Grilled Wedge Steak Salad + Intentional Eating Part 5 (The Practice)
Happy Friday, friends! Today’s recipe epitomizes what I love about summer cooking—it’s a dynamic dinner that’s packed with flavor and texture, but it’s also easy to make (it would be perfect for Father’s Day if you’re celebrating). It’s a grilled wedge salad featuring smoky romaine, a creamy blue cheese dressing, sweet tomatoes, quick pickled shallots, salty bacon and flank steak (or you can use chicken). It’s way more than the sum of its parts (and it’s way more than just a salad). Today is also the last part of my intentional eating series, and we’re going to tie everything together (oh, the satisfaction!).
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Our behavior is a choice
Most of us have the power to choose how cooking will look in our lives. As Edward Espe Brown states in his fabulous book, No Recipe: Cooking as Spiritual Practice,
“When we realize that the things we do are not just things but our behavior, then we may also realize that we have the power to change our life by changing the way we do things rather than what we do.”
For most of us reading this newsletter, cooking is an everyday activity. It might feel fun or it might feel like a huge chore (or somewhere in between). Either way, if we can shift our perspective to view cooking as a tool to help us connect to our bodies, to the foods we eat, and to our spiritual selves, then we can use the everyday act of preparing food (and the shopping, cleaning and eating that goes along with it!) as a way to access a deeper sense of presence, freedom and perhaps even joy in our lives.
Intentional Eating
One of the easiest ways we can do this is through intentional eating—cooking and eating with our full presence as an act of self care. Over the past four weeks we’ve been talking about how breathing, engaging our senses, setting intentions and expressing gratitude can connect us to our bodies, quiet the chatter of our minds, and bring us more pleasure in the kitchen. Today we’re bringing everything together in a simple practice that I call BESTT (oh, for the love of an acronym!). It stands for:
Breathe
Engage your senses
Set an intention
Thank your food
Thank your body
BESTT is an easy way to remember and embody intentional eating. It’s a pause before cooking or eating. It literally takes seconds—a few deep breaths, a grounding into your senses, a quick intention, a second of gratitude.
Think of BESTT as a daily practice or ritual, but remember that it’s a suggestion, not a prescription. It’s meant to grow and change with you. You can start by just taking deep breaths before cooking and eating, then expand as feels right and good. The focus should be on what feels good to you, and what helps you feel more embodied, present and free in the kitchen. It shouldn’t be one more thing on your to-do list, but rather a moment of consciousness that you take for yourself.
For an auditory version, listen here!
BESTT Practice
I’ve outlined the BESTT practice below (scroll down to to get a printable version that you can tape to your fridge!):
1. Breathe: Take two to three deep breaths, down deep into your belly. Let each breath relax you, starting at the top of your head all the way down to your feet. Arrive here.
Deep breathing is powerful medicine, helping us to relax our bodies, clear our minds and calm our nervous system. When we breathe slowly and deeply we can connect to the present moment, we ground into our bodies, and we unravel both physical and emotional tension.
2. Engage your senses: Feel into your fingers, rubbing them together, and ground your feet onto the floor. Smell the kitchen or the meal before you. Listen to the sounds in the room.
Connecting to our senses also helps us gain presence. It’s impossible to be lost in the entanglements of our thoughts when our full attention is on what we’re seeing, feeling, hearing, tasting and/or smelling. This in turn makes us more instinctive cooks—we can smell the garlic before it burns; we can hear the bubble of the soup when it needs to be turned down; we can feel the bounce of the cake when it’s ready to come out of the oven. As eaters, focusing on our senses connects us to our bodies and slows our eating. This helps us to better tune in to our hunger and satiation cues and experience the full pleasure of something delicious.
3. Set an intention: Set an intention for how to you want to be or feel as you cook or eat. This can be something as simple as “I will be fully here now,” or something more specific, such as “I will look for beauty in the small moments.” When your mind wanders, gently bring it back to the intention.
