Mahanasa - Seasonal Cook Book [First Book to Teach you Seasonal Recipes with Food & Lifestyle Guidelines]

Mahanasa means royal healthy kitchen in Sanskrit. During monarchy period the kitchen of the King’s had a Doctor who used to monitor cooking for wellbeing of King and soldiers at the kingdom. Such royal kitchen with Doctor was named as “Mahanasa”. Similarly we intend to create healthy kitchen at every home by creating health awareness to the person who cook and also to the person who eats. We depend on food as our major part of life. As we all know “Health is Wealth”, the vision of this book is to introduce healthy and tasty seasonal recipes which can be easily prepared in our kitchen to balance our health. 

Usually people try to learn new recipes by means of videos, internet and books for the sake of health. Now finding recipes has become easier with social media but getting accurate information is difficult, as many concepts are interpreted as per the understanding knowledge or for trend or for the look and taste. Most of the recipes speaks about presentation or taste but not about health. Once the health is lost than people just rush for search into Doctors, Dietitian’s, nutritionist and so on.

Changing Diet Pattern
Rather than spoiling health it is always good to learn how to maintain good health. At Mahanasa we focus on maintaining health first. Think, What is a diet? The diet is not the one we should not eat, diet is one we should eat to have a best health. A diet is the act of incorporating nutritious foods into daily life. Knowledge of such diet foods are most important in life and in ancient times, such precious knowledge was inherited from one generation to another like knowledge towards Ayurvedic herbs, implementing home remedies, understanding of seasonal diet and so on. 

But now even common cold and cough we tend to take medicines and it is ironic that these  days one who visits the hospital for a common ailment have to spend lakhs of amount and inspite have struggle to get back home healthily. Incompatible and seasonal variation foods can cause disease like diabetes, high blood pressure, obesity, joint pain, constipation and so on and these problems hit everyone like an epidemic. The root cause of all these is not having the knowledge of foods as per disease, or seasons. 

In cooking we tend to keep ourselves inside a box with selected vegetables, recipes, snacks and drinks, also we spend years together with same pattern of cooking. We also name it as traditional recipe of the family. This trend might change just during some festivals with special recipes. But now its time to think out of the box by adopting scientific changes in cooking and eating habits. Its always better late than never and time to get back the forgotten ingredients or the ingredients which are now named was Ayurveda medicines into cooking to avoid further more deficiencies and diseases. 
Kitchen is the Pharmacy and Food Ingredients are the Medicines
As mentioned earlier Mahanasa means Royal Healthy Kitchen. As our home is our first school and our mother is our teacher similarly our food ingredients should be our first medicines. We should have knowledge of every ingredient that we use to prepare food, its qualities, its nutritional value, its after effect once it gets digested in our body, good combination with that ingredient, bad combination with that ingredient, its benefits, side effects, its time to be taken, quantity that can be consumed and also which season or disease it can be used and so on. We should also know about the ingredients which are used in packed foods and how they are used, why they are used. When we know all these details it will be a great help for us to chose proper ingredients as per the season or the person needs and can be cooked healthily with good combinations and can be consumed at right time for the best digestion process. 

When human body is so complicated with systems then nutrition has to reach each cell through these complications and for this each and every minute detailing of the food we eat is important. When we understand these scientific details and use accordingly then definitely we can stay away from the diseases. Food to be eaten according to the season to maintain our health, so to know seasonal ingredients, seasonal changes, body changes during the different seasons are most significant. We Dr. Archana and Dr. Rekha from mahanasa has put our efforts to share this knowledge through this book. This book explains about seasons and seasonal foods through seasonal recipes, seasonal fruits and vegetables, ingredients to be used in the particular season, how to intake food and time to intake, cooking methods and many more are mentioned here. 

From Mahanasa as a team we are working towards “Food as Medicine”, as many symptoms and diseases can just be cured by changing diet patterns, in this way we are conducting many programs, workshops, Ayurveda Nutrition Course, etc. and this book is one of our such work. This book should be useful to everyone who follows and has to be a great gift to our next generation