climb a tree or mountain and enjoy, not fear, you have to beforehand be aware of all possible challenges and threats that may be involved in climbing a tree or a
mountain. If you have knowledge and you ready yourself with all equipments and safety measures to climb a tree or mountain, you shall not fear but enjoy. You may fear driving a car but when you grow up and get used to all possible aspects of the art and science of driving, you begin to enjoy. You also cook well when well informed and have good equipments and right safety measures.
Fear and disgust shall be replaced by surprise and happiness as you have right information and readiness. You acquire knowledge and build readiness in all aspects of life-living to cook novel and alternative experiences of realities. True, right and holistic knowledge replaces fear and disgust into happiness and pleasant surprise. You understand the raw ingredients of emotions, you understand the dynamics and dimensions of information and consciously build the right relationship with the information to cook new recipes of experiences of novel and alternative realities.
This is the art and science of cooking as well as life-living. You have been innately provided with the intuitive experiencing through the media of five emotions. However, life journey means you always upgrade and empower your experiencing to make you establish novel and alternative relationships with reality. Therefore, your emotions have to be juxtaposed with objective knowledge and all emotions always have be contextualized and referenced by objective scientific knowledge. In combination, they stand you in good stead to unravel realities in their totality and holism, for your life-living wellness optimization.
What you need to understand is that both intuitive and non-intuitive perceptions are modes to receive and process information. The intuitive experiencing was designed as primary information processing mechanism.
All animals have only this intuitive experiencing facility of information reception and processing. Only humans have the luxury and blessings of having this novel and alternative non-intuitive knowledge acquisition as additional mode of information reception and processing. For all animals, their memory as warehouse of information is formed solely by intuitive experiencing. Only humans have the superiority of having a memory, ideally formed less by experiencing and more by knowledge acquisition.
It is a tragedy that mass majority of children in contemporary world are being made to acquire only those non-intuitive knowledge, which are necessary for livelihood and career requirements. A huge number of kids are so unfortunate that they only have to depend on their intuitive experiencing as they have no or very little access to modern scientific education. If we are humans, not animals, then we all have to have modern scientific knowledge about all shades of life-living realities; not only livelihood ones.
To understand cooking as well as life-living; what is hugely important for you is to understand two facts about the role of the experiences of taste and beauty in the selection of food you seek to eat or life you wish to lead. First, the experiences of taste and beauty are like barcodes and your brain reads them right for you. However, if your brain itself has been fed wrong information, your brain shall fail to screen your food and behavior for righteousness. Memories with fake-fudged-partial-fraudulent-propagandist information about realities are scammed sentinels. That is why; unlearning partial, fake, fudged and wrong information is the primary journey of growing and maturing. This happens with conscious and conscientious non-intuitive knowledge acquisition.
Molecules your cell needs; have their information coded right and cells have their screening information true and right. If they go wrong, you are diseased and unhealthy. But your brain has only those screening information, which you have been fed since your early childhood.
Unfortunately, most children are made to learn only partial, fake, fudged and wrong information. That is why, often, many foods may have the feeling of good experiences of taste and looks, even when they may not have right ingredients your body needs. Still, the brain shall allow them in, as your brain itself has fake or fudged information. The same happens with most of actions and behaviors you do in life. That is why right, true and complete information is most important treasure of life and living. True, right, holistic information comes to you as you balance between intuitiveness and non-intuitiveness.
Secondly, many food items you buy from markets; may have been designed in factories to trick your security guard of the experience of taste and beauty. Many junk foods have added flavoring and styling to look and taste great but they either have very little nutritional and health worth and utility or are even risky for your health. The manufacturers trick your emotions to scam your intuitive choices. Similarly, many life-living experiences, you are told by people and society to be good and right may be only a
‘manufactured’ and ‘tricked’ one and may not be good and right for you.
Therefore, you need to know it clearly that your experiences can be scammed as most experiences like taste and beauty are primarily intuitive.
Your brain needs to have the right and true information and sound experiences about health and nutritional needs of your body so that it could use the experiences of taste and beauty to perfectly screen the food you need. Your non-intuitive brain alone can distinguish between what you seek and what actually you need.
You can understand it better as you grow up and learn in details about the very important macromolecule of nucleic acid and its critical role in coding of information in DNA and genome. As you grow and begin to understand how information is the core non-intuitive reality behind all shades of intuitive realities that your brain creates for you; you can be in best position to screen what is good and right for you. As it happens, you shall only seek what you actually need. Information is God and therefore like divinity, Information must always be pure, true and objectively verifiable.
Intelligence is to ensure this with all information you have in your life.
What I wished to tell you through the somehow boring details is this simple fact that what we experience; especially the experience of taste and beauty of food we eat is essentially different sets of information, with specific purposes for our brains. However, these information shall be perceived by different brains differently as no two brains are similar and identical.
Therefore, common Reality of taste and beauty of food we eat shall have different Experiences for different people. These different experiences happen as different brains create different intuitive perceptions and cognitions.
Despite this all; the non-intuitive cognition shall be singular and common to all and it shall install single core experience of food we eat for all people.
