Yoga Feed Retreats: Nourishing body, mind and tastebuds

Chef Erica Drum talks about cooking for the Yoga Feed retreats and how hands-on cookery classes have become an essential part of the weekend

Erica Drum

ALMOST 20 years ago, a friend went on a yoga retreat and returned with tales of wheatgrass shots, juice-fasting and five days without coffee. This was when wellness focused more on penance than pleasure and, although she really enjoyed the time away, it was not for the faint-hearted. While I never missed my weekly yoga class and liked the idea of a few days away to concentrate on my practice, her experiences turned me off the idea of a yoga retreat for a long time. I had no yearning to pay for the pleasure of starving myself and I’m not one for hair-shirts: If I go away for the weekend, I want to enjoy the experience, the eating and stretching.

Then, a few years ago, we went to one of Jess Hatchett’s yoga weekends at the Dzogchen Beara Buddhist Centre in West Cork. The yoga was alternately relaxing, challenging, and enjoyable. The food — our appetites whetted by the stretching and salty sea air — was memorable for all the right reasons. The fact that chef Caitlin Ruth was in the kitchen was one of the main reasons that I signed up. I lay on my yoga mat and dreamed of the huevos rancheros that Ruth served up for breakfast, brightly coloured salads at lunch and a most memorable celeriac and buffalo ricotta lasagne. My meditations were more on trying to figure out what she was magicking up in the kitchen for our next meal than any higher spiritual ideal.