Food at the Bosque

At the Bosque, our emphasis on healthy living and active lifestyles involves consuming healthy, hearty foods that leave us well nourished and satisfied.

Meals at the Bosque are mostly vegan, though eggs, dairy, and honey are occasionally used in food preparation. Lunches and dinners are prepared by visitors, volunteers, and residents with careful consideration of balancing nutritional components of every meal. We are able to accommodate most diet needs, including wheat sensitivities and strict veganism, provided guests state their needs prior to arrival. We provide guests with three meals a day.

We eat two meals together a day together on the Black Rock terraza, joining as a community ranging from three to fifty people. This is a time when announcements can be made to the whole group, activities can be planned, and most importantly, food can be shared and enjoyed together.

Our diet is heavy in whole grains and lots of fruits and vegetables, prepared with care to maximize nutritional value. We use a minimal amount of oil for cooking and salads, and stay away from chemicals, unnatural ingredients, and foods containing partially hydrogenated oils. Our meals give visitors an adequate amount of protein and iron to make up for the lack of meat. Click here to view a sample week's menu. While you are welcome to bring foods to supplement your diet at the Bosque, we keep fresh fruit stocked in the Casita for folks to snack on between meals.

We eat organic vegetables and fruits harvested at the Bosque when available, and shop at local tiangis (markets) to support locally grown produce. Guests can experience local interesting foods such as nopales, prickly pear, guayabas, blue corn tortillas, agave nectar and maguey stems, and chayotes. Visitors have opportunities to sample fresh molé in local villages, or ceviché in a nearby town's plaza.

Foods we like

We love super foods, which are foods containing essential nutrients important to human health. Some of the super foods we eat are: apples, amaranth, avocado, bananas, beans, broccoli, flax seeds, nopales, oats, oranges, papaya, pumpkin, soy, spinach, and tomatoes.
We provide hibiscus flower (jamaica) for guests to make tea.

Foods we don't like

We stay away from foods with high fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated oil, or MSG. Our guests are welcome to bring snacks for themselves or to share, but we request that the snacks not contain those ingredients.
We also don't eat highly processed foods or foods which contain ingredients that we don't recognize and/or cannot pronounce. We eat foods made out of food.

Cooking Methods

We love the idea of raw foods, and try to include raw food as a regular part of our diet. Combining fresh, raw ingredients with a simple dressing is a favorite cooking method. Overcooking vegetables reduces their nutritional value, and we like to maximize the value of everything we eat.
We bake in our solar oven and cook on the outdoor lorena stoves to minimize our reliance on propane. Our solar oven is perfect for cooking beans, rice, soups, cakes, pizza and more. The lorena stoves work just like a gas stove, except they are built to efficiently use wood to heat the burners.

Vegetarianism and Meat

We serve vegetarian food at the Bosque Village. A properly planned vegetarian diet is healthy and nutritionally sound. Numerous studies show that eating an entirely vegetarian or predominantly vegetarian diet significantly reduces risk of cancers and heart disease. You can read more about vegetarianism health benefits on Wikipedia.
While the food we serve is vegetarian, guests are welcome to bring meat to cook over a campfire. We have no rule against residents or visitors eating meat. We simply ask that those who prepare meat understand how to cook meat at the Bosque since we keep our kitchens vegetarian. When meat is cooked it is generally marinated and cooked over a campfire. People preparing meat are sensitive to vegetarians and vegans present and keep serving spoons and utensils they are using separate from utensils vegetarians use for their food.

Food Forest

We are planting trees such as walnut, loquat, pear, peach, quince, avocado, pomegranate, citruses, apple, and fig in tune with the food forest permaculture concept. In some years our forest will have changed from being only pine, oak, and madrone to a very diverse treescape full of a wide variety of trees, many of which bear fruits.

As we expand our knowledge of the plants which already exist in the forest, our guests will get the opportunity to experience wildcrafting, or harvesting plants from their natural environment. Many of the native plants in the forest have culinary or medicinal uses.

Food Gardens

One of our goals is to grow the majority of the produce we consume. So far we have had great luck with tomatoes, tomatillos, chard, carrots, radishes, zucchini, rhubarb, squash, broccoli, lettuces, beans, spinach and peas. We try new crops every year.

 

 

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