This singular experience is Health of body. Recalling the example we talked about earlier, the molecules of carbohydrates, protein and fat may have different expressions of intuitive experiences in different foods we cook and eat but they all have single common non-intuitive experience for the mitochondria, which require the chemical ingredients of all molecules only for creating energy for cells to use in your muscles, hearts, brains, etc.
This is where the idea of Substrate, which we talked earlier, shall help you.
Remember, most problems and troubles you may face in your life and living may look different to different people as their experiences about them may vary person to person. However, their true and objective processing happens at substrate levels, where it is singularly common.
The problems may look as surfacing at experience levels but their solutions shall always be at substrate levels. Remember and stand in deep gratitude to many scientists and experts, who devoted their lives to unravel the objective knowledge about the substrates in our body-mind as well as external milieus, which in 21st century forms the intellectual wealth of humanity and has made humanity stand tall in their battle against diseases and other troubles. We can do the least by leading our lives led by the light of knowledge of the substrate they have created. This intelligence to understand the duality of experiencing and substrate reality is what you must develop.
Next, we now begin to talk about food, recipes and actual need to cook, much beyond the experiences of taste and appearances, to create true and right worth and utility of eating our way to best combinations of taste, aroma, beauty and nutrition. Do kindly seek help from your parents and grandparents, if you have trouble understanding what we have talked about so far.
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Fundamentals Of Food And Cooking A kid was asked, ‘what would you like to do, if you were made to go back 2000 years back in time?’ The kid replied, ‘I would love to take all my science books and give them to people there so that they could be stopped from stupidities and hypocrisies, they heaped on us, making people even in 21st century live them out’.
This kid was smart and intelligent and all kids in 2024 have to be. You are fortunate to grow and evolve in an age and world, where there is true and real scientific knowledge about so many things, which never existed before.
Modern and contemporary kids like you must not live out the legacy of old stupidities and hypocrisies, which are still prevalent and causing massive troubles for people.
You don’t live the time and age your calendar shows but actually you live in a timeline that your knowledge about reality all around you, ingrains in your mind. You are living in 2024 because your brain lives out the modern contemporary knowledge of humanity about all realities. Most people even in 2024 are still living the same old and obsolete knowledge of 2000 years back and therefore, even while they are alive, they are like ghosts and zombies. Or at best, they are like animals, living solely on intuitive experiencing as their guide to subconscious behavior-actions.
Therefore, it is important that as you live in 2024, you must cook and eat only those foods, which modern scientific knowledge about healthy and right food tells you to eat. You don’t eat your bread or biscuits that have expired or have passed the best before or use by date. Similarly, you shouldn’t ideally cook and eat many foods, which people enjoyed centuries back, but modern scientific knowledge about health makes them expired and obsolete.
As we talked about it earlier; many centuries and decades back, most of the things people considered good and right, were based on intuitive perceptions, as centuries and decades back, they didn’t have the scientific knowledge to verify and hold as evidence. This knowledge is now available for modern kids like you to have these important non-intuitive perceptions, based on verifiable facts and scientific evidences. Very naturally, contemporary modern foods you eat should also be verified, tested and tasted on the basis of non-intuitive knowledge, made available by contemporary science.
As we have talked earlier, this non-intuitive reality tells us very clearly that we should eat only those foods, which are good and right not only for our taste and sense of beauty only but for cellular, especially mitochondrial needs to produce energy and maintain homeostasis. You should ideally seek only what you actually need and what you need form the food you cook and eat is what the mitochondria requires to keep you in best of health and vitality.
You are made of 30 trillion cells and your good and healthy life depends on how these cells work well. The mitochondria that produces energy for each cells and performs many other roles for overall cellular functions must remain fit. If not, you are unhealthy and diseased and a diseased life cannot experience the beauty and vivacity of life. This scientific knowledge about importance of mitochondrial fitness and vitality has come only in the last few decades. It has now been proven that most of the diseases, especially diabetes, cancer, etc happen because we eat those food, which are bad for mitochondrial health. This non-intuitive knowledge is a must for survival and overall health and this we can ensure only by having good and right food.
Moreover, one more important thing, which you must know and always keep in mind, is the fact that the contemporary environment, you are living in, is highly harmful for your cellular health. The level of pollution, undesirable chemicals in most foods available in markets, amount of stress in crowded and complex urban living, etc are enemies of cellular health. On the other hand, as medical facilities have improved a lot, most people are surviving long. Very naturally, from early childhood, we have to be very aware and careful about what we eat and how we eat, so that we could keep ourselves healthy and fit, even in today’s unhealthy environment and till very old age.
Therefore, in today’s world, the biggest challenge for cooking is to create such recipes, which are most suitable for our cellular and mitochondrial health and still, they have good and right taste and appearance. The magic of cooking is to create this golden balance between taste and nutrition as well as health and beauty. The magic and marvel of life and living is to create this critical balance of art and science of cooking and eating. This is our first fundamental goal and purpose, as we talk about cooking and eating in this cook book.
The second and equally important fundamental idea about cooking and eating is to be innovative and experimental about food and this can happen only when you are open and liberal about both taste and beauty. Often, kids are known to be very choosy and rigid about what they want to eat. As a smart and intelligent kid, you have to unlearn this habit and attitude fast and final. The beauty and exuberance of life-living is in having as many diverse experiences as possible.
