Cookbook Review: I Am Grateful, Recipes and Lifestyle of Cafe Gratitude

Disclosure: I live in Toronto, Ontario. I do not have access to the abundant harvests available year round in places like California. It is also early spring in Toronto; we’ve only recently caught sight of the sun. Preparing food with raw ingredients that are organic isn’t always a possibility for me with items like nuts, avocados, strawberries, fresh coconut, and Irish moss from the coast of Jamaica. And while I love and source and eat fresh and raw foods daily, I cannot for my own well being even contemplate eating full time a raw food diet, both because of my geographic locale and because in the Ayruvedic spectrum I am a vata which means I am supposed to avoid uncooked foods! I ate once at the live food restaurant in Toronto, Live Organic Food Bar located on Dupont Street, and ordered the vegan sushi. It was an enormous serving beautifully plated and crafted out of untoasted nori filled with chopped vegetables and in lieu of cooked rice, blended parsnip. Let’s just say that about an hour after my meal, the 48 parsnips it probably took to fill the rolls had me doubled over in agony. Apart from all of that, I am a strong advocate of local and organic foods – I eat seasonally and I eat as low on the food chain as possible and as freshly as is reasonable given my climate and physical temperment.

I Am Grateful by Terces Engelhart with Orchid

Terces Engelhart has had a hard life. That much is obvious in the introduction to her cookbook I Am Grateful as she shares with the reader a personal saga involving two sexual molestations, 20 years struggling with anorexia and bulimia, three marriages and three divorces, one domestic violence situation, and three children. She refers to herself as a Hero and she has a dream where “Jesus came to me and asked me to serve at the Last Supper”, she encourages the employees at her restaurant, Cafe Gratitude (recipes from I Am Grateful were adapted from the restaurant menu), to train themselves in choosing their thoughts and she names the items on her menu things like I Am Loved or I am Adoring (and the staff won’t let you get away with pointing at a dish on the menu) and when your meal come it is placed before you with the pronouncement “You Are Loved” or “You Are Adoring” or whatever it is you ordered. Thus you ARE what you eat. If you order I Am Responsible then You Are Responsible, and so on. You have to ask for it by name thereby, in the view of Terces, you are practicing saying something new and affirming about yourself. But before you reject this book as out of hand vegan voodooism (which I almost did), let me tell you what I came away with once I’d put my own judgements aside: as a way to kick the ass of an eating disorder, the author starts a food business; she supports local farmers, sustainable agriculture, and environmentally friendly products; rather than give over to addiction and discouragement as a result of her difficult life, she chooses to create her environment around living, organic foods which reflects a commitment to self sustenance and the nurturing of others. These are all reflective of the way restaurants have come to treat their food/their menus as a value-based commodity.

Terces wrote the book with Orchid Slayen, who created all the dishes in the cookbook and works as a chef at Café Gratitude in San Francisco (there are also restaurants in Berkeley, Marin and Los Angeles). The book is full of colourful photos and enticing menus – I Am Complete coconut ceviche, I Am Hopeful pad thai, I Am Bueno spinach tortillas, I Am Creamy hemp seed ranch salad dressing. The flavours of the recipes are evocative of west coast southern tex mex cuisine – lime, coconut, dill, avocado, jalapeno and mint all play a star role in several of the dishes. The pictures also suggest the food is as pretty as it is tasty. The direction in the recipes is where the cookbook lost me.

