Spicebox Kitchen

foreword

I FIRST MET LINDA SHIUE IN 2018 when she attended a dinner I organized in my role as Chef-in-Residence at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD). Linda’s colleagues with whom she was sitting introduced her as a “chef-doctor” or something like that, and I was immediately intrigued. I had no idea that one of the leaders in the field of culinary medicine came to my event that evening! During our brief conversation, I learned that Linda founded the groundbreaking Thrive Kitchen, a hands-on healthy cooking program aimed at empowering physicians and their patients with knowledge and fundamental culinary skills geared toward improving health and wellness, and inspiring people to get cooking at home.

When Linda and I met for tea several weeks later, we immediately hit it off. She and I discovered that we were both working to shift people’s perception of “healthful” food being bland, boring, and brown to a vision of vegetable-centered dishes bursting with flavor, creativity, and vibrancy. I also learned that we both wanted to move eaters beyond simply using staple ingredients and spices from world cuisines and excite them to celebrate the varied dishes and patterns of eating from culinary traditions around the globe. We knew that dishes from these traditional diets could be another tool for improving public health, especially for those most impacted by diet-related chronic illnesses.

Since then, I’ve had the privilege of serving as guest chef a couple of times at Thrive Kitchen. It was such a joy connecting with patients and other community members in attendance. Linda’s classes attract a crowd that’s not unlike those who come to my programs—including not just patients, but culinary and medical students and people who grow or cook food for a living. The excitement and eagerness of the diverse crowds who attend Linda’s classes are a testament to the effectiveness of her focus on flavor as a way to encourage people to make healthful eating a lifestyle and not a fad.

You’ll be glad to know that this book brings the same joy, warmth, and delicious flavor profiles of Linda’s classes right to your home kitchen. The recipes are simple enough for the novice or busy cook, and the dishes burst with complex flavors inspired by Linda’s home base in California, the varied cuisines of Asian countries she’s spent time in, the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern flavors she learned to cook during her restaurant externship while in culinary school, and the Caribbean flavors from her husband’s home in Trinidad. Her recipes offer creative twists on traditional favorites, in some cases gently nudging them in a more vegetable-forward direction, which often actually means getting closer to their roots.

Linda also helps you stock your pantry with nourishing staples and spices, and she offers menu suggestions to point you in the right direction. I’m excited for you to begin cooking the wide-ranging recipes in this book, and I imagine you will learn a lot from the comprehensive and user-friendly overview of spices and healthy staple ingredients that form the basis of the dishes. We’re all lucky we can experience Linda’s words, recipes, and generosity of spirit in the pages that follow. Gather your family and friends around the table, and welcome to Spicebox Kitchen!

—Bryant Terry, Chef-in-Residence at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD), James Beard Award Winner, author of Vegetable Kingdom

introduction

My Journey from the Clinic to the Kitchen

EATING WELL IS ABOUT FOOD AND HEALTH but equally also about celebration and community. There is a world of flavor, and the passport is spices. I connected my lifelong love of food and cooking to my work as a physician eight years ago, when I attended a medical conference that transformed the way I practice medicine, after a decade as a primary care physician. At that time, I was feeling burned out. I knew that I was helping my patients, but I didn’t feel that I was making an impact in the way I really wanted. Despite my support and advice, my patients struggled to lose weight, to control their cholesterol and blood pressure and blood sugar, and they were tired, anxious, and depressed. I wrote many prescriptions, for cholesterol medications, for blood pressure medications, for diabetes medications, and for antidepressants and sleep aids. My patients didn’t feel better, and I felt ineffectual.

Then, I went to that fateful medical conference, called Healthy Kitchens, Healthy Lives, cosponsored by Harvard School of Public Health and the Culinary Institute of America. We reviewed the latest updates in nutrition science, and how this knowledge could help patients. We were also taught to cook incredibly delicious food that was also health supportive, by the culinary school’s chef-instructors.

That conference was my lightbulb moment. My practice changed immediately: Before, at the end of routine physical examinations, I would review my findings with the patient, discuss their weight, blood pressure, and lab results, and make some vague suggestions for modifying their diet and exercise routine. Typically, it might have ended there. But after my epiphany, with my next patient, I pulled out my prescription pad—and wrote a recipe for kale chips. A week after the conference ended, I taught my first cooking class to patients, and I was hooked. I began teaching cooking classes on a regular basis and felt as exhilarated as my students were. I shifted my practice to include culinary medicine, a new evidence-based field that blends the art of food and cooking with the science of medicine. I did this to address some dismal statistics: About 75 percent of visits are due to lifestyle-related conditions. Half of premature deaths are attributable to our overfed, yet malnourished, society. Only 10 percent of Americans meet dietary guidelines. Practicing culinary medicine is a low-cost, accessible, and culturally adaptable intervention.

A few years after I began to teach cooking, I attended culinary school and earned a certificate in plant-based nutrition, after which I founded a formal cooking program for patients. I also teach medical students and residents—doctors in training—because only a quarter of medical schools offer a course in nutrition, despite the fact that diet is the top cause of death and disability. While this path is nontraditional, it reinvigorated my joy in my career and, equally important, allowed me to help patients in a way I had previously been unable to do. Whether patients take a hands-on cooking class with me or simply accept my offer of a recipe, they are surprised, grateful, and inspired. They tell me that I have changed their life. It might mean reversing diabetes, going off blood pressure medications, or avoiding weight-loss surgery. At the least, eating better makes people feel better. Helping people find their way on this path is my mission, and a joy.

