The Ayurvedic View on Eating for Health

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Cooking an Ayurvedic Meal at Home
If you have an organized kitchen and your ingredients handy, cooking an ayurvedic meal can be simple and fun, taking about 15 minutes to prepare and 20-25 minutes to cook.
Your kitchen should have the following staple ingredients on hand:split mung beans. basmati rice and/or other whole grains such as barley, quinoa, or couscous, ghee or olive oil, spices such as ginger, cumin, coriander, and turmeric, the freshest vegetables you can get, yogurt, wheat flour and a pre-made chutney.

To save time, have spices appropriate to your needs for balance pro-mixed in a container or have handy some Ayurveda spice mixtures such as Vata. Pitta, or Kapha churna (you can buy on-line or sometimes from health food shops). Keep your beans and grains in glass jars for easy measuring.

Split mung dahl or moong dahl arc the green whole mung beans that have been split and the green skins removed. Split mung is the easiest to digest of all the beans and is balancing for all the doshas. It provides protein and the astringent taste. Ayurveda recommends that you try to include all six tastes in a meal - sweet, salty, sour. astringent, bitter, and pungent. If you are on a diet to pacify a specific dosha. it is still good to include all six tastes, focusing on the ones related to the specific dosha and taking less of the other ones. For example, a person trying to reduce pitta would include more of the sweet, bitter and astringent tastes and less of the pungent, sour and salty tastes.

Basmali rice is considered to be a highly beneficial grain according to ayurvcda. It is balancing for all the doshas, however, eating it every day is not recommended because it is a little heavy. People with a kapha imbalance can dry-roast the grain before adding the water for cooking as this will make it a bit lighter.

Quinoa, barley or couscous can be used for the grains portion of the meal as well. Quinoa has high protein content and is delicious and fast cooking.

As your beans and grains are cooking, start preparing the vegetables. Vegetables should constitute a substantial portion of your meal and it's good to have al least two different vegetables at each meal - such as carrots and broccoli, or cauliflower and green beans. Dark leafy greens such as kale, spinach, or collard greens can be added to the vegetable dish or prepared separately. Dark leafy greens have minerals that other vegetables do not have and it is important to cat them several times per week 01 even every day if available. You will notice increased benefits from including them in you diet on a regular basis.
Article by Maharishi Ayurveda (MAV).