Jamie Oliver may have never stepped foot on a yoga mat, but he is doing and living yoga every single day of his life.

Before you get images of Jamie ladling soup from his nimble toes in scorpion, know that doing and living yoga doesn’t mean attending your favorite asana class five days a week to perfect your handstand.

Yoga means “to yoke” or “to unite”.  That is exactly what Jamie Oliver is doing—uniting the world by creating a food revolution, one fresh ingredient at a time. He is uniting families and school systems by teaching them how to put down the processed food that we know, love and let kill us slowly.

Then, in comes his culinary genius!  He’s teaching us the oldest trick in the book—how to cook. Not only how to cook, but using clean, healthy and fresh food.  Jamie’s inspiring people all over America to reconnect with their food and change the way they eat in hopes of a longer and healthier future.

And Jamie, if you read this and want to do yoga, I’d happily be paid in food.

Visit Jamie’s website www.jamieoliver.com/campaigns and sign his petition, which states:

I support Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution. America’s kids need better food at school and better health prospects. We need to keep cooking skills alive.

GET INSPIRED

Watch Jamie’s amazing speech for TED.  Sharing powerful stories from his anti-obesity project in Huntington, W. Va., TED Prize winner Jamie Oliver makes the case for an all-out assault on our ignorance of food.

http://vimeo.com/9407655

DIG IN

Two of my FAVORITE Jamie recipes—one delicious roast chicken and one mushy carrot goodness for the veggies out there!  Check it, he even pushes free-range and organic! I’m so in love.

perfect roast chicken

main courses | serves 4 – 6

Having learnt the things I’ve learnt about chickens over the last few years, of course I’m going to suggest that you buy free-range or organic. But if you’re a little tight for cash, the RSPCA Freedom Food chickens are very good and available in all good supermarkets.

ingredients

• 1 x approximately 1.6kg chicken, preferably free-range, organic or higher welfare

• 2 medium onions

• 2 carrots

• 2 sticks of celery

• 1 bulb of garlic

• olive oil

• sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

• 1 lemon

a small bunch of fresh thyme, rosemary, bay or sage, or a mixture

To prepare your chicken

• Take your chicken out of the fridge 30 minutes before it goes into the oven

• Preheat your oven to 240°C/475°F/gas 9

• There’s no need to peel the vegetables – just give them a wash and roughly chop them

• Break the garlic bulb into cloves, leaving them unpeeled

• Pile all the veg and garlic into the middle of a large roasting tray and drizzle with olive oil

• Drizzle the chicken with olive oil and season well with salt and pepper, rubbing it all over the bird

• Carefully prick the lemon all over, using the tip of a sharp knife (if you have a microwave, you could pop the lemon in these for 40 seconds at this point as this will really bring out the flavour)

• Put the lemon inside the chicken’s cavity, with the bunch of herbs

To cook your chicken

• Place the chicken on top of the vegetables in the roasting tray and put it into the preheated oven

• Turn the heat down immediately to 200°C/400°F/gas 6 and cook the chicken for 1 hour and 20 minutes

• If you’re doing roast potatoes and veggies, this is the time to crack on with them – get them into the oven for the last 45 minutes of cooking

• Baste the chicken halfway through cooking and if the veg look dry, add a splash of water to the tray to stop them burning

• When cooked, take the tray out of the oven and transfer the chicken to a board to rest for 15 minutes or so

• Cover it with a layer of tinfoil and a tea towel and put aside. Now is the time to make your gravy

To carve your chicken

• Remove any string from the chicken and take off the wings (break them up and add to your gravy for mega flavour)

• Carefully cut down between the leg and the breast

• Cut through the joint and pull the leg off

• Repeat on the other side, then cut each leg between the thigh and the drumstick so you end up with four portions of dark meat

• Place these on a serving platter

• You should now have a clear space to carve the rest of your chicken

• Angle the knife along the breastbone and carve one side off, then the other

• When you get down to the fussy bits, just use your fingers to pull all the meat off, and turn the chicken over to get all the tasty, juicy bits from underneath

• You should be left with a stripped carcass, and a platter full of lovely meat that you can serve with your piping hot gravy and gorgeous roast veg

carrots with thyme, cumin and orange butter

snacks and sides | serves 8

Wash the thyme stalks in hot water for 20 seconds. When cool enough to handle, strip the leaves off the stalk. In a food processor, whizz the thyme leaves, the cumin seeds and orange zest together with the butter. Lay out a 30cm square piece of greaseproof paper on a work surface and scoop the butter on to the middle. Roll one edge up over the butter as if you were trying to fold the paper in half, and with your hands shape the butter into a cylinder shape as best you can. Wrap the butter up in the paper, twist the ends so the package looks like a Christmas cracker and place in the fridge to set.

Steam the carrots for 10 minutes and, once cooked, toss in a warm bowl with some slices of the thyme, cumin and orange butter.

ingredients

• 400g baby carrots, scrubbed

for the butter

• a small bunch of fresh thyme

• a small pinch of cumin seeds

• zest of 1 orange

• 250g unsalted butter, softened

Kathryn is a lover and teacher of yoga by day, a wizard in the kitchen with her Jamie Oliver cookbook by dinner time and a professional dog snuggler at night.

Follow Kathryn @kathrynbudig or on Facebook

www.kathrynbudig.com