"Getting back to how your great-grandma used to eat" is the tag line on local Chef Zachary Mazi’s facebook page. Chef Mazi is passionate about helping others improve their health through nutrition. He gives cooking classes, wellness lectures and one-on-one coaching. He will give a cooking class entitled Healing Foods for Autoimmune Disease on Tuesday, July 23 at the Westside New Leaf.
In 2012, Chef Mazi and partner Naturopathic Doctor Juli Mazi founded the organization Food is Medicine (www.facebook.com/YourFoodISMedicine) to help people worldwide understand that their choices in food matter greatly. The Mazis advocate sticking to intuitive, local and organic options.
For the last 10 years Chef Mazi has been studying herbal medicine and mushrooms and developing recipes that combine the deep earth wisdoms he has gained Medicinal mushrooms are used to help boost the immune system when it is needed, and to stop it from overacting when that is needed.
One of Chef Mazi’s original recipes is included below. It includes three types of mushrooms with clinical studies showing their effectiveness in immune modulation, as well as burdock root, a bitter tonifying herb used for helping stimulate liver cleansing and aid in digestion.
The Benefits of “Living Foods”
Chef Mazi says that one of the foundational concepts on which Food Is Medicine rests is the belief that we are complex beings constantly in process; foods that mimic this bridled life process are the most relevant for our health. Finally, studies are showing an increased immune benefit from having a healthy relationship with the bacterial population of your gut, and supplying more of the good and suppressing the bad with nutrition. It seems living foods are playing roles in everything from weight loss to helping to control the negative effects of Autism, to auto-immune disorder treatment. Once again, traditional folk medicine has proven to be wise beyond its explicit knowledge.
Cooking Class for autoimmune disease
Chef Mazi’s hands-on cooking class on Tuesday, July 23 from 6 – 8 pm. Chef Mazi: "Cooking for Auto-immune Disease is a class for anyone affected by an auto-immune disorder: individuals, friends, family members, care-takers. When western medicine tells us that there is nothing that can be done, this proclamation of helplessness is often as damning as the diagnosis, and it isn't fair, and is proving to be untrue. Our bodies are generally made of a complicated combination of the fuels we provide through food and supplementation, the body's own manufactured chemicals, and the billions and billions (and billions) of organisms that populate of digestive tract." To register, visit www.newleafwestside.eventbrite.com. For information and registration, call 831-426-1306 ext. 0.
Healing Recipe by Chef Zachary Mazi
“I have included two recipes in one here, because miso soup is one of the most amazingly versatile dishes, and can be used to put any number of awesome healing ingredients into. It includes three types of mushrooms with clinical studies showing their effectiveness in immune modulation, as well as burdock root, a bitter tonifying herb used for helping stimulate liver cleansing and aid in digestion,” said Chef Mazi.
Broth
2 Qts Water
1 ea Kombu lea
f¼ cup Bonita fish flake
½ cup Shiitake, chopped
1 pkg Maitake, dry, crushed
½ cup Crimini½ cup Burdock root, chopped
1 Green Onion, diced
¼ - ½ cup Miso, depending on desired strength
to taste Coconut Aminos*
to taste salt
1. Broth can be made ahead of time, in any volume: Heat water with kombu, and when boiling, remove from heat and add fish flakes. This first step is the secret to excellent Miso soup.
2. Heat broth with mushrooms and simmer other ingredients until cooked
3. Remove from heat, and allow to cool to about 160° or even less before adding miso paste. We find foods hotter than 140°F to be too hot to eat anyway. Miso can be blended with a small amount of water in another bowl to help dissolve it in the large pot of soup.
4. Add diced green onions for color and flavor.
NOTE ABOUT MISO: was traditionally made from soybeans in Japan, but can now be found to use any number of substrates to grow its culture: barley, rice, wheat, etc. It tends to be very salty, precluding the need for additional salt in your dish. The most important thing to understand about miso is that it is living--the processes that create the miso are still in process--and that cooking the culture for too long or too hot will kill the living organisms in it. Therefore, it is of the utmost importance to add your miso paste LAST in the recipe, once the broth/soup has cooked sufficiently.
*Coconut Aminos (Coconutsecret.com) is a soy sauce alternative brewed by fermenting coconut tree sap. It is also a living food (like Tamari) and has a sweeter and less salty profile than say sauce.
