damian.gardynik

22/10/2026

🧑‍🍳 Comment CHEF to join us in 2027!

IT'S OFFICIAL! 🌿 2027 RETREAT DATES ARE CONFIRMED!

I'm so happy to announce that we'll be returning to the beautiful Valle de Vida in Málaga, Spain, for another year of incredible food, learning, and unforgettable experiences!

👨‍🍳 PLANT-BASED CHEF TRAINING
📅 May 21–29, 2027
📅 September 17–25, 2027

Nine days of hands-on cooking, exploring extraordinary local ingredients, mastering techniques, discovering new flavours, visiting organic farms, and sharing beautiful meals with people from around the world.

For 2027, the program is evolving! With a greater focus on developing your culinary intuition, understanding flavour combinations, and gaining the confidence to create exceptional plant-based food, from fresh raw preparations to hearty cooked dishes and everything in between.

☀️ NEW FOR 2027: CULINARY HOLIDAY RETREATS!

I'm also introducing a completely new experience for those who simply want to enjoy incredible food without having to cook it!

Think beautiful plant-based feasts prepared by me, exotic fruit tastings, visits to local growers, nature excursions, and plenty of time to relax and enjoy sunny Andalucía.

More details on these coming soon!

🌱 Chef Training applications are NOW OPEN!

Comment CHEF to discover the program and apply.

Can't wait to welcome you to Málaga! ❤️

30/09/2026

I started counting the ingredients from the last Chef Training mostly out of curiosity.

The conservative count so far is 150+ edible plant, fungal and seaweed species, and 300+ culinary expressions once you include cultivars, ripeness stages, edible parts, sprouts, ferments, flours, pastes and other forms.

What fascinates me most, though, is why this kind of diversity now feels so unusual.

Modern food systems need crops that yield reliably, look uniform, travel well and keep on a shelf. That makes large-scale distribution possible, but it also filters out a huge amount of local, seasonal and fragile diversity.

When food is grown close to where it’s eaten, you can eat more cultivars, more stages of ripeness, more leaves, flowers, shoots and wild foods. And when there is too much of something at once, you preserve it, dry it, ferment it, pickle it, turn it into syrup, jam, vinegar, w**e or something else entirely.

At the training, that looked like 15 mango cultivars, 30+ tomato cultivars, several figs and pitayas, different dates and ripeness stages, wild capers, mushrooms, seaweeds, sprouts, flowers, herbs and so much more.
This is increasingly what I want the Chef Training to be about.

Not just plant-based cooking, but recovering the breadth of real food.

The edible world is still enormous. Our diets got small.

And if you’d like to experience this kind of cooking in person, the 2027 Chef Training retreats and Culinary Holidays are currently taking names for the waiting list.

Join the waitlist to be the first to hear when dates and places open. Comment RETREAT for more info.

13/09/2026

Creation is not God. Nature is not a goddess. Food does not carry spiritual vibrations or cosmic energy.

It doesn’t need any of that to be extraordinary.

The Christian view is both simpler and greater: creation is good because God made it good. Its beauty, abundance and order are gifts, and they point beyond themselves to the One who made them.

Nature is not divine, and creation is not the Creator.

We receive the gift, enjoy it, nourish ourselves with it, and give thanks to the Giver.

📸: Some of the abundance from last year’s Chef Training. 🥭🍒 🍋

05/09/2026

I’m not writing this as someone looking at diet culture from the outside.

For years, food occupied far too much space in my life. What began as a sincere search for better health gradually became tied to purity, control, dogmatism, and identity.

And whenever I still wasn’t as healthy, clear-minded or in control as I thought I should be, the answer often seemed to be: try harder.

The Church helped me see the problem more clearly.

Christianity does not teach indifference toward food or the body. It teaches temperance, fasting, abstinence, stewardship and gratitude.

But it also insists that creation is good without being God.

Food can nourish us. Discipline can train us. Fasting can free us from being ruled by appetite.

But none of them can make us whole.

I think that was the mistake: asking food to carry a burden it was never meant to carry.

Food is a gift. It is not a savior.

24/08/2026

I know this probably won't be for everyone.

A lot of you originally followed me for food, recipes, health or retreats, and some of you may have very little interest in seeing me talk more openly about my faith.

But I think I've reached a point where trying to keep the two worlds carefully separated would be dishonest.

I don't know exactly what I'll be sharing here going forward, or how often. Food will still be here. So will cooking, growing things, beautiful ingredients, travel, work and the ordinary things that make up my life.

But I also want to make more room for what is actually at the center of that life now.

So if you're Catholic, if you've recently returned to the faith, if you're trying to take your faith more seriously, or simply trying to work out what it means to order an ordinary life towards Christ, I'd genuinely love to have more of you here.