Terces argues that raw food need not be more time consuming than other kinds of cooking from scratch. I totally disagree. For the nutritional equivalent of what it takes to puree nuts into milk, dehydrate spinach and flax meal for an hour to create a tortilla, blending soups before serving as an artificial warming method, or instead of cheese in a lemon cheesecake you substitute 3 cups of soaked and chopped cashews and press them through a cheese cloth (talk about clean up!), I could eat a nutritious, low fat, organic, vegan meal of sautéed rapini and broccoli with toasted sesame seeds and tamari marinated tofu served on brown basmati rice with a dollop of an Indian inspired chutney and it would take me 10 minutes to prepare. I believe many foods offer health and wellness and that raw food is not superior to a varied and low fat East Asian diet. And while introducing raw food into one’s diet is a blessed thing to do, if only to admire the majestic transformation of a zucchini into “pasta” strips, or pecans and cilantro chopped into falafel balls, to subsist on a small rotation of meals that primarily source their ingredients from nuts and seeds, lime or lemon juice, carrots, daikon, tomatoes, fresh herbs, garlic and ginger, kale, cabbage and coconut could result in a serious case of irritable bowel syndrome not to mention a lack of certain nutrients (vitamin B12, calcium and magnesium, iron). If the protein that is gained from eating a variety of legumes, meat, and seafood is suddenly restricted to a choice of almonds, cashews or walnuts, one might indeed tire of the repetition. I know for my own self that eating a raw food diet in the 8 months of cold climate in Canada would not be what my body craved (coconut curries and dhal is more like it) or needed.

I think Café Gratitude is an admirable restaurant – it introduces people to a healthy way of eating, it raises the profile of the bounty of local fruits and vegetables, it is good ‘food politics’, and I guess if someone is feeling a bit low on the morale front Café Gratitude’s a good place to hit up for a reminder that “You Are Alive”. If you enjoy the fresh flavours of herbs and spices and tangy sauces then there are several recipes in the cookbook that will appeal to you and I’d encourage you to order the book and pull it off your shelf, if you’re Canadian like me, in August and September when our harvests most closely resemble California’s and in the heat a sparkling wheatgrass juice cocktail might be just what you need.

I tried the following 2 recipes and think they would be a find addition to any repertoire. The kale could be replaced with a mix of dandelion greens, arugula and watercress for a tangier blend of greens. Kale is an acquired taste that not many people have.

PEPPERY AVOCADO CAESAR DRESSING
Makes 2 cups salad dressing

1 cup avocado
2 Tbsp lemon juice
1 Tbsp olive oil
1 cup + 2 Tbsp fresh water
1 tsp salt
1 tsp freshly ground pepper
pinch of cayenne pepper
(I added 2 cloves of raw garlic)

blend all ingredients in your blender until smooth and creamy.

I Am Giving
Marinated kale salad

I omitted this: 1 cup marinated shiitake mushrooms
4 cups shredded kale
1 cup hijiki seaweed (pre-soaked for 2 hours and then drained)
1 cup shredded carrots
1 cup julienne-cut cucumbers
½ cup sesame seeds

Marinade
½ cup olive oil
1/3 cup fresh orange juice
2 ½ Tbsp nama shoyu
2 ½ Tbsp rice vinegar
½ Tbsp sesame oil
½ jalapeno pepper
¼ tsp salt
blend all marinade ingredients until well combined.

For the salad: in a large bowl, place kale, hijiki, carrots and cucumbers. Drizzle with marinade and toss until well coated. Toss lightly. Garnish with sesame seeds.

Note: the picture is from the cookbook and it appears they also add toasted/seasoned almonds and pine nuts.

I Am Grateful is published by North Atlantic Books. Photographs in this posting are the copyright 2007 of Terces Engelhart. To order a book please go through your local bookstore or visit www.northatlanticbooks.com.

Comments

[kittu]

wow! good, thanks for a nice article. but you should need Information about organic food Aorganic food. In Flagler Or Volusia Counties ...

[Susan Bernstein]

Thanks mucho for sharing the great recipes and your experience with being a vata trying out raw food. Just as a clarification, as of early 2008, Cafe Gratitude does have four locations, but none of them is in Los Angeles. They have two in San Francisco, one in Berkeley, and one in Marin County (San Rafael). It's quite a fun experience, and their desserts are divine. I find the atmosphere in all of their locations warm and friendly, and it's kind of a fun treat to be told by the servers things like "you are hopeful" or "you are loved" when I eat.

[Diet Eating]

This meal is pretty! Thanks.