Cooking & Entertaining

What to Eat for How You Feel
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What to Eat for How You Feel: The New Ayurvedic Kitchen - 100 Seasonal Recipes

Author Divya Alter, Photographs by William Brinson and Susan Brinson

This indispensable kitchen companion brings the ancient art of delicious healthy cooking to the twenty-first century with flavors adapted for the contemporary Western palate.
 
Drawing on her many years of vegetarian cooking, catering, and teaching, in this book Divya Alter explains how to create flavorful meals with seasonal ingredients by applying Ayurvedic principles. With food combinations, methods of preparation, and healing spices customized for individual needs, this is an inspirational guide to achieving optimal health through a personalized way of living and eating.
 
This volume features 100 recipes for breakfasts, soups, salads, main dishes, one-pot meals, treats, and beverages in three seasonal-based chapters. It includes an ingredient guide along with recipes for staples such as cultured ghee, fresh cheese, yogurt, nondairy milk alternatives, dressings, chutneys, and spice blends.
 
Alter offers practical ways to bridge the ancient wisdom of food with modern living beyond the bound- aries of India. Dishes such as Asian-style Stir-Fried Red and Black Rice, Italian-style Spinach Risotto, and French-style Braised Root Vegetables are accessible to all and carry the healing benefits of Ayurvedic cooking.

About The Author

Divya Alter is a certified nutritional consultant and educator in the Shaka Vansiya Ayurveda tradition. She is the cofounder of Bhagavat Life, the only Ayurvedic culinary school in New York. She and her husband launched North America’s first Ayurvedic chef certification program and Divya’s Kitchen, an authentic Ayurvedic café in Manhattan.

  • Publish Date: April 04, 2017
  • Format: Hardcover
  • Category: Cooking - Vegetarian
  • Publisher: Rizzoli
  • Trim Size: 7-3/4 x 9-3/4
  • Pages: 256
  • US Price: $39.95
  • CDN Price: $53.95
  • ISBN: 978-0-8478-5968-9
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Reviews

"Divya—a Bulgarian yogini with equal passion for flavorful food and holistic healing—shares her firsthand knowledge of how Ayurvedic principles have helped her in her struggles with her own health challenges over the years. In doing so, Divya Alter chronicles food’s powerful ability to transform our bodies and our health: physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. She writes with the clarity of someone who has studied carefully and whose mastery of her subject spans the theoretical as well as the practical. Yet her words are always from the heart. As Divya tells her students, “Your love is the most important ingredient in everything you make.” 
Namaste, dear Divya, for offering your inspirational book as a gift to those looking to tap the healing power of food—deliciously. I’m so glad it found me."
— KAREN PAGE, two-time James Beard Award–winning author of The Flavor Bible and The Vegetarian Flavor Bible 

“Divya is a truly talented chef and healer, who creates perfectly mouthwatering dishes that are equally delicious, nourishing, and appealing to the eye. Her sattvic meals incorporate the balancing facets of Ayurveda to promote healing, wellness, and great digestion, and you can feel her heart and soul in her recipes! I recommend her meal program to all of my clients, and this book is a must-have for anyone wanting to live a healthy lifestyle and cook beautiful, healing meals at home.” 
— DR. PRATIMA RAICHUR, author of the bestselling book, Absolute Beauty: Radiant Skin and Inner Harmony Through the Ancient Secrets of Ayurveda 

“I have been a vegetarian for 45 years, in constant search for sumptuous, healthy, easy-to-digest Ayurvedic cuisine. I finally found it in Divya Alter's exquisite cooking. Now Divya has written the perfect ‘how-to’ Ayurvedic cookbook and everyone can prepare—and enjoy—delicious, healthy eating at its best.”
— ROBERT ROTH, Executive Director of the David Lynch Foundation, author of Transcendental Meditation
 
“Divya Alter's joy in life is to please everyone she meets with her world famous delicious, nutritious cooking. Inspired by that joy, she has spent decades learning, practicing and teaching traditional Ayurvedic cooking. It is truly what she loves to do. What to Eat for How You Feel: The New Ayurvedic Kitchen is a wonderful expression of the enormous love of Divya's heart, and each recipe will surely nourish and awaken joy in your body, mind and soul.”
— RADHANATH SWAMI, author of the bestselling books, The Journey Home and The Journey Within
 
“Divya Alter is more than a chef; she is an artist, a teacher, and a healer. In her beautiful book What to Eat for How You Feel, Divya carries on the tradition of authentic SV Ayurvedic cooking by creating appetizing and appealing recipes to nourish the body, mind, and spirit. She brings her deep knowledge into our own kitchens so that we can eat well, and also feel fabulous. Highly recommended!” — LISSA COFFEY, author of the bestselling book, What’s Your Dosha, Baby? Discover the Vedic Way for Compatibility in Life and Love “This books is a marvel, an elegant, articulate, easy-to-follow presentation of ancient culinary wisdom in accessible contemporary language. If you are someone who cares about your own health and happiness and that of your friends and family; if you are someone who knows how central food is to life’s spiritual dimension, then this work of love was meant for you. It is a cookbook that deserves a place in the wisdom section of bookstores.”
— JOSHUA M. GREENE, Editor, Lord Krishna’s Cuisine: The Art of Indian Vegetarian Cooking; Author, Gita Wisdom
 