And if you're not Catholic or generally Christian, you're still very welcome to stay. I'm not interested in turning every post into a sermon or pretending to be qualified to teach the faith. I'm simply no longer interested in hiding it either.

I'm still figuring out what all of this looks like.

But perhaps this page can become a little less about building an identity around food, and a little more about sharing the good things in life from their proper place.

Food. Work. Beauty. Creation. Hospitality. Community.

All good things.

Just not the highest Good.

17/06/2026

The Chef Training Retreat, in plates 😍 June 2026 edition.

These are the dinners from our last training, shown in reverse order, starting with the graduation dinner where the students created their own dishes.

By the end of the retreat, they weren’t just following recipes anymore. They were combining techniques, balancing flavors, thinking through textures, using what was available, working under pressure, and creating food that actually made sense.

Throughout the week we explored high raw vegan food with some cooked elements, drawing inspiration from all over the world.

Plant based cheeses, ferments, soups, salads, dips, wraps, sushi, tacos, curries, dehydrated dishes, crackers, desserts, herbs, spices, sauces, and all the little details that make plant-based food feel abundant instead of restrictive.

Some meals were light and fresh.
Some were comforting and rich.
Some were experimental.
Some were beautifully simple.

That’s really the heart of this training: learning the foundations well enough that you can create freely.

Not just “raw food.”
Not just “healthy food.”
But food with depth, culture, color, technique, and heart, without dogma.

The next Chef Training Retreats are already filling through the waitlist.

If you’d like to join a future edition, comment CHEF or send me a message and I’ll send you the waitlist link.

11/05/2026

24/04/2026

I’ll be honest.

Sometimes this whole thing feels weird.

Posting food, filming recipes, promoting retreats, selling courses, trying to stay visible, trying to keep the business alive, trying to be “inspiring” all the time.

Sometimes it feels real.

And sometimes it feels like overcompensating.

Sometimes it feels like I’m sharing something good and useful.

And sometimes it feels like I’m performing healing before I’ve fully lived it.

Sometimes even the retreats feel like that too.

They are beautiful. They are real. People do connect, learn, open up, eat well, and leave changed. I know that.

But I also know myself.

I know how easily good things can become an escape. A mask. A way to prove something. A way to avoid the quieter, harder work underneath.

And I don’t want to pretend I’m above that.

I do love this work.

I love cooking for people.
I love teaching.
I love creating beautiful food.
I love seeing people remember what nourishment can feel like.

But I’m also trying to do it with more honesty now.

Less pretending.
Less pressure to look perfectly aligned.
Less content for the sake of content.
Less hiding behind the thing I’m good at.

So if you’re still here, and this still resonates with you, thank you.

And if you still vibe with what I share, I’d love to invite you into it more deeply.

You can join one of my retreats, or support my work through one of my digital books, courses, or recipes.

Not because I have it all figured out.

But because I’m still walking this path too.

And whatever is real in it, I still want to share.

23/04/2026

26 plant based cheeses ready for culturing for the upcoming Chef Training Retreats 🙌🧀

Made with different types of nuts and seeds, and different kinds of fermentations.

On the 2nd picture:

Bottom right: cashew-almond lactofermented, plain cheese
Middle right: camembert/brie, with almond milk curdled with fig leaf latex
Plastic containers: roquefort, with macadamia-cashew
Bottom left: cashew-pumpkin seed, lactofermented

Just some amazing flavors are developing for 5-8 weeks. The mold-fermented ones are just amazing, roquefort-like, and brie-like cheeses that will develop a beautiful blue and white bloom of mold soon enough in a controlled humidity and temperature.

Can't wait to share these beauties with the students at the Chef Training, and teach them how to make them at home. 😍🙌

Last spot for the Chef Training Retreat in June 5th to 14th in Málaga, Spain is available! DM me RETREAT to sign up!

13/04/2026

You ever catch yourself thinking about food way more than you should?

Not cooking. Not enjoying it. Just… managing it.

What to eat. What to avoid.
If this fits. If that’s “allowed”.

Feeling good when you get it right, slightly off when you don’t.

From the outside it looks like discipline.
But it’s a bit exhausting, if you’re honest.

I’ve been on both sides of that.
Losing weight, feeling on top of things, locked in.
Then pushing it too far, losing balance, and watching it swing back the other way.

Years of using food for comfort, distraction, control… it catches up with you.
And it leaves you a bit disconnected from something that should be simple.

I’m not really interested in that anymore.

Not in overthinking every meal, or needing food to follow a system just to feel in control.

Lately it’s been more about keeping things simple, grounded, actually enjoyable again.

“Do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink…” — Gospel of Matthew 6:25

Still care about what I eat. Just trusting in that Divine Providence in everything.

Just without it taking up so much space in my head.
If you know, you know.