GET COOKIN’ IN THE NEW YEAR

Start the New Year off right with healthy cooking and healthy eating. Natural Gourmet Institute offers both. Read more about them below and watch the video. And click here to discover other wonderful Side Street spots that will get you cooking in 2014.

Annemarie Colbin came to New York in the early 1960s to “become a movie star.” After being cast as one of the hundreds of young, female extras in George Sidney’s 1963 film, Bye Bye Birdie, however, Annemarie decided that she preferred to pursue a career in the culinary arts. She explained to us that while growing up in Argentina, her mother took the family to a vegetarian health spa, to help heal her ailing father, and instill in her the knowledge and wisdom that what you put into your body directly affects your well-being. “It seemed so obvious to me, even at age eleven, but I was living in Argentina, the land of meat….And then when I came to America, I immediately realized that no one thought about food and health.” Annemarie taught herself how to properly cook vegetarian cuisine and put herself through culinary school. Quite the intellectual, and an extraordinary student, she went on, years later, to write her Ph.D. dissertation on Food and Physics.

With her movie dreams behind her, Annemarie Colbin taught cooking classes out of her Upper West Side apartment for a decade, until she was kicked out for, essentially, running a business in a residential building. In 1977, Annemarie officially established The Natural Gourmet Institute on 21st Street. Thirty-six years later, the school continues its unique mission to teach cooking and food theory as it relates to bodily health. READ MORE.