You need to understand and accept it as early as possible in your life that life’s journey is all about how many diverse experiences you have and how
many and richly multidimensional experiences you create in any situation of life-living. This prosperity and wealth of experiences can come to you if you don’t shut the doors on life. You are rich and prosperous only when you are open and liberal to innovate and experiment with what life offers to you in whatever situations. This happens only when you free yourself of the trap and slavery of your intuitiveness and embrace non-intuitiveness.
You also must have the knowledge of science and art of creating and recreating newer and better experiences in life and living. As we have talked earlier, life offers the same ingredients to all but smartness and intelligence is in cooking the same ingredients with non-intuitive innovations and experiments to create recipes of new experiences of novel and alternative realities.
You are rich and wealthy not by how much money you have. Rather, your true wealth is in how many and how rich your experiences are. Your money is also worth its value as it becomes a means to journey you to newer and richer experiences. This is fundamental not only for cooking and food but for everything else in your life and living.
As we have settled with what fundamental aspects we are going to have, while we talk about cooking and eating, we now straightaway start with all questions and all answers about cooking, recipes, eating and enjoying the processes of them all.
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This is the primary and most important question and it is essential that you have true and right answer. As we have talked earlier, the answers must come from both intuitive as well as non-intuitive perceptions and thinking.
The answer shall lead us to another critical question and its answer.
It has to be remembered that there are millions of species of living organisms, which do not and cannot cook. Only we humans have the ability and intelligence to cook our food. It naturally suggests that as cooking is an intelligent idea, we must not be stupids with cooking processes we practice and the cooked food we eat. Therefore, it is crucial that you understand why we need to cook at the first place, before you go on to decide what to cook and how to cook.
You already know that more important than cooking is the reality of digestion or broadly what is scientifically known as metabolism. The intelligence of cooking is essentially in facilitating the processes of digestion and metabolism. This scientific term called Metabolism is complex mechanism and process of your body, which you must know and understand well. You also must know and understand the roles of hormones and enzymes in facilitating metabolism. This is the substrate knowledge we have talked about earlier, which we now know in details; thanks to modern science.
Metabolism begins with the food you eat, about which you intuitively know through the sense of taste and looks. But, after your mouth, the food has to journey a long way in your body, till it reaches to the mitochondria of cells for final use as energy. This journey you don’t feel and sense out and can be known only non-intuitively through the scientific knowledge of the substrate processing, you acquire through conscious learning.
The taste, aroma, beauty and digestion are common purposes of cooking, which we know and understand intuitively. This means, you feel them and don’t need any evidence to tell you whether a cooked food tastes good, smells good, looks good and got digested. However, large part of metabolism is the non-intuitive aspect of cooking, which you cannot feel and require good evidence to know, whether metabolism is happening well or not.
Metabolism is the biochemical processes within your body, which helps convert the food you eat into energy, to be used by your body cells.
Metabolism includes two different process called Catabolism and Anabolism. Catabolism is the process which breaks down your food into nutrients, which your body cells use for energy. Anabolism is the process which uses the energy to build and repair your body. The later process is very critical as it creates proteins, which are most crucial for your body functioning. Hormones and enzymes are all proteins. It also creates the very important nucleic acid in your body cells.
Cooking is the human intelligence to facilitate and strengthen the Metabolism processes. The intelligence of cooking is to ensure that you do not in any possible way harm or jeopardize the very crucial catabolism and anabolism processes of your body through the food you eat.
You can understand very clearly now as why non-intuitive perception and thinking is important and why only intuitive perception and thinking can be dangerous and even fatal. If we accept cooking only as a means to create taste, beauty and smell, then we are seeing and accepting only very partial answer of why we need to cook. We must also keep in mind the very crucial non-intuitive aspect of metabolism and the role of cooking in facilitating our metabolism.
You need to understand your metabolism to know why we need to cook.
You already know, how plants ‘cook’ their ‘food’, which we call photosynthesis. It is very simple. Plants use the energy of sunlight to break the carbon dioxide (CO2) they take from environment. The carbon is then used by plants as food and Oxygen is released in atmosphere. The wood you use is essentially carbon.
This metabolism of plants is so simple but we humans are not blessed to have such a simple one. How brilliant it would have been if we had this simple mechanism of plants as we would then not need the troubles of cooking our food. We would then save so much of our time and energy we invest in procuring and cooking our food.
Now consider how fortunate we are, if you compare yourself with the tough life and living of an elephant. An elephant has to spend around 16 hours of a day searching and eating his food to survive. It is because it has to depend only on plants for its food, which require long hours of digestion. As most plants it eats has low energy and nutrition value, an elephant has to eat a lot and therefore spend his lifetime searching and eating. You are very fortunate that you can cook your food to make it easily digestible and you have food variety rich in nutrients to quickly fulfill your calorie (energy) needs. Still, many people don’t wish to devote even few minutes for cooking and instead opt to buy readymade and processed food from markets. Many of such foods may not be right for health, as manufacturers may trick your intuitiveness to sell them.
