A couple years ago, I got a call from my friend Heather. She wanted me to meet her friend Amanda Chantal Bacon—she thought we might be able to work together somehow, or just find a kind of kindred spirit in one another that would be generative to us both. Heather told me that Amanda and I had had opposite food journeys, of a sort: I grew up in a household that viewed food as medicine, at times obsessively so, to the point of veering into the territory of orthorexia. I’ve been vegetarian, vegan, raw, and now, after three decades of finding my way with food, am a very content (and highly selective) omnivore.
Like most American babes of the ‘80s, Amanda grew up eating sugary cereal and Yoplait yogurt, with a side of rich foods in gorgeous Manhattan restaurants, and a hefty dose of suffering from terrible food allergies. Though her parents sought alternative treatments, it wasn’t until many decades later, after she’d immersed herself in culinary school and apprenticeships with some of the best chefs in California, that she discovered her own healing relationship to food. She found that seaweed alleviated long-standing hormonal imbalances. She used adaptogenic foods like medicinal mushrooms (reishi, chaga, cordyceps), ashwagandha, and maca to rebuild her immune system and blood chemistry. She reveled in the power of system tonics like turmeric and the chlorophyll abundant in heavy doses of juiced greens.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Before I knew any of this, Amanda and I had a meeting at her home in Venice in 2014. At the time, I was still working as a freelance editor and copywriter, and her business, Moon Juice, was in need of support with a whole range of content for their website, their product labels, and, most importantly, her forthcoming book. That first day together, I sipped on cold-pressed juices and spiced milks unlike any I’d ever had.
Amanda floated around her kitchen as we talked, tossing various dark powders and creamy liquids into her Vitamix, asking me if I’d ever tried shilajit resin (nope) or liquid ormus (nope) or heard of tocotrienols (also nope). She occupied a world of natural ingredients with magical powers—a world where she’d seen, firsthand, the results of experimentation with ingredients that delivered highly specific effects within her body. Shilajit increases the bioavailability of nutrients. Ormus activates the pineal gland. And tocotrienols regenerate tissue. Though I’d grown up dousing my food with spirulina and nutritional yeast and drinking vegetable juice, this was a whole new level of medicinal food.
The really wild thing about all of these wacky ingredients, though, was that Amanda made everything taste incredible. To her nori wraps, green juice blends, fermented vegetables, and raw donuts she brought the culinary insight of a brilliantly trained chef. One of my favorite treats, to this day, is her strawberry rose geranium bar (raw and vegan, of course), with a side of golden milk. It’s a palatal delight unlike any I’ve ever had before or since.
And all of this is to say nothing of the fact that Amanda and I became fast friends, bonding over love of strong flavors, healing foods, and distaste of new age BS. Though we’d arrived at our current juncture from wildly different paths, in her I did, in fact, find a kindred spirit. A woman deeply committed to two things: Helping people live more ecstatically healthy and happy lives, and mothering her toddler son, Rohan.
As Moon Juice grew to wild acclaim on an international plane in the past year—long after Amanda and I finished working on her book proposal and then the book itself—some press turned on her. Sullen reporters shamed her for her passion for health, for the way that passion translated into dollars and cents. Because I am in a somewhat adjacent field, friends who didn’t know my connection to Amanda began sending articles of this nature to me. To them, I consistently volleyed back the following: Amanda is exactly the breadth and strength and magic she seems to be. She is a culinary genius, a deeply passionate healer, an incredibly savvy businessperson, and a phenomenal mother. And that’s all that matters.
And she also makes food so potent that it always surprises me it can also be delicious. These turmeric cider pickles are the perfect example. Drawn from the pages of the book we worked on throughout the spring and summer of 2014, these are an incredible accompaniment to salads, sandwiches, wraps, and grain and veggie bowls. They’d be delicious with rice and a fried or poached egg. And excellent with curries and soups as well.
The Moon Juice Cookbook assigns unique medicinal properties to each recipe, providing an easy way to navigate the book with purpose. These pickles are an “Inflammation tamer” and “Immunity food”, due to the hyper-dosage of turmeric and apple cider, as well as the potency of chiles.
Reprinted from The Moon Juice Cookbook by arrangement with Pam Krauss Books/Avery, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, A Penguin Random House Company. Copyright © 2016, Amanda Bacon
TURMERIC CIDER PICKLES FROM THE MOON JUICE COOKBOOK.
Ingredients
- 1 (3-ounce) piece fresh turmeric root
- 3 cloves garlic smashed with the side of a knife
- 3 chiles de àrbol, torn thirds by hand (I couldn’t find these, so used red chili flakes)
- ½ teaspoon pink salt
- ½ cup apple cider vinegar
Instructions
- Scrape the peel from the turmeric root with the side of a spoon and then use a mandoline to slice it lengthwise into long, thin strips. Place the sliced turmeric in a clean 1-quart glass jar and add the garlic, chiles, salt, and vinegar.
- Cover and refrigerate for up to a month, and use as soon as an hour later.
