Nutrition

At The Acorn, we love talking about food and its nutritional benefits. We create plant based recipes that are delicious and can be cooked easily to inspire you in your own kitchen.

Katie has spent more than the last decade adapting recipes to suit the requirements of her family and gently increasing the content of plants and decreasing the animal products. The family has seen amazing health benefits that have secured Katie’s beliefs in the plant powered way. She now runs a fully plant based kitchen at home since 2017.

Katie studied a course on Whole Food Plant Based Nutrition in 2018 with Cornell University and has applied this to her support of others and the Heartwood Kitchen meals. She continues to enjoy learning different benefits of plant based foods and is happy to discuss with you on retreat days, commitments allowing or if you would like to explore this, please email to book a date and time.

Sarah joined the Acorn crew in January 2022 and brings with her true kitchen magic! Her firm belief is that what we put into our bodies determines our health, our well-being and the quality of our lives.

Using the philosophy of Food as a healing tool the dishes she creates are wholefood, seasonal, nutritionally and energetically balanced, organic and local wherever possible. Sarah also incorporates the vibrancy of highly nutritious kitchen garden produce, weaving whatever is available into her beautifully nourishing meals.

Sarah offers plant based cooking workshops to inspire your own kitchen and bring new ideas of nutritiously delicious foods to you. She makes cooking accessible and fun, allowing a confidence-building approach.

Sarah is able to cater for hired retreats if you require her to do so. She can provide breakfast for £5 per person and she offers two options for a main meal and dessert –

Option A is food left to heat and serve £15 per person per meal

Option B is fully catered, served and cleared for £20 per person per meal

All food is plant based and gluten free.

The journey of nutrition and food is a life long process. It is one that will have a unique path for each and every one of us. There will be reasons we choose to eat and cook the way we do – our upbringing, our own physical response to food, lifestyle and personal experiences with health.

The importance of nutrition is that it satisfies many areas. That it is foremost about health – fuelling our body in a positive way and giving ourselves the best chance to stay well but it is also achievable and enjoyable because otherwise it simply won’t work or at least not for long. We encourage people to look at their own approach to food and help them to make the changes necessary to support optimum health.

We have our own Nutritional Therapist, Sara, at the Acorn. Sara also uses Vitality Screening as a tool to see how well your body and its organs and systems are functioning. A set of non-invasive tests, Vitality Screening is a great tool to discover lots of data and information about what is going on in your body right now. Such as: how you are metabolising your glucose, what your cholesterol is, how oxygenated your blood and therefore your body tissues are, how balanced your nervous system is… and lots more. Using this information and talking to you, Sara will put together a report and recommendations on what you can do to further improve your health or assist with any difficulties or health concerns you are currently facing. Sara works collaboratively with our other therapists, and will often recommend health and healing strategies beyond diet and supplements.
Sara is passionate about educating people on good nutrition and runs a number of workshops from the Acorn, sometimes alongside Sarah, our vegan chef. Sara is a flexitarian, with a mostly plant based diet, and as such she knows only too well the challenge of bringing a more plant focused diet into the home. Sara is a keen cook and worked for some time in a Michelin starred kitchen. Together Sara and Sarah bring you workshops such as “Grains, Greens, Nuts and Beans” where you are given lots of recipes and ideas of how to include these valuable plant foods easily and most importantly, deliciously, into your diet. Another popular workshop is “An introduction to Fermentation” where you will learn how to make your own ferments at home, including sourdough and kombucha, you are given a sourdough starter and kombucha scoby as part of the course.

We have witnessed some wonderfully positive changes from some of our guests and have received many encouraging comments about how they have been inspired by being at The Acorn. We really love talking about food and nutrition and love the idea that food is here to heal and keep us well… we just need to use it properly and go back to nature. “A food that is whole will always be worth more than the sum of its parts.”

We aim to inspire people to take steps towards their own ideal way of eating and give them support in this process

We are very lucky to have a Thermomix in our kitchen and even luckier to have Sam Croom, a top Thermomix advisor who works with us, creating dynamic workshops.