The best way I have found to make transitioning to eating more healthfully a joy is to bring in flavors from around the world. My food influences have always been global and wide-ranging, and I love the adventures you can have in your own kitchen just by exploring different spices. I believe that the best way to get to know a culture is to sit down and break bread (or roti, or a bowl of rice or noodles) with the locals. What I cook and what I teach in my cooking classes are recipes inspired by the people I have met from around the world. I grew up with parents from Taiwan, lived in Singapore for a year in college, and married a man from Trinidad. No matter where I am cooking, I rely on spices to capture the flavors of a particular cuisine. And I am never without my own spicebox. Known as a masala dabba, the spicebox found in the kitchen of Indian homes is a large, flat-bottomed, round steel container in which nest several smaller steel bowls for the cook to fill with a personal VIP list of spices. I like to think of a spicebox as the cook’s equivalent of a doctor’s bag—containing the essential tools to use in the art of cooking. Learning to use spices is the best way to add interest and vibrancy to simple home cooking. As our first medicine, spices also play a role in our health and wellness.

This cookbook shares my love for flavors from around the world from my unique perspective and nutrition knowledge as a physician and professionally trained chef. Whereas most “healthy cookbooks” focus on nutrition over flavor, these recipes celebrate eating for pleasure. At my table, food is meant to be savored. I won’t prescribe you a diet, advise you to count calories, or tell you what to eat. I believe that our food choices should be personal; the best diet for one person may not be the best for another. I do recommend that everyone eat “mostly plants,” for many reasons, including taste, variety, the environment, ethical concerns, and, yes, health. My goal as a physician is to improve patients’ health by inspiring them to cook more and eat more vegetables. My goal as a cooking instructor and recipe developer is to get people to love and crave vegetables by showing them the many ways to prepare them, deliciously. While this book celebrates vegetables and the recipes that follow are mostly plant based, I have also included recipes with seafood, eggs, or dairy when those ingredients are essential to the recipe. This approach reflects the “mostly plants” omnivorous diet I follow and that I recommend to my patients and students. Cooking these recipes, I think you’ll realize that the measure of a cook is not how they cook a piece of meat, but how they are able to coax a variety of flavors and textures from vegetables, legumes, whole grains, seeds, and nuts. I am confident that eaters of all types will find much to enjoy in these recipes. In fact, I can’t tell you the number of times a self-declared carnivorous student finishes their meal with gusto and surprise and says, “I don’t miss the meat at all!”

While I teach people to eat more healthfully and deliciously, really, it’s a party, and a means of building community. After all, a great way to spread happiness and build bridges is to cook for others. Even if you can’t join me in person for one of my cooking classes, you can re-create the experience in your own kitchen with this cookbook.

HOW TO USE THIS BOOK

I’ve organized the recipes into four geographical regions to which I have a personal connection: California, Asia, Mediterranean/Middle East, and Trinidad. I chose these broad areas not only because I enjoy eating and cooking their cuisines, but also because they represent the diversity of our country and are all cultures with rich traditions of spice-filled, health-supportive cuisine. Each culture has its own way of cooking for health, with distinct uses of spices, herbs, and other flavoring agents. There are also commonalities shared among these diverse cuisines, all of which feature health-promoting ingredients, such as whole grains, vegetables, nuts, and seeds, and such techniques as fermentation.

Most of these recipes are designed for weeknight cooking. Organizing geographically makes it easy to assemble a menu by a cultural theme. For many of these recipes, side dishes can be mixed and matched to make a meal, meze style, whereas others are more traditional main dishes that can be served with one or more side dishes. This opens up the possibility of other ways of creating a menu. For example, you can assemble a menu by theme—choose several dishes from one section of this book. You can also combine recipes from different sections of this book with similar spices, as several of these cross over into different regions. Seasonality is another way to set a menu. Or you can go the more traditional route, with an appetizer, soup and/or salad, and main dish, and finish with fruit or a dessert. But no matter how you choose to assemble a meal, it is good to have a balance and contrast of flavors and textures, just as you would have in an individual dish. Although mixing it up is encouraged, I’ve also included sample dinner menus for each section.

I designed this book for the home cook of all levels of experience—so, no matter whether you’ve never boiled water or you’re a wiz at sous vide, there’s something here for you. Part One functions as a how-to and reference guide. If you’re a novice cook, you may want to spend more time here, to get stocked on cooking equipment and build your healthy pantry, as well as to learn fundamental knife skills and cooking techniques, with special attention on how to make vegetables the star of the show. If you already know your way around the kitchen stove but are seeking to make healthier food, you’ll learn about healthy ingredients and how to select and store them. And everyone can benefit from some tips that chefs use to transform food from good to fabulous, including a primer to acquaint you with spices typical for each region. If you want to cook more often, but find it challenging to work it into your schedule, check out the meal planning and meal prep section. And I hope everyone will read the section on reducing food waste, which I consider as important as all these other topics.

Part Two takes you on a culinary tour; you’ll discover recipes spanning breakfast, appetizers, soups and salads, side dishes, entrées, desserts and other sweet treats, and pantry items, including spice blends, sauces, snacks, and fermented foods. Please have fun exploring and consider these recipes to be templates. Once you get familiar with the ingredients, you can swap in similar ingredients depending on what is in season, what you have in your kitchen, or simply what flavors you prefer. For recipes that include non-plant-based ingredients, I’ve included substitutions whenever appropriate. Each recipe highlights key spices marked with → and key healthy ingredients marked with → that you can learn more about in Part One.