How to Cook like a (Breakaway) Monk

 

 

I just spent a long weekend at the surreally gorgeous Tassajara Zen Center, in the mountains east of Big Sur. Tassajara is a monastic training center for serious students of Zen Buddhism from September through April, but they open their gate to the public during the summer, if you're lucky enough to get a reservation. And boy, do they take food seriously.

I got invited down to help the cooks there "wake up" their summer menus with some breakaway goodness, to introduce some global flavor blasts into their robust and creative vegetarian cooking. We cooked and tasted 20 or so recipes from my new book, but the object wasn't learning new recipes per se; it was to unleash the considerable creativity of the monks (all female while I was there) through the introduction of flavored salts, pickled gingers and fennel, reduced citrus syrups, garlic confit...all the elementals of breakaway cooking. And given the enthusiasm and serious cooking chops of these monks, I can't wait to see what they'll serve this summer, now that they're armed with maccha salt, pomegranate molasses, raspberry pickled ginger, preserved Meyer lemons, umeboshi, yuzu, and much more.

One of my favorite aspects of the Tassajara kitchen was its "mindfulness bell" -- a bell that sits in the middle of the action, that anyone can ring at anytime. When it rings, everyone stops what they're doing -- no matter what it is -- and reflects for about a minute on just what it is that that we're trying to do when we cook. It's not really designed as such, but one of its purposes is to pretty much eliminate stress in the kitchen. There's no task that's SO important that it can't just wait for a minute while everyone takes a few deep breaths.

How I would love to see the mindfulness bell incorporated not only into every restaurant in the country, but into every home kitchen, too. It's the perfect kitchen wake-up call, to remember why we even bother cooking in the first place. It's because we're hungry, of course, but it's also one of the oldest, and surest, ways of demonstrating love and care. We just have to remember this WHILE we do it.