Ardito - The Self-Care Cookbook: A Holistic Approach to Cooking, Eating, and Living Well

Copyright 2017 Francis Ardito and Stacey Ballis

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without express written permission from the publisher.

Photos on pages iv, 6, 30, 58, 86, 124, 152, 174, 200, 226, 250 by iStock.com/Ondine32

All other photography by Zhao Photography

Recipe development and culinary consultation by Stacey Ballis

Art direction by Alice Zhao and Jared Zhao

Food styling by Alice Zhao, Jared Zhao, Stacey Ballis, and Bill Thurmond

The graphic on page 2 is adapted from the Prevention Through Wellness model Dr. Francis Ardito for The Wellness Registry. All rights reserved. Find more information at www.mywellnessregistry.com.

The Self-Care Cookbook

eISBN 13: 978-1-57284-802-3

First printing: November 2017

Surrey Books is an imprint of Agate Publishing. Agate books are available in bulk at discount prices. For more information, visit agatepublishing.com.

I would like to dedicate this book to my dear friend, life coach, and author-extraordinaire, Stacey Ballis. In addition to being the architect of each scrumptious recipe, chief culinary consultant, and senior food stylist, she is someone who truly espouses what it means to live and be well. Anyone who knows Stacey knows that, notwithstanding the very short list of aforementioned talents, she is someone who is simply brilliant and charming, authentically passionate, uncompromisingly available, and relentlessly supportive. Without Stacey and the countless hours of dedicated energy that she poured into each and every page, this book would simply not exist.

I would also like to acknowledge all those who have empowered me to live well and to all those who struggle with self-carethis ones for you!

Table of Contents

Contents

I call this book The Self-Care Cookbook because most cookbooks are, at their core, essentially about cooking for other peopleabout feeding your family, getting dinner on the table for your spouse or partner, hosting holidays or celebrations, or exploring a different culture. While all of that is a part of this book, I wanted to underscore that this cookbook is about you.

It is, first and foremost, a cookbook. If your current feelings about your personal wellness are that you just dont have the bandwidth to even think about it, but you love great food and want to add new dishes to your repertoire, this book is still for you. You can skip the rest of this introduction, go straight to the recipes, and enjoy the variety of delicious options that await you.

But if you want to support your interest in wellness through food and cooking, then I hope youll be as excited as I am by this new culinary approach to self-care.

WHAT IS WELLNESS?

These days, concepts regarding well-being are everywhere. We are inundated with the wordswellness, health, dieting, weight loss, exercisebut the definitions of each are vast. Of all of these, wellness wins the prize for the most misunderstood. A wellness visit can mean a doctors appointment, a spa treatment, or checking in on someone elderly during a weather crisis. Dog food? Theres a brand called Wellness. Even funeral homes use the word wellness to describe after-life care. All of this begs an important question: What is wellness, really?

Health is not always a choice. Wellness, on the other hand, is always a choice.

At its core, wellness does indeed have an important meaning. The easiest way to wrap your head around it is to consider the difference between wellness and health. Health is an outcomesometimes the result of choices, good or bad; sometimes the result of benefit or misfortune; sometimes the result of positive or negative genetics. Blood pressure, weight, and cholesterol levels are all examples of markers to help define ones health. Health is not always a choice. Wellness, on the other hand, is always a choice. It is the things you choose to do to enrich your lifeenrolling in a class to learn something new, going for a walk or a workout, or attending a faith-based service or a holiday celebration with friends and family. These are all ways to enhance your well-being, and they are all ways to improve aspects of your existence. True wellness is multidimensional and enormously empoweringnot just from a physical perspective, which is often the first inference we make when we hear about wellness, but in a more complex and all-encompassing way.

The Wellness Registry, an organization I founded that awards the worlds first consumer wellness certification, created a model (see below) for empowering wellness. Called Prevention through Wellness, it was created to put you in control of your complete personal wellness. You get to call the shotsyou choose what is most important to you. It is much more than the simple mind, body, and spirit premise we have all seen. It defines 10 dimensions of youand it gives you 10 choices for things you can choose to do to be well. Please note that the words on the left side indicate your health dimensions, and those along the right represent your wellness choices.

PREVENTION THROUGH WELLNESS

Adapted from the Prevention through Wellness model Dr. Francis Ardito for The Wellness Registry. All rights reserved. www.mywellnessregistry.com

WHY I WROTE THIS BOOK

There have been hundreds of books written about health and wellness and thousands of published cookbooks. I had no interest in duplicating either of these. So, I asked myself a basic question: What if? What if there was a book that connected the dots between self-care and food; one that provided you not only with delicious recipes but also showed you which ones complement each aspect of your well-being? What if there was a resource to help you choose the foods that best support whatever it is that you are currently focused on for your personal wellness? And most importantly, what if the recipes in that book were easy for anyone to master and so delicious that the person cooking them would never hesitate to incorporate them into his or her life?

This book is not about dieting; it is about your diet.

This book is not about dieting; it is about your diet. These are not the same thing. Dieting is about what you are limited toa narrowly focused program of eating for a specific outcome, and these days, that almost always refers to a weight-loss program. While the majority of the recipes in this book will seamlessly fit into a dieting or weight-loss regimen, that isnt my focus. This book is about wellness and your relationship with food. It is about understanding how to eat well based upon