I've always eaten well and healthily, at least compared to the average person. Growing up in Australia there was always an abundance of fresh fruit, vegetables, meat and seafood. It was a Mediterranean climate, which attracted migrants from that area, so Italian, Greek and Lebanese food were readily available, and cheap. Once you've eaten that food it is very hard to go back to boring Anglo-Australian meat and two veg, so I started teaching myself how to cook it, from books. In my poverty-stricken days as an itinerant surfer I tended towards vegetarianism, mostly for financial reasons, and would often find myself eating free Indian food with a Hare Krishna splinter group. It was more flavours to explore and learn. After a while vegetarianism became a choice rather than just a necessity and I started exploring the health and spiritual aspects of it. The more I looked into it, the less I ate, mostly because of the influence of a book called "The Mucusless Healing Diet" by Arnold Ehret. I dropped dairy, grains and pulses, then went from cooked vegetables to raw vegetables and finally to just fresh fruit. It is not actually something I would wholly recommend, although it is probably the healthiest I've ever felt but I did have the advantage of freshly-grown fruit that I picked from the trees when I needed it (and this was living in suburbia too), and not having to work in a full time job. I also lost a LOT of weight. I'm six feet tall and I weighed 55 kilos! If you have seen Christian Bale in The Machinist it will give you some idea of how I looked, although I was still doing a fair amount of water sports. Then something happened that changed everything.

One of the reasons for doing the fasting and diets was to cleanse my body. It was a purification process that was part of my spiritual seeking. I'd been to India "guru shopping", where it was easy, and preferable, to be a vegetarian, but I didn't come across anyone that I would have called enlightened, except maybe this one Buddhist monk in Sri Lanka, but he was only interested in meditating and was shunned by the rest of the clergy. It wasn't until I returned to Australia, disillusioned and almost ready to give up the quest, that I met Sri Mataji Nirmala Devi. In my seeking I'd read about and met a lot of "gurus" and swamis and their disciples and most of them left me decidedly underwhelmed, and also wary of anyone professing to know the Truth. When I first met Sri Mataji, all my conditionings about what a "spiritual" person should be went out the window. Firstly, she was a woman; she didn't wear saffron, but she did wear a sari, because she is an Indian woman. She didn't speak in metaphors and riddles, and I even found myself mentally disagreeing with some of what she was saying, not because it was wrong but because it didn't fit into what I had conditioned my self to consider to be the "Truth". It wasn't until the end of her talk when she asked the people in the audience if they wanted to experience Self Realisation that I knew something was up. I knew this was what I had been seeking for, at least by name, so it had to be worth a try. I had nothing to lose, and there wasn't any charge - not that I could have paid if there was. There were a few simple exercises and questions, or more requests, all done with the eyes closed. At the end of it I felt this incredible internal silence, which I knew was the goal, and a sense of joy that one gets when completely in love. I knew at the core of my being she was the one who could teach me all I needed to know, even though she insisted we had to be our own gurus. Of course my mind wasn't going to completely give up without a fight, but that evening it wasn't going to bother. Since that day I have been practicing her method of meditation known as Sahaja Yoga.

In the following weeks I met her in person a few times and also her followers, who seemed very normal (almost too "normal" for me, bearing in mind I was a fruitarian art student). I started attending their new "ashram", and started eating (raw) vegetables again, which they very kindly prepared for me if I ever stayed for dinner. Then one evening one of the people accidently put a large plate of lamb curry and rice in front of me, and I thought, "what the hell" and ate. It tasted good. Just like that, I was no longer a vegan/fruitarian. Within three months I put on 20 kilos and my weight was back to normal for my height.

