[Column] Making Everyday Meals Medicinal

I am often asked, "Is your everyday diet also medicinal cuisine?"
Medicinal cuisine is often thought of as dishes that use hard-to-find crude drugs and are not necessarily tasty but seem good for the body, or as something enjoyed by people with plenty of time and money, but this is a misunderstanding.

Medicinal cuisine is a diet where ingredients are selected and prepared based on the theories of Traditional Chinese Medicine.
While medicinal cuisine sometimes incorporates crude drugs, based on the idea of "what should I eat right now," it can become medicinal cuisine if you select ingredients that can be purchased at supermarkets and the like, just like crude drugs, with an understanding of whether they warm or cool the body and what effects they have on the human body when consumed, and then prepare them accordingly.
And if you understand the characteristics of the ingredients, you can incorporate medicinal cuisine even if you don't usually cook, when eating out, or when you are feeling unwell and cannot cook.
If you are cold, why not add cinnamon to your hot coffee?
Small bottles of cinnamon are lined up in the spice section of supermarkets.

Cinnamon works to support yang energy, warm the body, dispel cold pathogens, and resolve chills.
Several years ago, I went to visit a shrine for the New Year, stood in a long line of worshippers, and became chilled to the bone.
At a restaurant I stopped at on the way home, I had ginger-thickened udon noodles with shichimi pepper, green onions, and extra ginger, warming my body with these hot and pungent ingredients.

When you are starting to catch a cold, you want to eat easy-to-digest porridge and rest, don't you?
If you feel chills, you can add coriander (cilantro) or green onions to your porridge to dispel the pathogens on the body's surface, and if you don't have chills but have a high fever, you could add mint.
If it's too hard to stand in the kitchen, it's fine to use leftover rice or even retort-pouch porridge instead of making it from raw rice.
For a feverish cold, how about some mandarin oranges, which have heat-clearing properties?
Let's eat well so that we can stay as healthy as possible.

Changing the subject, I was born and raised in a region with a strong belief in Tenjin, the god of learning.
When my son was born, my parents had a wooden Tenjin statue made for him, and we enshrine it at home.
One year, I went to Kanazawa Shrine to pray for my son's success in his qualification exams while he was studying and not returning home.
All a parent could do was pray to the gods.
I still remember the nervousness I felt back then.
I sincerely pray that the cherry blossoms will bloom for all students taking exams this year.

I just took this with my smartphone, but since a beautiful light appeared at Kanazawa Shrine, which enshrines Sugawara no Michizane, the god of learning, I decided to post it.

On the 1st and 15th of every month, I write a medicinal cuisine column on the website of
Nagoya/Osaka Medicinal Cuisine Qualification Acquisition - General Incorporated Association Tsumugu Shiawase Yakuzen Kyokai (yakuzen.or.jp)
.
I usually work as a pharmacy pharmacist, and I am an International Traditional Chinese Medicine Medicinal Cuisine Specialist, an International Traditional Chinese Medicine Doctor, and a certified instructor for the Tsumugu Shiawase Yakuzen Kyokai, and my columns have been published since February 2017.

The [Medicinal Cuisine Column] "Making Everyday Meals Medicinal" was updated on February 1, 2015.