Cook right to eat right - the Ayurvedic way

As someone who has not cooked until hitting the quarter century mark in terms of age and without a formal initiation into this art, I sometimes depend on the cooking shows both online and off it. Thanks to my little experiments, mom's on-call help and the ubiquitous cooking shows I have turned out to be a decent cook in a little under five years. While in the beginning my focus had been to produce something edible I learnt along the way, the real art or science (depending on the way one views it) of food per se.

With such tremendous scope for experimentation and cultural variations there is no wonder that there can be as many styles of cooking as there are people living on this planet. "Delicious, exotic and presentable"  besides the hep "low-cal" phenomenon seem to be the most trending objectives for cooking, whereas "wholesome, nutritious and well balanced" seem to have lost their race somewhere along the line by simply remaining as sale-able propositions as has the linkage between eating right and staying better. Amidst this increased importance to eating tastier food we seem to have deleted  simple and less processed foods from our menus such as, "rasam", a south Indian soup cooked with great digestives including cumin, asafetida and pepper.

Earlier the art of cooking greatly used the principles from the science of Ayurveda (I only speak of Indian vegetarian cooking as I know of no other) but now I notice that this has completely been lost and forgotten at least in our generation. While as a self declared foodie, I enjoy good food, but in parallel I am also conscious of the damage that can be done to humanity by forgetting the authentic style of cooking - using the correct combination of ingredients (which is probably more important than knowing the right proportions) and the exact procedure - that I am confident was laid on foundations of health and fitness. By right procedure, I mean for instance simple things such as  cutting leafy vegetables and pumpkins into large chunks to retain their nutrients. 

Authentic cooking - as per my definition is something that maximizes the nutritional gains while still being tasty. Also, the more processed the food, the lesser the benefit will it provide in terms of nutrition. 

While food needs to be palatable I am against the rants most chefs seem to be making on popular shows on combining and multiplying ingredients that simply should not be used together for wrong reasons such as for increasing food appeal. For instance, combining spinach and tomato for the color it brings out when actually these two should not be mixed together but Okra or ladies fingers should always be cooked together with tomato and onions. Yes, cooking has a great scope for personalization but this I believe should not go against the principles of cooking healthy food.  

While cooking shows and recipe books can teach us to cook exotic dishes only our mothers' and grandmothers' kitchens have secrets to a healthier cooking. Now, lets go and figure!