You also know that a cow has to regurgitate or ruminate for hours – means, it has to bring back the food from its stomach to mouth and chew it for hours to break it down for better absorption of nutrients. You are lucky you are not a cow or elephant. You can cook to facilitate digestion and
metabolism! Very naturally, you should ideally use your intelligence to augment and bolster this luck and affluence you are blessed with.
Therefore, your cooking must be intelligent and eating should avoid stupidities, which squanders this fortunate wealth you have.
Therefore, cooking is a human intelligence and you have to keep in mind that this intelligence must be used skillfully and very consciously to not only create taste, smell and appearance in the food you cook out of the available raw ingredients but also ensure that cooking processes actually facilitate digestion and strengthen the ultimate metabolism processes.
Cooking therefore must simplify the absorption of nutrients from food we cook and eat and not complicate and vitiate it.
This discussion brings us to other aspects, which are associated with metabolism. The first aspect is that metabolism is facilitated when we break down the food to such smaller parts, which could then be easy for the bacteria in our gut to further break down. Therefore, you must chew your food well before you swallow and dump it down your food pipe all the way to your stomach. This in turn means, you should always eat your food in calm and peaceful ways to focus on chewing it enough to break it down and also enjoy its taste as long as possible. After all, the taste is only till the food is in your mouth!
The second aspect of metabolism is this non-intuitive learning that as we humans can cook and help its digestion and absorption of its nutrients better, we require less food for our energy needs. Always remember and be full of gratitude that the amount of calories you can have in your small plate and eat in minutes; an elephant has to spend hours and travel many kilometers to have them.
Therefore, if cooking is a human intelligence for facilitating metabolism, then eating must also be intelligent enough to restrict eating to that much only, which is required for your energy and nutritional needs. You already know, most lifestyle diseases happen because of bad food habits and overeating. You already know, obesity is a pandemic now. As you grow up and acquire more knowledge about your body and health, you shall come across a very crucial scientific term of very recent discovery called hyperinsulinemia. As discussed earlier; it is part of the substrate knowledge available in 21st century.
Hyperinsulinemia refers to a situation of the body when the pancreas begins to produce much more insulin than normal. This happens as people eat a lot more than necessary for use by the cells in their body. Insulin helps the cell to absorb glucose from the blood, which metabolism processes produce out of all the foods we eat.
Hyperinsulinemia means more insulin, which in turn means overeating and over calories to our bodies. Hyperinsulinemia is now considered the root cause of almost every lifestyle disease humans have, including diabetes and cancer. These detailed aspects of cooking, eating and metabolism you need to keep in mind as you begin to think of cooking.
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Cooking And Compassion
The question, why do you cook, is important but its true, right and complete answer can come only when you ask and answer a far more basic and original question as why do you do anything, let alone cooking?
It is always a primary learning and unlearning to seek the true and right causes of all actions and behaviors you do or intend to do. You know it very well that all actions and behaviors you do, shall have their effects on you and others in your life. This is what we call causality, which we discussed earlier. Therefore, you must always be sure of the true and right cause or set of causes, well before you set out for any action or behavior.
This automatically means that you also therefore must always be aware and stand responsible for the effects your actions and behaviors shall have in your life and that of others.
As we talked earlier; it is important that you are in full knowledge and awareness of the three entities of – You, Reality and Causality, as well as their relationship with each other. This is the true and right definition of compassion, which is so very indispensable element in whatever you do and however you behave in your life. Even animals are compassionate and if you think and believe that humans are far more superior to animals, then you must be many times more compassionate than animals.
In true and right sense, compassion is this conscious awareness and deep sense of responsibility about the cause and effect of all your actions and behaviors. What you do and what you don’t, always have their effects and impacts on you and others in your life and around you. You are compassionate if you are aware of the effects of your actions and behaviors and you are also honest and brave enough to own them and be responsible for them. It is tough to be compassionate. It is in fact tough to be a human; easy to be an animal. Animalism is what you are born with and practice subconsciously. Humanism is what you grow to acquire and evolve and live out very consciously and conscientiously.
This conscious acknowledgement of equal importance of others and acceptance of responsibility towards others is compassion. It is intuitive, visceral and animalistic to believe that all causes and all effects of all your actions and behaviors should be aimed only at your personal and individual self. It is non-intuitive to believe and accept others as equal to your own self. This compassion is hallmark of humanity and as cooking is something exclusive to humans; cooking processes must always have deep sense and insinuation of compassion.
In so many ways, cooking is rooted in and is an expression of compassion.
The recipes you think of; the foods you eat; are actually the different expressions of compassion. So, the core and critical question is – How do you cook compassion?
You cook compassion when you understand the reality in totality. As we have talked earlier, there are intuitive causalities your mind subconsciously and automatically accepts as essential for cooking. These intuitive causes are taste, aroma and beauty of the food you cook. However, as we have been talking all along; you don’t cook only for taste, smell and beauty.
There are these ‘other’ non-intuitive causes like nutrition, health, sharing, togetherness, etc. Togetherness and simultaneity of intuitive as well as non-intuitive thinking is totality and holism you should aim in all aspects of life-living, including cooking.
