About 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 and recipes in the Comments section! We'd love to hear from you.

What Sorts of Things 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, and what "food restrictions" we might follow. Oh, we've tried them all! But now we're in a phase of healing our metabolism, which was severely damaged by our experiences with elimination diets in the past.

Now we eat a modified-traditional, balanced diet, more like that of our grandparents than our parents, but with a few tweaks. We do closely monitor what we put in our bodies, so that our diet tends to look like this most of the time:

• Lower sodium
• Fewer, carefully measured carbohydrates
• Healthy fats, including butter, ghee, and lard
• No sugar or its artificial derivatives
• Natural sweeteners (fruit, stevia, occasional honey or maple syrup)
• Organic or conscientiously farmed produce
• Seasonal foods
• Traditional dishes modified for today
• Limited wheat and wheat flour
• Variety of other grains and flours, properly soaked and prepared
• Fermented foods for digestive enhancement
• Limited lactose (for Lianne), with more goat milk and cheeses
• Animal foods, from oysters to emu and everything in between
• Fresh fruits and vegetables, straight from the farm if possible!

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; 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 a novelist, 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.