“One achieves greater awareness of the body and how it interacts with the natural elements and the world in Ayurveda. Similarly, in Yoga one achieves greater awareness of how the self interacts with spirit and the true nature of things. And most ideally in Yoga practice the outer bodily world comes into harmonious relation with the innermost world of the heart. Therefore I highly recommend this beautiful volume to be the constant companion of any serious practitioner of yoga who wishes to engage diet as a powerful means to take one’s yoga practice into deeper realms. In Divya Alter’s book, we can expect to discover something of the unimagined beauty and pleasure of spirit, which, amazingly, you will glean through the sweet words of guidance and wondrous recipes contained therein.”
— GRAHAM M. SCHWEIG, Ph.D., ERTY500, author and translator of Bhagavad Gītā: The Beloved Lord’s Secret Love Song
 
“An alternative to the Standard American Diet (SAD) is something to rejoice about.  With deep devotion to the core principles of Ayurveda, Divya has managed to create a masterful Ayurvedic cookbook that is worthy of the pages of Bon Appetit.  She invests her soul into every recipe.  My patients and people everywhere can rest assured that they won’t have to adjust the recipes. They are healthy and delicious just the way they are. And that’s no small achievement!”
— DR. MARIANNE TEITELBAUM, Dr. Marianne Teitelbaum, Chiropractic and Ayurvedic Physician
 
“Non-vegetarians and vegetarians alike will delight in the attractive and tasty dishes that grace the pages of this informative cookbook. Divya Alter’s recipes are eminently doable, and the food created from them is pleasing and nutritious—and, in the unique Ayurvedic way, just suited for one’s individual needs. From kitchen newcomers to cuisine connoisseurs, everyone will find the content and recipes of this excellent, carefully-researched book nourishing to their body as well as their heart.”
— VISAKHA DASI, author, Five Years, Eleven Months and a Lifetime of Unexpected Love 
 
“When you read through a recipe and it gets you immediately jumping up to go get the ingredients and get to cooking it, it’s the sign of a good cookbook. An better cookbook is one that does this, plus it shows you what good health tastes like; and the best cookbook—it’s in your hands—does both of these, plus it shows you how to reclaim your very life by reclaiming your kitchen from the industrial consumer culture bent on turning you into a (sick and getting sicker) eating machine. And Divya Alter gives you so much more than this--offering a sensible, time-honored way of getting right with your body, mind, and spirit, by rediscovering the wisdom within yourself that connects you with the world through truly nourishing food.”
— KENNETH VALPEY, Ph.D., co-author and translator of The Bhagavata Purana: Selected Readings
 
“Divya Alter is a visionary chef with a compassionate heart. In her, we meet the best friend of our holistic health, and she is about to turn our kitchens on their heads!
Where are all the not-so-healthy comfort foods we've come to lean on in a typical vegetarian diet? Where are the nightshade vegetables? The potatoes? The tomatoes? The mushrooms? The soy? Onions? Garlic? And chocolate? You won't miss them!
Divya has conjured up simple, delicious, and aesthetic recipes that harmonize what's best for each of our body types with the changing seasons of the year, making ancient Ayurvedic wisdom accessible to us in our busy urban lives.
Bravo to Divya and to Rizzoli for this stunning gift! It will be a joy to give, to receive, and a force for positive change in our health and in our culinary world.”
— RUKMINI WALKER, owner of the As Kindred Spirits boutiques, Washington, DC

"Eating Ayurvedic clears the body and mind from blockages and helps us feel happiness and bliss. You experience a clear communication between your body, mind, and senses, and you can easily control them. On a soul level, eating the right foods in the right way makes the light of our soul shine—you experience a tangible connection with the divine energies."
—Numious.com 

"Ayurvedic chef Divya Alter’s What to Eat for How You Feel is different than your average cookbook. (Ya know, the one you go back to for the same chicken masala recipe every time.) For the uninitiated, Ayurvedic (pronounced ay-er-vey-dic) cooking is the ancient Indian practice of healing the body with food. But even if you’re never going to give up fries, this book offers surprisingly practical tips about how to make sure the food you eat is actually replenishing and restoring your body.  "
—PureWOW.com

"Here, Alter shares three recipes from What to Eat for How You Feel, each one deemed particularly beneficial for a different dosha. And because foodie FOMO is real, all recipes have modifications for the rest of the digestive types. Finally, you can have what your friend’s having, minus the side effects"
—WELL+GOOD NYC

Author Bookshelf: Divya Alter

Joy of Balance

Author Bookshelf: William Brinson

Cultured Foods for Your Kitchen