Interestingly, there are billions of bacteria in your gut, which help your digestion and health by breaking the food you eat into smaller bits so that the nutrition in your food could be absorbed well. They need to survive and thrive and you also have to be compassionate towards them by chewing your food well, so that these helpful bacteria could survive and benefit you.
You also need to eat lots of fibers, especially soluble fibers to feed them well.
Therefore, reality is both intuitive as well as non-intuitive and when you accept the totality of both, while deciding the cause and effect of anything you do or cook, you cook compassion. You cook compassion when you assign equal importance to others, as you do it to yourself.
This reality about totality and its connection with compassion is so very evident all around you but we seldom care about it. Most kids love the food their mother or grandmother cooks for them. You need to be aware and recognize that they cook not for them but for your happiness and satisfaction. They take extra care to cook something of your linking and for them, you are the ‘other’, they are compassionate about. However, when you eat what your mother or grandmother cook for you, you do enjoy and accept the taste, smell and beauty of the food but probably do not recognize the non-intuitive element of compassion so meticulously mixed in them by your mother or grandmother.
This clearly suggests, when you eat, you must have gratitude filled in your heart for the compassion you receive through the food. Cooking is expression of compassion and only gratitude can pay the price for the labor and pain of cooking. You also need to feel gratitude for the trillions of good bacteria in your gut and food, which help your health. When you cook, you should feel the compassion so that it gets expressed aesthetically in recipes you cook.
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Science of cooking is all about understanding well the ingredients and different processes of cooking and how these processes shall lead to different combinations of taste, color, aroma and appearance. The art of cooking is about skillfully using the science of cooking in imaginative and innovative ways to create and recreate novel and alternative taste, color, aroma and appearance of the set of ingredients you are using for cooking.
My mother, from whom I learnt the basic and essentials of cooking, was not satisfied with my cooking and once she asked me, ‘Do you imagine before cooking, how your recipe would turn out to be, when finally cooked and how many times they exactly emerge the way you imagined?’ To be very honest, only around 20-25 percent of my cooking happened the way I had imagined. This poor success potential I am constantly trying to improve.
The idea is to underline the importance of good knowledge of how your ingredients work out when cooked and how your imagination is actually supported by your practical skills of cooking. Broadly, it points out to the fact that not only in cooking, but almost in all aspects of life-living and all actions you do, you need to have sound mastery of the art and science of reality. Success is the outcome of the right mix of imaginations and thoughts about the enterprise you do in present to create some utility and worth in future. This relationship, symmetry and harmony between your present and future is recipe of your success. Your artistry with science makes it happen.
As we talked earlier, it is hugely important for all round success and satisfaction in life and living that you fully understand and own responsibility of Cause and Effects of all your actions, including your
cooking. Science is all about having knowledge of full spectrum of causes of your proposed actions in present as well as their effects in future. And, art is about being sincere and un-hypocritical enough to own the responsibility of all good and not so good effects. Art is about keep innovating, experimenting and practicing, till you get the desired effects out of your pre-imagined actions and behaviors.
Cooking in a way is a simulation or modeling of life-living, as it readies you for larger and deeper successes in life. Cooking skills and artistry teaches you about the important ideas of patience, endurance, sense of proportion and balance, honesty, aesthetics and most importantly the basis of compassion. Importantly; your cooked food should reach out these elements to those, with whom you share your food.
Cooking is a primary learning mechanism to inculcate in you the importance of the golden balance between intuitive and non-intuitive thinking. This balance leads you to holism in life, which means, you are aware and receptive not only to partial and one-sided perceptions and thinking but also to the larger and fuller picture of reality, which is always a totality of part perceptions and thinking. This holism is the basis of compassion and only compassion qualifies you to be called a human.
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Broad Themes of Cooking
There are five core and primary emotions in life-living, which dominate or to say, lead majority of actions and behaviors of a person. They are –
Happiness, Fear, Anger, Surprise and Disgust. We have talked about them earlier. These emotions need to be understood well for success and
satisfaction, both in cooking as well as all other aspects of life and living.
These emotions are the ingredients of all intuitive actions and behaviors most humans do. These emotions are common in humans and most complex animals, especially mammals.
It is to be understood that the five emotions together create all our intuitive sense of right and wrong, good and bad. The brain is pre-wired, or to say commonly programmed in all humans and almost all bigger animals for almost common intuitive perceptions about realities in our world of living.
That is why all our intuitive actions and behaviors feel good and right to us as they are backed by emotions and therefore, we do not feel any need to seek any evidence for their validity and veracity. We seldom act and behave contrary to them.
What you need to know and understand is that animals can have only intuitive perceptions and thinking. Only humans have the superior brain to go beyond intuitive realities and think non-intuitively, based on facts and evidences outside emotional justification of our instinctive minds. You should be interested in knowing why and how your brain evolved over millions of years to have such additional and more complex parts, which make you different and superior to animals. Ask your parents and teachers about it and learn them. Learn about brain structures and functions; especially the evolutionary relevance of cortex and prefrontal cortex parts of your brain and their role in conflict handling.