Fast forward a couple of decades and I'd been living in London, with a five year sojourn in Italy. I'd been eating 'normal' food for all that time. Good food but certainly not with the attention I used to pay to what I ate. I cycled everywhere, covering at least a 100 miles a week. I was pretty fit but I didn't feel healthy. I would often feel sleepy, sometimes have panic attacks and I accidentally discovered my blood pressure was through the roof. The doctor wanted me to go on medication immediately but I refused. I knew that when I meditated it was fine, so there had to be another factor at play. I immediately cut wheat from my diet because this is one of the most common food intolerances. It's a tough one to do in a society that survives on sandwiches and pasta, but I persevered and felt an immediate improvement, but it wasn't enough. Then a friend told me about this homeopath she had been to see about her high blood pressure and as she told me about the diagnosis I recognised immediately what I needed to do. So I made an appointment.

This homeopath doesn't use the traditional method of asking lots of questions about how I feel and family history etc. She takes a strand of hair and makes an analysis from that, so when I met her she told me what was wrong with me and had the remedies prepared. She told me I was essentially someone with low blood pressure, and people with low blood pressure and prone to feeling tired and weak in the afternoon as the blood sugar level drops, so they take sweet stuff to give them a boost - I would drink tea with 3-4 sugars and eat biscuits - the sugar rush would then excite the adrenals, which give the desired effect of waking me up, but also sent my blood pressure shooting up and causing the panic attacks because of the flight or fight effect of adrenaline. It made perfect sense. I just wondered why GPs didn't know this, but as most of them are not much more than drug pushers for the pharmaceutical corporations now, it's hardly surprising. So this dear old lady gave me a personalised list of foods I could and couldn't eat, which naturally meant nothing sweet, including fruit (tough for an ex-fruitarian), although I was allowed honey and apples. Dairy products and beef - basically anything from cows and cattle - was out, but goat and sheep products were OK. I was still not eating wheat, so that was easy; I rarely ate cheese and didn't eat beef anyway and only had milk in tea. Tea was immediately off the menu because, to my palate, it is undrinkable without milk and sugar. Giving up sugar was the toughest, but I went cold turkey. It was way harder than giving up smoking and alcohol, which really only need a change of mind and a bit of will power, but the sugar cravings were hard to get over because my body was demanding it, but after a few days it passed and I started to notice an immediate improvement.

So with this list of things I couldn't (or shouldn't - depending on your attitude) eat, I wanted to find a way of making the best of what I could eat without resorting to bland meat and two veg, the very things I had been trying to avoid since I was a youth. So it was back to the Mediterranean diet, minus the pasta and pastries that dominate Italian and Greek cooking, which mostly left Middle Eastern, and the Indian food I was already more than familiar with.

So there you have it. I have almost gone full circle, back to the food I ate when I was a youth and discovering the wonderful flavours of the East. It also rekindled my passion for cooking, which I lost after working as a sous chef for longer than I should have. The same thing that happened to me with graphic design.

The pages of this blog will feature recipes of food that fit into the criteria of my dietary regime: no dairy, no beef, no wheat and no sugar. Fruit is back on the menu. You may be surprised to read how well you can eat without what many people would consider the absolute staples, which are basically all the components of hamburgers. What I make is far from fast food and usually takes between one and two hours to prepare - and about 15 minutes to eat - but it tastes great, and there is as much satisfaction in cooking it as there is in eating it. And that is one of the secrets of good cooking - giving. Sure I do it because I love the flavours, but I enjoy seeing others enjoying what I cook even more.

One final thing. Living in London is a real blessing if you love to cook, especially for all these "exotic" dishes. Everything is available. What may be even more surprising to you is that this food is generally incredibly cheap to prepare, despite the fact that London is one of the most expensive cities on the planet. Most the recipes here will feed four people for around £5, depending on the meat used, and usually with enough left over for a lunch for two the next day. I still fail to understand why people think that fast food and packaged food is a cheaper alternative. It is a quick alternative for people who are too "busy" to cook because they have to watch mindnumbing shite on the TV. Oops, rants are supposed to go in a different part of the blog.

Anyway. I hope you will enjoy the recipes from Morocco, India, the Middle East and Mediterranean, and let me know if you do, or if you have any questions.