Product Description

This beautifully designed book

• Includes an interactive wheel that helps you calculate your elemental sign
• Explains how to plan meals appropriate to your home element
• Offers tempting recipes for every home element, season, and time of day
• Shares dishes with a delicious variety of ingredients and flavors, from Cold Soba Noodles to Stir-Fried Chicken or Port with Watermelon Rind
• Contains beauty, mind, and spirit sections with recipes for face masks, hair treatments, and massage oils based on each home element
• Features more than 120 full-color photographs of finished dishes and life in Thailand

Written by the IACP Award–winning author of Cracking the Coconut and Asian Grilling, the simple, inspiring recipes and straightforward, easy-to-follow advice found in The Elements of Life will inspire you to live according to the elements and follow a traditional path to health, beauty, longevity, and inner peace.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #13322 in Books
• Published on: 2009-10-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 336 pages

Amazon.com Review

Product Description

Discover the Thai approach to food and wellness-and use nature's elements to eat for optimum health, beauty, and spiritual well-being

The traditional Thai philosophy of diet and health involves eating meals planned around your "home element"-earth, water, wind, or fire-as well as the weather, time of day, and other factors. In this book, award-winning author Su-Mei Yu explains this age-old philosophy and gives you information and recipes to help you prepare meals that will promote better physical, spiritual, and emotional health.

She describes the personal characteristics related to the each of the four home elements, as well as the tastes, flavors, aromas, and natural ingredients best suited to them. She shows you how to identify your home element and eat foods that accommodate it through different times of the year and different times of the day. Beauty treatments geared to your home element will help you to relax, rejuvenate, and feel renewed.

Recipe Excerpts from The Elements of Life

Salad Rolls with Chicken, Mango, and Grilled Asparagus

Crispy Shrimp with Sweet and Sour Sauce

Shrimp and Thai Eggplant Salad

Cucumber, Papaya, and Chamomile Facial Mask

From Publishers Weekly
Yu, author of Cracking the Coconut and chef/owner of the San Diego restaurant Saffron, explores the Thai approach to food and wellness in this unique and illuminating collection. Based on the belief that fresh, locally grown vegetables are natural remedies essential to maintaining good health), the book details the four elements of life: earth, wind, water and fire. To be healthy, all of our bodies' elements must be in harmony, which occurs through a diet that combines the most beneficial tastes, flavors and aromas of our element and allows for varying factors such as time of day and weather. Recipes help achieve this balance and are grouped together by element. Yu provides a wide array of options for each meal, including stir-fried shrimp with asparagus; cool rice vermicelli with grilled vegetables; noodles with Chinese broccoli and pork or chicken; and mango sorbet with young coconut ribbons. Headnotes list the ailments each dish will improve. Yu also includes recipes for facial masks, massage oils and sachets that calm the mind and the senses. An informative and appetizing look at Thai tradition and its relation to food, this book offers a new perspective on healthy eating. (Oct.)
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From the Inside Flap

In Thailand, food is about nourishment, enjoyment, and the interplay of flavors, but it's also about healing and wellness. The Thai philosophy is based on the notion that each of us is born under a "home element"—Earth, Water, Wind, or Fire—which is also present in our physical bodies. By eating to satisfy your home element, in combination with the time of day and the weather, you create your own optimal health, beauty, and spiritual well-being.

Su-Mei Yu, born in Thailand to Chinese parents, grew up amid these ancient beliefs, though her own family's approach was slightly different. She moved to America as a teenager and eventually opened San Diego's first Thai restaurant. On one of her annual trips back to Thailand, Yu encountered a folk doctor who determined her home element as Water. With uncanny accuracy, he announced that she thrived in warm, dry climates, and that she preferred sour, bland, and bitter flavors. Intrigued, Yu researched the philosophy behind the home elements, and in The Elements of Life, she brings it to Western home cooks for the first time.

In the first chapter, Yu helps you determine your own home element, using a special wheel affixed to the inside back cover of the book. Then she guides you to a basic understanding of how to plan meals around your home element in conjunction with the weather and the time of day. From there, she moves into the recipes—glorious, richly flavorful recipes that fuse Western influences and Thai traditions.

The Basics chapter offers foundations you'll use across all the elements, including recipes for breakfast (Applesauce Pancakes), lunch (Tom Ka, a coconut cream soup), and dinner (Panang Curry). Here you'll find drinks, salad dressings, stir-fries, soups, curries, and much more.

Next, Yu devotes a chapter to each element. She identifies the personal characteristics related to that home element and the tastes, flavors, and aromas best suited to it, with a chart of natural ingredients that possess those qualities. Then come the recipes, meant to balance the element, time of day, and type of weather. Cold Soba Noodles, Grilled Shrimp and Mango Salad, Persian-Thai Fried Rice, and Stir-Fried Chicken or Pork with Watermelon Rind—each offers benefits for one or more elements. Every chapter ends with recipes for natural beauty treatments, massage oils, and healing balms.

With a wealth of simple, inspiring recipes and straightforward, easy-to-follow advice, The Elements of Life will help you follow a traditional, natural, and remarkably effective path to health, beauty, longevity, and inner peace.