What we have talked above is that not only in cooking but in all aspects of life and living, we have to accept holism and therefore we need to include and have a balance of both intuitive and non-intuitive perceptions and thinking in cooking as well as in life-living. It is hugely important that when we cook or plan other actions and behaviors in life, all five core
emotions must be taken care of but only proportionately indulged in. Life as well as cooking must have basic intuitive satisfactions for successes; even when we are also aware of and take care of non-intuitive joys.
Often, people would tell you, ‘when in conflict, always listen to what your heart tells you and don’t always do what your brain tells you’. This is one of the many traps your intuitive perceptions lay out for you and you should never fall for them. Never be slaves to your intuitive and instinctive brain.
You need to fully understand this trap.
This division of heart and brain thinking is incorrect. Only your brain can think and it thinks both intuitively and non-intuitively. As we talked earlier; it is the way your brain evolved over millions of years to qualify you to be human. It is this intuitive thinking and perceptions, backed by five emotions your body is designed to feel instinctively, which is popularly referred as heart’s choice of right and wrong. Definitely; your ‘heart’ is not and cannot be always right. Why?
What you have to understand is when in conflict, your intuitive thinking would always be stronger and more persuasive as it is backed by powerful forces of emotional satisfaction. Your body instinctively provides evidences of satisfaction and joy to your brain to go for it. But, evidences of joy and satisfaction alone cannot be good enough to judge the goodness and righteousness of all actions and behaviors. Why? Let us understand it.
There is a plate full of chocolates and sweets and your ‘heart’ shall tell you to eat all of them. As you eat them, you shall feel the emotions of happiness and it shall truly justify your actions. Your ‘heart’ shall even ‘tell you’ to steal the plate or eat up all, without sharing with others as the actions shall make you ‘happy’. This is the animal way of judging good and right. Why?
This action is bad for your teeth and health and qualifies as selfishness. You shall not feel like stopping as the alternative evidences of health and compassion are non-intuitive thinking, which only your conscious and disciplined ‘brain’ tells you. Your brain tells you both – to do something and not to do. Emotions lead to one set of actions and behaviors, whereas intelligence tells you to do opposite or alternative set of actions and behaviors. Emotional action-behavior is also intelligence but it is only a primary and intuitive-instinctive one. It is only part intelligence. The holism or completeness of intelligence happens when you balance them with contrary and alternative action-behavior.
Here is the need for a balance and holism. You must eat chocolates and sweets from the plate but must also eat in proportion and share them with others. Therefore, when in conflict in life or in cooking, always do what objective facts and evidences tell you to do or not to do. This happens when you don’t fall in the trap of self-evident intuitive perceptions and balance them with non-intuitive facts and evidences beyond your own self. Intuitive action-behavior needs no knowledge as emotions lead them, whereas alternative non-intuitive action-behavior needs knowledge, which your brain is not preloaded with. You have to acquire the knowledge by your own personal initiative and labor. Being knowledgeable is being human.
This is the golden rule for idea and best cooking practices. You shall cook for intuitive choices, based on emotional satisfactions but shall always balance and restrain it with non-intuitive facts of health, nutrition, sharing, proportion, et al. It is also very important that you understand each of the five emotions of Happiness, Fear, Anger, Surprise and Disgust very well.
These five emotions have shades of meanings and interpretations as they shall be intuitively and non-intuitively interpreted by different people differently. What you feel and accept as emotion of happiness in an action
or behavior; may very well surprise others, instead of making them happy.
Yet, others may even feel disgust or fear for what you accept as happiness.
That is why, in cooking as well as in all other aspects of life-living, you need to be liberal and compassionate towards different possible interpretations of a reality. Reality is not a picture you see but a canvass that has many pictures, others have painted. If you cook only for your personal and intuitive satisfaction, you miss out on compassion. No human action and behavior should ideally be lacking in compassion. All actions and behaviors bereft of compassion are animalistic, not human.
The liberal and compassionate attitude and choices make you open to non-intuitiveness of perceptions and thinking and this in turn qualifies you to be human and not an animal. We have discussed how cooking is exclusively a human intelligence and therefore, it must have human elements. The world you live in; lacks compassion and therefore, it has become unfit for humans. It only intuitively validates animalistic successes.
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Non-Intuitive Ideas for Cooking Successes
If you ask, what is the most beautiful, satisfying and precious thing in life, you may not find a single answer. However, if you think of it; you may like to say that it is the Relationships you have and you create. This relationship is not only about parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, friends, family, etc but with almost everything in your world, including your pet, toys, school, your house, city, country etc and above all, the ideas
and ideals. What this relationship is and why it is so beautiful and satisfying? You need to understand this as this is the most human reality, which you shall encounter, in all shades of your future life and living. That is why we talked about it at the very start of the eBook.
A relationship is a Pattern you have or you create in your mind with or vis-à-vis the Information, which presents itself in the form of a person, object or idea. This pattern is a model or simulation of reality, which your mind accepts, based on emotional flavor and color you assign to this information.
So, someone you love so much and accept as good friend or family. May be, after few years, the same person you begin to dislike and even hate.
What happened? What led to the change of love into hate? The change is in the pattern or model, your mind accepts. This change of pattern happened as the emotional information you had or accepted about the person changed. This change altered the simulation or model of reality in your mind. Interestingly, both you and the other person remain the same reality for yourself and others. Relationship changes as simulation of reality changes. Therefore, reality is what you simulate or model out in your mind, based on the emotional information you assign or accept.
