Kitchen Medicine by Tamara Wolfson

The most powerful place to start a journey to optimal wellbeing and healing is in the kitchen, viewing food as medicine. We’ll begin by discovering how to eat to nourish your gut microbiome — the mini-ecosystem of your digestive tract where the key to your health begins.

We’ll learn about foods and herbs that can help you cleanse your system. At the beginning of most natural medicine protocols, there’s a general consensus that before healing can occur, we need to remove toxins. A detox improves and optimizes the function of your bodily systems.

We’ll also discover how the different tastes or flavors of foods can impact your body through the ancient lens of the Five Phase Theory, the ancient Taoist system of organizing and understanding the ecology of the body.

In this session, you’ll discover:

• Your gut microbiome, why it’s important, and what kinds of foods support it
• Food toxins and how you can avoid them
• How the 5 flavors (bitter, sweet, sour, salty, and pungent) affect different systemic functions in the body, according to traditional medicine
• How to use an elimination diet to clarify if you are suffering from food allergies
• Foods that help cleanse the body, such as beets, artichokes, nettle, and dandelion

Kitchen Recipes to Clear Toxins:

• Traditional Russian Borscht
• Beet Kvass
• Nine Herbs Soup With Nettles
• Artichoke Spinach Dip
• Fermented Nettle Ginger Beer
• Dandelion Tea

In spring, your body’s energy is waking up and renewing itself, after winter’s time of contemplation and rest. It’s when we often began to clean our house to create a fresh space for something new to happen. This is also the case with our body — spring foods are geared toward supporting liver health and refreshing the body.

During this session, you’ll discover:

• Healing green foods and how to sprout seeds, nuts, grains, and beans
• What foods support your liver and help it to filter toxins out of your blood
• How intermittent fasting can help your digestion reset
• An introduction to the healing properties of mushrooms and how you can use them simply and easily in your kitchen

Kitchen Recipes to Support Liver Health & Detox:

• Sprouted Almond & Nut Milk With Extracted Mushrooms
• Sprouted Mung Bean Salad With Ginger Lemon Dressing
• Rejuvelac & Fermented Nut Cheese
• Basic Green Blender Drink
• Fermented Turmeric Ginger Beer

The healing foods of summer remind us of our heart opening to the world. Food and herb gardens are stunningly beautiful, full of color and amazing fragrances. It’s a time for being open, as we witness the season’s energetic movements, reaching out as succulent, ripe fruit — a perfect time to discover the joys of eating more raw foods.

During this session, you’ll discover:

• Which foods are rich in which enzymes, and how these nutrients are like fire for your digestive system
• How to dehydrate food to preserve their enzymes
• The health benefits of omega-3 fatty acids, which are a great support for heart health
• Healing with lemon balm and everyday garden herbs

Kitchen Recipes to Support Digestive Enzymes & Heart Health:

• Garden Salad With Creamy Garlic Dressing
• Chia Pudding With Vanilla & Cardamom
• Fermented Fruit Chutney
• Sprouted Curry Garbanzo Beans
• Lemon Balm & Goji Berry Sun Tea

In Chinese medicine, late summer is associated with the Earth element and with digestion itself. The taste associated with the season is sweet; however, this does not refer to our modern idea of refined sugar. In fact, in this module, you’ll learn how sugar is destructive to digestion and significantly sabotages your overall health and wellbeing.

In this session, you’ll discover;

• How the flavor “sweet” nourishes and lubricates the body AND neutralizes the toxic effects of other foods
• The most effective herbal support tools for regulating blood sugar
• The role grains, glutens, and lectins play in our diets
• The relationship between the Earth element and blood building in Chinese medicine
• Foods that strengthen blood, thereby increasing energy and stamina

Kitchen Recipes for Late Summer:

• Grapefruit Salad With Avocado & Dried Cherries
• Sprouted Quinoa & Broccoli Salad
• Raw Kale Salad
• Bee Pollen Wild Fermented Soda

In fall, we increase our consumption of sour foods to help us align with the energy of condensation within. This helps tighten up our bodies’ pores and tissues in preparation for the cold to come.

Fermented food satisfies this fundamental nutritional need this time of year as a traditional way to access “sour.” It’s been a dietary aid throughout all of human history, and has just regained popularity again over the past decade or so.

In this session, we’ll renew our relationship with the fabulous world of fermentations and experience the delights of eating sour foods.

During this session, you’ll discover:

• Tools and guidelines to make your own fermentations successfully
• The history and traditions around fermented foods and how they feed your gut’s microbiome and support its health
• The healing properties of apple cider vinegar and how easy it is to make
• Demystifying kombucha — how to create this natural probiotic from a Symbiotic Culture Of Bacteria and Yeast (SCOBY) culture that turns tea into a digestive wonder

Kitchen Recipes for the Fall:

• Apple Cider Vinegar & How to Make a Shrub (acidulated beverage)
• Traditional & Mushroom Kombucha
• Asian Style Vegetables Pickles
• Basic Sauerkraut

Winter is when eating foods that are warming, deeply nutritious, and tonifying are vital for maintaining health and wellness.

In this session, we’ll focus on foods that nourish the kidneys, such as bones, marrow, eggs, and seaweed. Making bone stock is one of the strongest super foods to heal our entire body!

We’ll also explore the Five Phase theory in which winter is connected to Water, including an overview of water’s healing properties.

During this session, you’ll discover:

• How important winter foods and herbs are in supporting your health through the cold months
• Herbal traditions that use bones and gelatin to deeply replenish the body and how to work with these ingredients in the kitchen
• How to make bone stock and various medicinal ingredients you can add to customize
• How bone stock helps improve skin conditions, diabetes, leaky gut, osteoporosis, arthritis, allergies, autoimmune diseases, and digestive issues

Kitchen Recipes for the Winter:

• Bone Stocks, Roots & Stews
• Working With Gelatin — The Traditional Egg Aspic
• Roasted Bone Marrow

Food and herbs can help you to transform your health goals into successful realities. What are your health goals and what plan can you put into place to reach those goals? This class will review the traditional medicine model of the “ideal meal,” and help you in creating this based on your unique constitutional imbalances, dietary requirements, and health concerns.

In this session, you’ll discover:

• Your personal constitution and what foods can best support it
• Constitutional patterns according to traditional Chinese medicine and the foods that can support and injure those conditions
• Remedial dietary therapy as it pertains to imbalances in the body, such as dampness, congestion, heat, and cold
• Digestive support herbs and how to utilize them to strengthen digestion

More information about Self Help:

Self-help or self-improvement is a self-guided improvement—economically, intellectually, or emotionally—often with a substantial psychological basis.
Many different self-help group programs exist, each with its own focus, techniques, associated beliefs, proponents and in some cases, leaders.
Concepts and terms originating in self-help culture and Twelve-Step culture, such as recovery, dysfunctional families, and codependency have become firmly integrated in mainstream language.

Self-help often utilizes publicly available information or support groups, on the Internet as well as in person, where people in similar situations join together.
From early examples in self-driven legal practice and home-spun advice, the connotations of the word have spread and often apply particularly to education, business,
psychology and psychotherapy, commonly distributed through the popular genre of self-help books.
According to the APA Dictionary of Psychology, potential benefits of self-help groups that professionals may not be able to provide include friendship,
emotional support, experiential knowledge, identity, meaningful roles, and a sense of belonging.