KITCHEN KARMA
At The Yoga Loft cooking class, you’ll learn to make the best salad known to man, and all about the invisible ingredients that take food to a whole new level
The cooking class with an invisible ingredient that takes Indian food to a whole new level.
Just across a busy road from Auckland’s Spark Arena, dwarfed by the great slabs of commerce around it, is a doorway; a modest slit in a concrete facade. And as improbable an address as this is for an oasis of calm and spirituality, this tiny portal is the gateway to The Loft Yoga Lounge.
We’re not here for yoga or lounging, however; we’re here for an Indian vegan cooking class. I climb the stairs to the first floor and on entering the reception/lounge area, the waft of spices tells me I am in the right place. dish food editor Claire has already arrived; she reminds me to take off my shoes and we sit at a table as the place starts to fill up with the 14 or so, mostly young, cooking class attendees.
Our hosts are Adi-rasa and his French partner Seva, who have been running this popular monthly class for some three years. The couple are organic farmers, with a property up in Kaiwaka in Northland; much of the produce for their classes comes from their farm. They met couch-surfing in Adi’s native Australia, where the pair did some ‘WWOOFING’ on organic farms.
POPPADOMS AND PASSION
“We’re just very interested in food, and discovering a vegetarian diet was revolutionary for us. We got really passionate about cooking,” Adi tells dish.
They got involved with The Loft after attending their dinner and meditation programmes when they emigrated to Auckland five and a half years ago. Neither are trained chefs; they continue as they started out at
The Loft, as volunteers (which the non-profit organisation relies on to run its very affordable sessions). They befriended a couple who were hosting the cooking classes and Adi and Seva became their unofficial ‘apprentices’.
“We started learning how to plan menus, getting our cooking skills up there. A couple of years in they had a child and asked if we’d like to take over.”
Before we enter the kitchen, Adi tells us not only are we going to learn to make delicious food from South India – “North,”
Seva corrects him with a grin – we are participating in part of the yoga tradition. Because yoga, he goes on, is not just about movement. At The Loft they offer “the complete yoga lifestyle experience”, which includes workouts, meditation, cooking classes and workshops to help us find “connection and happiness” in our daily lives.
In the kitchen we stand shoulder-toshoulder around the central steel-topped bench. This is a demonstration class, where we watch and drool as Adi and Seva chop, chat and generally wizard up some incredible food. The menu is for six people, but they’re adapting the amounts to feed all of us.
I wonder how on earth they’re going to make, in roughly an hour, this feast of aromatic basmati rice, jackfruit cauliflower curry, samosas and tamarind chutney, cabbage salad, poppadoms and halva.
MEAL PREP THE YOGA WAY
The kitchen is warm and cosy; everything is rudimentary; big metal pans, plastic tubs of spices, a charmingly vintage-looking gas burner on the bench. It all has an air of what you might call ‘generous functionality’ – nothing flash or state-of-the art; just a small space with a big heart, where meals are made to feed the many.
I notice all the ingredients are simple and affordable. “That’s a bit of a Loft speciality!” Adi tells me later. “We feed a lot of people for a low price. The style of cooking class comes from the way we learned to cook, affordable and tasty but doing things from scratch.”
As they prep, they explain cooking the yoga way. Garlic and onion are avoided as they have a “negative effect on consciousness”. “In yoga philosophy food comes under three modes of nature; the mode of ignorance, of
“The style of cooking class comes from the way we learned to cook, affordable and tasty but doing things from scratch”
passion, and of goodness. Each affects your mind in a different way,” says Adi.
“If you have too much food in the mode of passion – so onion, garlic, chillies to some extent (though we love chillies, so it’s not hard and fast!) – it will aggravate the mind. So if you’re practising meditation and want to be really calm you try and avoid these foods.”
Instead they use hing – a pungent-smelling yellow spice. It’s also known as asafoetida, derived from the Latin for ‘fetid’. Sounds disgusting, but in cooking it takes on magical properties, mellowing into a quasi onion-garlic flavour. Hing gives the same ‘kick’ as onion and garlic, but without being overpowering. Use it sparingly, warns Adi;
“for two people, about a quarter teaspoon is plenty”.
HING AND ZING
The menu is quite labour-intensive, but the pair chop and chat with good cheer and, just like the dishes they are creating, work in perfect harmony. It wasn’t always like this, apparently. When I ask Adi later if he has any tips for staying so chill while catering for a crowd, he laughs: “The answer is just do it a lot! The first time we agreed to cook a Sunday feast, and even when we started cooking on Wednesdays by ourselves, planning our own menus, it was horribly stressful. We were yelling at each other, and rushing with just 10 minutes to go… the calm has come from five or six years of being in the kitchen regularly.”
Seva and Adi prep the samosa filling – cooked potato with peas, cumin and mustard seeds – and stir the mix with an enormous wooden spoon that looks like a boat paddle. “And this is the small big wooden spoon,” laughs Adi.
The two explain where to source each ingredient. For example jackfruit – which will lend a lovely meaty texture to the curry – isn’t available fresh but it’s easy to find tinned.
Adi prepares the cabbage salad, throwing in roasted cashews and coconut, coriander, lemon juice, mustard seeds, cumin seeds, hing, turmeric and cayenne pepper.
Everything sings with freshness and colour. The tamarind chutney is vibrant, and even though we’re not allowed to dip any fingers in (so tempting), we can almost taste its zinginess just from watching the ingredients being tossed together: tamarind concentrate, green chillies, dates, ginger, sugar, garam masala and salt.
Towards the end of the class, we get to our hands-on bit – making the samosas.
We’re shown how to fashion the pastry into pockets for the stuffing, and not to put too much in. Predictably I overstuff mine, perhaps imagining the pastry is my mouth. Claire comments to me that if you had a lot of filling left over, it would be great fried with eggs or haloumi. Thanks, Claire – that’s not helping my hunger pangs.
Ah but finally. We are ushered back into the social dining/lounge area and sit on cushions at low tables drinking delicious sweet tea while Seva and Adi bless the food in the kitchen.
The blessing is a key part of the session. “What you eat not only affects your health and your body but it also affects your consciousness,” Adi explains later. “Say you go to your mother’s house, and she makes you an amazing meal cooked with love, you’re going to imbibe some of that consciousness. That’s why we chant these mantras at the end of the cooking class. We are offering it back to the source of everything, whatever you want to call it – god or the universe. It’s purifying the karma of the food.
“People think karma is ‘you do a good thing and good things happen, a bad thing and bad things happen’ etc… that’s a valid concept. But we take it a step further and say every single milli-action you perform – breathing, picking fruit, eating a plant – has some effect, negative or positive, on someone else. So we are taking on a positive consciousness, cooking with love, for others.”
Our plates arrive laden, all the colours and aromas and textures jostling for space.
It’s the perfect balance of flavours – sharp, and spicy, zesty and earthy – and another subtle, indefinable element. Could it be the hing? Or perhaps it’s the love.
The generous spirit continues when we’re all given doggy bags to take home with leftover food. I don’t just feel full – I feel cared for.
Adi was right about finding happiness and connection. And if some of that joy just happens to be samosa-shaped, who am
I to complain?
See the dish website, for a selection of
The Yoga Loft recipes.
“What you eat not only affects your health and your body, but it also affects your consciousness ”