The emotional information you assign to a reality or align with, is the most satisfying and even most annoying thing in your life. A person or object in your life is neither good nor bad reality in themselves. They are good or bad, satisfying or annoying, depend upon what emotional information your brain accepts or creates about them.
The same is true about cooking and food. No food or recipe is good or bad.
They are good or bad only for you, depending upon what emotional information you assign them. May be you liked some food and now you don’t. The food is the same and it still remains the same for others, but
things changed for you. It changed as your emotional relationship with the food changed. However, what remains unchanged is something, which is beyond and independent of your emotional relationship. The nutrition and health associated with the food remains unchanged.
Therefore, in cooking or in anything else in your life, your relationship with all realities should be based not only on emotional relationship but with objective and non-emotional utility and worth, which remains unchanged, even when your emotions change. As we talked earlier, what you seek may not always be what you need and what you need is emotional stability and continuity of relationship with all realities in harmonious ways. This can happen only when you create your relationships with all realities based on balanced acceptance of both subjective emotions as well as objective facts.
The same is true and right for the food you cook and eat.
Therefore, when you cook or otherwise create a recipe; you need to understand about how you wish to create a relationship with them. As we have repeatedly said, cooking is also about how you perceive reality of things in life and living. In that sense, you just need to keep in mind that when you cook, you create a relationship with ingredients available for a recipe and when you create a relationship; you actually create a model or simulation of information, which the ingredients have. The joy of life-living as well as cooking is how objectively you simulate and model out relationships with reality and how you liberally and compassionately assign affectionate-respectable emotional information to all different simulations and models of realities.
Now, I try to list out only non-intuitive ideas for cooking, as for the intuitive ideas of taste, smell, color and appearances; your own emotions are good enough to guide you through. You shall find the popular food
recipes, based on intuitive realities, everywhere and you do not need a stupid like me to tell you about them. I can very humbly only present you with some non-intuitive, non-emotional, innovative and experimental ideas about cooking processes, which you may add up with your intuitive recipes to create something more balanced and holistic. I only mention them in outlines so that you can have your own personal ways to manufacture more interesting outcomes. Here we go –
1. Modern understanding of healthy eating as well as better availability of food items has transformed the very idea of cooking. Cooking does not anyways mean you put all food items to fire and heat. It is ideal that eating involves many foods in raw and natural forms.
Therefore modern eating habits must include varieties of salads, with fruits and vegetables in raw forms. Learn to innovate and experiment with raw ingredients in your food choices.
2. There is a debate about simple and complex carbohydrates and an insistence on eating more complex carbohydrates for better health.
You may like to know about two different polymers of carbohydrate called Amylose and Amylopectin, which have different impact on Glycemic index and insulin reaction. Then, there is another term called resistant starch about which researches are going on. These ideas may be confusing. What you need to understand is when you choose your food with carbohydrates; you need to go for those, which have higher fiber content in them. Fiber is not digested in gut but it slows down the breaking of carbohydrates into glucose and thus checks sugar spike, does not stress your insulin production and also makes you stay full for more hours. Moreover, fiber in food is great for the friendly bacteria in your gut and they use the fibers to convert them into fatty acids, which your cells can use for energy.
Check out the list of fibrous ingredients, especially the soluble fibers.
3. There is this artistry of patience in the cooking processes. You need to cook your food in low flames as you know well that high heat kills or reduces substantially the nutrients, especially minerals in food. Slow cooking also makes you enjoy the cooking process. I personally sing a lot when I cook or prepare for cooking as I take my time to do the cooking rituals. It is ideal to develop a taste and liking for steaming process to cook your food. Cooking makes vegetables more digestible and in some cases also augments nutrients but overcooking and at high heat should be avoided.
4. There has been a long tradition of having carbohydrates and protein sources of food items as main and bulk portion of eating. Rice, wheat, meat and dairy products have therefore been the large chunk of our traditional eating. Naturally, most food recipes are predominantly about wheat, rice, meat and dairy. Modern eating habits must have better balance and therefore include fruits, vegetables, dry fruits and in equal portions. It is healthier and even better in taste if you create your recipes mixing fruits-nuts-vegetables with rice-wheat-meat-dairy items. Alternatively, there are better and healthier options to avoid burning of oil and fat as a medium to cook your food and instead use juices, coconut milk, curd-yoghurt, etc to add taste to the food you cook. It takes time to evolve and grow up in new and alternative tastes but it is important that you experiment with traditional eating habits and food choices.
5. Experimenting and innovating in cooking is very important. Usually, you get bored and lose interest eating the same food over and over
again, even when they are good and of your liking. Therefore, you need to experiment and innovate in the dimensions of food you cook. Innovations and experimentations in all relationships you have are helpful in reinvigorating their taste and aroma. Change the size and shape of vegetables you cut for your fixed recipe. Or, add new ingredients and flavoring in your usual recipes and they may help a good deal in breaking away the monotony and boredom of food you like to eat regularly.
