What is Cosmic Cooking?

“I love traditional foods because I think many of them carry the wisdom of the ancestors. It’s the wisdom of the body before corporations got involved with their hidden agendas, and murked up the body’s innate nutritional instincts.”– Joseph

“I’m the fortunate wife who gets to eat all of these marvelous concoctions Joseph creates. I also wash a lot of dishes.” – Lianne

What is Cosmic Cooking?

Cosmic Cooking is healthy, inspired, and often spontaneous. We think the lost art of cooking your own food is an important "Survival Skill for the 21st Century."

Cosmic Cooking is best enjoyed sitting down at a table with loved ones. But if you must, it will still be nurturing and satisfying stuffed in a backpack, eaten alone, consumed in the car, or spoon-fed in front of the TV. Although we think you’re going to like it so much, you’ll prefer the table, where you can taste every delicious morsel!

The not-so-secret ingredient of Cosmic Cooking is LOVE, every step of the way, from the field to the fork.

How This Blog Can Help You

If you don't know how to cook, let us inspire and instruct you.

If you do, enjoy some crazy new combinations or ideas or ingredients or tools you've never tried before.

And by all means, post your experiences in the Comments section! We'd love to hear from you.

What We Eat

We love to eat a gourmet, widely varied diet. You'll find specific posts about ingredients here, but you're probably wondering what kind of recipes you'll find. We've tried so many diets, it's really rather embarrassing. All of them had good results at first, but made us sick over time.


Since April of 2013, we've been on the Perfect Health Diet, which so far has lived up to its name. We do closely monitor what we put in our bodies, so that our current diet tends to look like this most of the time:

• 5 oz. white rice (to avoid the toxins in brown rice), potatoes, plantains, orange, white or purple sweet potatoes, taro root (giant or little), tapioca, or other roots per meal, 3 meals per day
• Healthy fats, including butter, ghee, cocoa butter, suet, and lard from pastured pigs, olive oil, and hazelnut oil; we try to avoid high omega 6 oils such as canola, corn, soy, safflower, etc.
• No sugar or its artificial derivatives
• Natural sweeteners (fruit, stevia, occasional honey, maple syrup, or carob syrup)
• Fresh produce — Currently we're not eating as much organic because freshness energy-tests better than old, and the ethnic markets (Korean, Asian, Mexican, Persian, Arabic, etc.) in our neighborhood have higher turnover than the farmer's markets
• Seasonal foods
• Traditional dishes modified for today
• We avoid all grains, especially wheat
• Fermented foods for digestive enhancement
• Limited lactose (for Lianne), with more goat milk and cheeses
• Animal foods, mostly ruminants and low fat fish, with poultry, fatty fish, shellfish, and organ meats once per week. We eat 3–4 oz. (cooked) each, 2 meals per day
• 16/8 fasting — We eat all our meals within an 8-hour window, fasting in between (Breakfast 10:30 a.m., Lunch 2:30 p.m., Dinner 6:30 p.m.)

A typical day for us would be:

Breakfasts

Split a steamed pudding made from 10 oz. plantains, sweet potatoes, or tapioca, 8 oz. fresh fruit baked in with 6 eggs, 1 oz. of homemade sausage with liver or heart on the side for each of us, and raw carrots, celery, or jicama.

Steamed eggs, liver or heart sausage, and a mash of white rice or sweet potatoes with bananas or other fruits, and raw carrots, celery, or jicama.

Frittata or omelette with seasonal veggies (asparagus, chard, spinach, zucchini, broccoli, or whatever's in season), with goat cheese and a sweet mash like we have with the steamed eggs.

 Lunch

Salad with cold potatoes or rice or yucca, chopped meats (4 oz. for Joseph, 3 oz. for Lianne), and a variety of seasonal veggies with a nice, salty homemade dressing. We don't eat the bagged greens anymore. Perhaps they're too old by the time we can get them? Or maybe lettuce just holds up better in a head. 3–4 oz. seasonal fruit for dessert.

Dinner

Bone broth or stock soup. We put the 5 oz. rice, potatoes, or maybe taro roots in a bowl, then on the stovetop boil two cups of bone broth or stock, into which go seasonal veggies and a variety of seasonings. Sometimes we'll boil the meat in the stock, sometimes we put leftovers in a bowl and heat it up by pouring boiling stock on top. Lianne likes to include a raw vegetable on the side (cucumbers, celery, carrots, red bell peppers, or ?)
 
Joseph considers it a special challenge to redesign familiar favorites to suit these parameters. He'll be posting specifics about some of his unusual ingredients, with recipes for sampling. 

We're not vegetarians, but we've been hugely influenced by the recipes and cooking style in Deborah Madison's Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone; by the Weston A. Price Foundation and Sally Fallon's Nourishing Traditions; the Perfect Health Diet, and our large collection of traditional cookbooks, which you'll surely hear more about!

Who We Are

Joseph Downey is a self-taught gourmet who loves to create spontaneous, unexpected delights from whole, lovingly grown and carefully nurtured ingredients. He’s also an author, poet, composer, and dancer. But his favorite way to relax from his full-time day job is in the kitchen, converting another recipe into something truly magnificent—or just plain weird but yummy.

Lianne Downey has become an adventurous eater, purely for survival in Joseph’s kitchen! But she has no regrets and does in fact eat amazing meals three times a day, especially on weekends. She’s also an author, dancer, musician, and publisher. She writes another blog, "Soul Pursuits," about our shared adventures in interdimensional consciousness.

Together, we own Cosmic Visionary Music & Books – and this blog.