The Inner Sun: Sweetcorn, Saffron & the Ivy's Climb
A Note on Eating Yellow
This week we're stoking the Solar Plexus Chakra (Manipura) with golden yellow food — sweetcorn, grapefruit, saffron, quince and egg yolk, the purest yellow in the kitchen. The Solar Plexus is the seat of the inner fire: digestion, confidence, and the will to act. Yellow foods come at the height of the harvest, when the year itself turns amber and gold. Here's this week's golden table:
Download This Week's Resources
Download this week's Recipe Card (PDF) and Shopping List (PDF) to take with you to the kitchen or the shops.
Welcome to Cook in Colour — Series 3
We're three weeks into our third journey around the wheel, and this week the food turns golden. From a Vietnamese grapefruit salad to a Spanish paella pan, from golden fritters to an Italian zabaglione, the yellow table is a world tour — because gold is the colour every cuisine celebrates at harvest time. Each week brings four colour-themed recipes, a cold soup from somewhere warm, a seasonal brew, medicinal herbs in bloom, and a Celtic tree to sit with. This week the tree is the Ivy (Gort), and it has a heart hidden in a close off the Royal Mile.
The Solar Plexus Chakra (Manipura)
The Solar Plexus Chakra is our inner sun. Its element is Fire, its colour is golden yellow, and its seed mantra is RAM. Affirmation for the week: I honour the fire within me. I digest my life with confidence and act on my own behalf.
This Week's Recipes
Breakfast: Sweetcorn Fritters & Salmon
Golden fritters of sweetcorn, spring onion and herbs, pan-fried until the edges lace brown and crisp, topped with hot-smoked or griddled salmon, a squeeze of lemon and a spoonful of creme fraiche. The BBC Good Food fritter batter is a reliable friend. Get the recipe at bbcgoodfood.com
Lunch: Gỏi Bưởi — Vietnamese Grapefruit Salad
The great cold salad of Vietnam: sweet grapefruit segments teased apart into their juice vesicles and tossed with shrimp, mint, grated carrot, cabbage, roasted peanuts and fried shallots in a sharp fish-sauce and lime dressing. Andrea Nguyen's version uses the mild oroblanco grapefruit, but a sweet pink grapefruit does beautifully. Get the recipe at vietworldkitchen.com
Dinner: Martha's Paella
The golden centrepiece of the week. Saffron-soaked rice cooked in one wide pan with chicken, chorizo, shrimp and mussels, the bottom layer toasting to the treasured socarrat. Paella is theatre as much as dinner — a dish that asks you to stand at the pan and tend the fire, which is pure Solar Plexus work. Get the recipe at marthastewart.com
Supper: Zabaglione
Italy's purest yellow pudding: egg yolks, sugar and Marsala whisked over a pan of barely simmering water until they swell into a warm golden cloud. It takes eight minutes and two wrists, and it is the whole point of keeping egg yolks in the house. Get the recipe at seriouseats.com
This Week's Brew: Quince & Honey Liqueur
Quinces are only just arriving, and this is the way to meet them. Grate the raw fruit — skin and all — into a big jar with vodka, a handful of dried rose petals and a cinnamon stick, and sweeten it with honey instead of sugar. Then put it away in a dark cupboard and let the ivy month do its slow work: two to three months later you strain a pale pink-gold liqueur that arrives, quite conveniently, just in time for Christmas bottling. Get the recipe at adamantkitchen.com
Cold Soup of the World: Salmorejo (Spain)
From Cordoba, the silkier cousin of gazpacho: ripe tomatoes, day-old bread, garlic, olive oil and sherry vinegar blended until impossibly smooth and served cold, crowned with chopped jamon and hard-boiled egg. No cooking, no straining, fifteen minutes — a golden-orange bowl that still tastes of high summer even as the year turns. Get the recipe at bbcgoodfood.com
Medicinal Herbs in Bloom
Calendula is the Solar Plexus flower — a little sun you can grow on a windowsill, and still golden in Edinburgh gardens well into October. Herbalists prize its petals for lymph and skin, but its oldest work is the gut: a calendula infusion is a traditional soother for an inflamed digestion, which is exactly the terrain of Manipura. It is one of the safest and friendliest of all healing herbs, gentle enough for children and cheerful enough for a grey morning. Dandelion is its rougher sibling, and autumn is prime root season — the plant has spent all summer pumping energy down into its taproot, which is where the medicine lives. A teaspoon of roasted dandelion root in a cup of hot water is the great bitter: it wakes up the liver, gets bile moving, and lights the digestive fire from below. Herbalists call it the herb of the stubborn and the strong. If you feel your willpower flagging as the dark half of the year begins, this is the root to sit with.
What the Land is Offering Right Now
Early October is the fattest forage of the year in the Lothians. The bramble lanes around Blackford Hill and the Water of Leith are still heavy, sloes have blackened on the blackthorn for gin, rosehips hang red on every hedge, and the hazelnuts the squirrels haven't claimed are dropping in the Cramond woods. Elderberries are at their last good week for cordial, apples are falling in every neglected orchard, and the first quinces are arriving in the shops — which is where this week's liqueur begins. Take a basket, take your time, and leave plenty behind for the birds and the winter ahead.
Where to Meditate: Solar Plexus Chakra
The Solar Plexus is the seat of the inner fire, and October tests it: the light is leaving, and this chakra is where we keep our own. Element: Fire. Colour: golden yellow. Seed mantra: RAM. Start your week with Lorna's Sunday morning chakra workshop on Instagram: @lorna.mckey — the perfect place to kindle the fire before the week begins. For a golden meditation, climb Calton Hill at sunrise and face east over the Firth of Forth — the city's best place to watch the light come back. Portobello Beach does the same with salt in the air; Blackford Hill does it at the other end of the day, when the sunset sets the whole western sky on fire. And because this is the first week of the Ivy month, the map below keeps the full living calendar wheel of Edinburgh's Ogham trees turning.
Tap any pin to get Google Maps directions. Open the interactive street map →
The Ivy (Gort)
The Vine month ended on September 29, and on Wednesday the Ivy (Gort) took over the calendar — the tree of binding, tenacity and connection, keeper of the green through the dead half of the year. You won't find ivy in the council's street-tree register — it climbs, it doesn't stand — so there are no ivy pins on this week's map. But you'll find it on half the old walls of the city, and nowhere more perfectly than Chesil's Court, the close off the Canongate where the ivy has grown itself into a heart on the wall. It's one of Edinburgh's quiet wonders, and it even appears in Secret Edinburgh: An Unusual Guide, Hannah Robinson's book of the city's hidden places. If your own photo doesn't come out, hers is in the book — and the book makes a rather lovely Christmas gift. The photograph below is the ivy heart of Chesil's Court, taken by Sharon. Go and see it in person before the month turns.
A Sacred Table in Yellow
Pack the fritters cold — they're better that way than you'd think — with curls of hot-smoked salmon and a lemon wedge. The grapefruit salad travels beautifully in a jar: dressing in the bottom, vesicles and shrimp and mint on top, shake and pour at the top of the hill. A flask of salmorejo keeps it cold going up. Zabaglione is strictly a kitchen-table affair; leave it for Sunday evening at home with the last of the Marsala. Take it all up Calton Hill an hour before sunset, eat your golds facing west, and let the day go out burning.
Until Next Week
Next Sunday the wheel turns green: the Heart Chakra (Anahata), with the Ivy still climbing and the first hard frost never far off. Recipes land here every Sunday at 9am, selected each week by Sharon for thenofussgourmet.com. Recipes selected each week by Sharon for thenofussgourmet.com
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