6. What you want dearly for yourself, you should also give to others in the same measure. Reciprocation and mutuality are exclusive human intelligence and you must always reflect this intelligence in all your behavior-actions. You need loads of respect and love and therefore the food you cook and eat also needs the same amount of respect and love. You must show respect for something, which gives you life. In all cultures, there have been traditions of rituals to show respect and love for food. Gratitude is the way to show it. Growing your own food in some possible ways is another good way to show respect and love to food. You cook your food with happy mind and hygiene of body. You eat your food in peaceful, leisurely and slow manner.
You should ideally eat small morsels and not stuff your mouth with large chunks of food you eat. You also shuffle your morsels in mouth to extract better taste of food as your tongue has different sensitivities of taste in different parts. You don’t muddle up different food items in your plate. You need to eat them one by one, enjoying their different tastes. Sometimes, ‘riot of tastes’ in your mouth is exciting but individuality of tastefulness must also be respected. You don’t waste your food; cook them and eat them in right portions and
proportions, etc. These are the ways to exhibit your gratitude for food.
7. There are two dimensions of food we cook and eat. One aspect of cooking and eating is for personal health and satisfaction. Second is cooking and eating as celebration and group enjoyment. In all cultures and traditions, cooking and eating has remained as primary event of collective happiness and celebration of life with people you love and care for. Everyone loves a big hearty party. What you need to keep in mind is that both dimensions require different cooking and eating etiquettes. Ideally, you eat alone and focus on eating, as taste is available for a very short time; till the food remains in mouth.
When food is eaten as celebration, you have to focus on thrill and merriment of the emotional satisfaction of togetherness. Naturally, when you eat food as celebration, you eat less and enjoy togetherness. Often, people overeat in parties and restaurants as you cannot focus on taste in group eating and therefore tend to eat more to compensate for the lost taste. You need to be cautious about it.
Overeating is disrespect to food and food as celebration is only occasional event, not a daily routine. Food is for health and vitality; it is disrespect to food if it is made a vehicle of too much and too often celebration for happiness.
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Understanding The Idea of Recipe I wish to make it clear and easy, with an example, what the very idea of a recipe is. This shall help you create and recreate many recipes. We have talked earlier that a recipe is a relationship model or a simulation you imaginatively create with raw ingredients to cook an experience of taste, beauty and aroma. We understand with an example how this idea of recipe works. I take the example from India cuisine but the same can be replicated in all cuisines across different cultures as the broad ingredients are common. Here we go –
The roti, chapatti, paratha, puri, naan, bhature, bread etc are staple recipes of the food you cook and eat in Indian cuisine. What are they? All these recipes are essentially a relationship of wheat flour with water and fat. So, when you cook, you create and recreate new recipes of wheat flour ( atta) by choosing to enter it with novel and alternative relationship with new ingredients. The carbohydrate is made to have diversity of relationships with protein and fat.
So, you can cook the wheat flour by kneading it with water, milk or yoghurt. You may choose to add ghee, butter, cheese or no fat at all.
Alternatively; you may not knead it but cook the wheat floor by making a flowing batter of wheat flour with water, milk, curd. You can cook it the way you make cheela or dosa. Alternatively, you can use different flours of maize and millets instead of wheat flour or mix them in different proportions. You can mix up the wheat and maize-millet flours with so many different leafy vegetables like spinach, fenugreek-mint-coriander-soya leaves, etc and make dough for roti or paratha. You can also mix finely chopped vegetables like carrot, onion, garlic, capsicum, beetroot, cauliflower, peas, etc and make dough. You already know how wheat flour
is fermented and raising agents added to make pizza-burger base. More experimentally, you may add soluble fibers to wheat flour to make healthier roti or paratha. So, you can mix pulp of chickpeas, peas, beans with flour and some whipped curd to make soft, fluffy and healthier roti and paratha.
Why only vegetables; you can also mix fruit pulps like mango, banana, tender coconut, apple etc with wheat flour to create new recipes of roti-paratha. Many such ingredients are used as stuffing to make poori or paratha. Different kinds of meat can also be used to make dough for roti-paratha or used as stuffing.
The primary and common idea is; how you create different relationships for the single ingredient of wheat flour, with other available ingredients in innovative and experimental ways, is the sole and singular basis of so many recipes you can have. The same is true with all other staple ingredients like rice, meat and dairy. Broadly, whatever are the ingredients of cooking; they should ideally be accepted as bare information. In life-living, information is the raw ingredients and you create relationship with information to cook realities for experiencing. This is the singular idea behind cooking.
As we talked earlier; different realities we experience, are all different relationships we create with information, as raw ingredient. Therefore, be it cooking or your life-living; the joy and satisfaction is inherently in how you experiment with your relationship with infinite information in your world of living to invent and reinvent different recipes of experiences of diverse realities. Your true and lasting wealth is the experiences you have in your life-living.
More importantly, all recipes of experiences you cook are neither good nor bad. I had an uncle, who taught me many things in life and he said, ‘there is nothing good or bad in life. There are only melodious-harmonious or
cacophonous experiences. How you create or align with harmony-melody in life and how you distance away from cacophony is the art and science of life-living.’ I, despite of my infinite stupidities, have sincerely attempted to live out what my uncle taught me. I am still learning…
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