Intentions are like guideposts, helping us direct our attention towards how we want to be and feel in any situation. Our minds are problem solvers and love to have something ruminate over. However, when we let our minds rule, we get caught in an endless cycle of worries and expectations. Intentions give our minds something else to grasp onto. They’re like a healthy chew toy when the dog is tearing up the furniture.
4. Thank your food: Give thanks to the food in front of you and to the earth for nurturing it. No matter what’s on your cutting board or plate, feel gratitude for the fact that it’s here to nourish you. What a gift.
There are many scientifically proven benefits of gratitude, from improving physical health and psychological health, to boosting self esteem, to reducing stress, to fostering resilience. A simple gratitude practice is also one of the easiest ways we can shift our perspectives. When we focus on the positive aspects of our lives, we can begin to see abundance where perhaps we had only perceived scarcity. In the kitchen, gratitude connects us more deeply to our food, but it can also connect us to the earth, our bodies, and each other.
5. Thank your body: When it’s time to eat, thank your body. It knows how to digest food and process nutrients without your mind doing a thing. No matter what you’re eating, imagine the food entering your system without resistance. Take pleasure in the experience, and welcome it with open arms. Say to yourself, “I trust my body.”
Our bodies are incredible. They know how to breathe, heal wounds, digest food, absorb nutrients and so much more without our minds doing a thing. Giving thanks to our bodies before each meal allows us to reconnect to the deep, inherent wisdom of our physical beings—a wisdom that our mind does not manage. We can begin to release the resistance we carry about our bodies and instead begin to honor them as something wondrous and beautiful. In doing so, we learn to better listen to and trust the messages that our bodies communicate, from what foods feel best for our specific make-up, to when (and even where) we best digest foods, to when we should rest or move.
Consistency is key
While it only takes seconds, BESTT requires a moment of pause, and pausing isn’t always easy. Old habits are hard to break. For years I was in the pattern of doing, doing, doing. I would jump into making dinner (and eating) without taking a breath. I would bring the worries of my day into the kitchen with me. Cooking was often stressful, to the point where I developed chronic indigestion for five years, as I describe here.
It took me many months to rewire my patterning, but I was gentle with myself. No matter how BESTT looks for you, remember that consistency is key. The only way to create real, lasting change is through repetition (research shows that it takes at least 18 days but on average 66 days to rewire the neural pathways in our brains to establish a new habit). So think of this practice as a ritual, like tying on an apron or turning on music everyday before cooking and eating.
And remember, the whole point of all of this is to help bring more ease and joy into the kitchen (and into your life!). There will be still be nights when you’re rushed or tired and dinner will feel like a chore. It’s okay. I think of those moments like light posts, reminding me that I’m human. For me, it’s usually a sign that I need nourishment, whether that’s in the form of a deep breath, a moment of quiet, a warm bath, or even take-out.
Grilled Wedge Steak Salad
This is way more than a salad—it’s a charismatic meal filled with contrasting flavors and textures. Like with the BESTT practice, I encourage you to make it your own. You can use any cut of steak you like (I use flank steak) or go for grilled chicken instead. You can also omit the meat altogether for a lovely starter course. While it’s a one-dish dinner, you can also round things out with these Grilled Potatoes if you prefer.
When I last made this salad, I was having a rough day. I was scattered and stressed and didn’t feeling like cooking at all. I therefore set an intention to focus fully on my senses. I moved slowly and deliberately, feeling the thin slices of shallots between my fingers, tasting the sharp edge of the blue cheese, listening to the crackle of bacon in the skillet, smelling the smoky romaine as it crisped on the grill. I tried to let go of perfectionism, allowing the cooking itself to be the goal. As we sat to eat, I realized that I was filled with serenity. Yes, it was just dinner—just another weeknight meal—but I was fully in my body. I was completely alive, I was present for the food in front of me, and I was incredibly grateful.
Watch the recipe come together in this video:
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