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one of those meals
…where everything comes together.
1. Chinese turnip and tofu with mung bean noodles (recipe found in “From the Earth: Vegetarian Chinese Cooking.” Quite Cantonese style, which is different from what I know and therefore all the more enticing. I would make this particular dish again and again x 100.
2. curried potatoes with spinach
3. eggplant with fermented black beans and ginger
4. tossed salad with peanut dressing
5. fried spring rolls made with tofu skin
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Julieann’s Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies
(gluten-, dairy- & refined sugar-free)
I’m really looking forward to giving these a try. They’re courtesy of San Francisco baker, Julieann Moore, formerly of Tartine and Chez Panisse, currently independent and rocking the gluten free world.
Makes 3 dozen
- 2 tablespoons ground flax seed (golden or brown)
- 6 tablespoons boiling water
- 1 1/2 cups brown rice flour
- 2 tablespoons tapioca flour (also called tapioca starch)
- 3/4 cup quinoa flour
- 1 teaspoon xanthan gum
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 3/4 cup coconut oil
- 1 3/4 cups coconut sugar
- 1 teaspoon kosher salt
- 2 tablespoons mashed banana
- 1 tablespoon vanilla extract
- 2 cups cacao nibs
- 1 cup chopped lightly toasted nuts of any kind (optional)
Instructions: Mix ground flax seed and boiling water in a small bowl. Cool and refrigerate until thickened. This flax seed “egg” can be made ahead.
Position a rack in the center of the oven and preheat the to 350°. Line a baking sheet with parchment and set aside.
Combine the brown rice flour, tapioca flour, quinoa flour, xanthan gum and baking soda in a bowl; set aside. Cream coconut oil, coconut sugar and salt in the bowl of an electric mixer with the paddle attachment. Beat until light and fluffy, about 1 minute. Scrape down bowl. Add the prepared flax seed egg, mashed banana and vanilla; mix until fully incorporated. Scrape down bowl. Add the flour mixture, and mix until well combined. Stir in the chocolate chips and nuts, if using. Chill dough for 30 minutes to make it easier to handle.
Form heaping tablespoons of dough into balls; space about 2 inches apart on the prepared baking sheet. Gently press the tops down to help the cookies spread evenly. Bake for approximately 8 minutes, then rotate the baking sheet and bake another 3-5 minutes more. These cookies tend to be light in color when fully baked. Let cool a few minutes on the baking sheet, then remove to a wire rack to cool completely.
Per cookie: 178 calories, 1 g protein, 22 g carbohydrate, 10 g fat (5 g saturated), 0 mg cholesterol, 109 mg sodium, 4 g fiber.
Read more: HERE -
May retreat
Where did the time go? Meant to post this right after the fact. My first 10 day retreat as head cook and honestly, it went quite smoothly. We veered from the menu at will, but it all for the best.
Menu for May 20-29, 2011
Silent Illumination retreat
FRIDAY, 5/20
Medicine Meal
1) Pasta Putanesca
2) Green leafy salad with balsamic vinaigrette
3) Tempeh Cacciatore
4) Cream of broccoli soup
5) Apples and oranges (SERVED WITH ALL MEALS)
SATURDAY, 5/21
Breakfast – standard/variation
1) oatmeal served with nuts, berries, sweeteners
2) sweet bread and multigrain bread
3) sliced cheese
4) margarine, peanut butter, jam
5) yogurt
6) dry cereal
7) soy milk
Lunch
1) Tortilla Soup
2) Tamale Pie? (something with tofu in it?)
3) Orzo with cremini mushrooms salad
4) collard greens with currants
Medicine Meal
1) coconut white rice
2) Peanut-Eggplant Soup
3) baby bok choy with strips of black mushrooms (saute separately in ‘oyster’ sauce)
4) Carrot-raisin saladSUNDAY, 5/22
Breakfast – standard/variation
plus Baozi
Lunch
1) Kasha varnishkas
2) corn chowder with roasted red peppers
3) Cauliflower with toasted pine nuts
4) Leafy green salad with tofu, carrot, apples and honey mustard dressing
Medicine Meal
1) brown rice
2) tempeh stew
3) Fava beans
4) leafy green salad w/ carrot-ginger dressingMONDAY, 5/23
Breakfast – standard/variation
Lunch
1) kitcheree (south asian rice dish)
2) curry tofu
3) eggplant and snow peas
4) Carrot Ginger Cashew Soup
5) lentil, wheat berry salad
Medicine Meal
1) couscous with tempeh and apricots (Bittman)
2) lemon-rosemary roasted potatoes
3) green leafy salad with avocado-wasabi dressing (dressing from 3 Bowls)
4) creamy root vegetable soup with oatsTUESDAY, 5/24
Breakfast – standard/variation
Lunch
1) Carrot-Potato-Seitan Curry (NR)
2) Brown rice with peas and cardamon (NR)
3) Triple Mushroom soup with coconut milk (wood ear, shitake, crimini)
4) Red cabbage salad
Medicine Meal
1) dirty rice
2) gingery adzuki beans with spinach
3) cucumber salad with soy raita
4) creamy tomato soupWEDNESDAY, 5/25
Breakfast – standard/variation
Lunch
1) rice noodle stir fry (with broccoli, napa cabbage, black mushroom, pressed strips of tofu, wood ear, carrot) (NR)
2) ginger string beans with bamboo shoots (?) or carrots (NR)
3) hot and sour soup
4) green cabbage slaw with mustard seeds
Medicine Meal
1) spicy rice bake with black eyed peas, collards and sweet potato
2) BBQ wheat gluten (NR)
3) no soup
4) potato salad with edamameTHURSDAY, 5/26
Breakfast – standard/variation
with Baozi
Lunch
1) stuffed tofu
2) bulgar and arugula salad
3) garbanzo and green split pea soup with mustard greens or chinese brocolli (NR)
4) whole wheat bread or freshly made pita bread
Medicine Meal
1) tofu-spinach lasagna with yellow squash
2) white bean Tuscan soup with kalamata olives
3) leafy green salad with balsamic vinaigrette
4) leftovers?FRIDAY, 5/27
Breakfast – standard/variation
Lunch
1) raisin-walnut basmati rice
2) sweet and sour tempeh
3) broccoli sauteed with corn
4) (pickled?) daikon salad
5) lentil soup
Medicine Meal
1) brown rice or udon noodle
2) dragon bowl: steamed veggies (carrot, kale, turnip, shitake, nori seaweed) with miso-tahini sauce
3) miso soup
4) whole grain cornbread with margerine put outSATURDAY, 5/28
Breakfast – standard/variation
Lunch
1) turnips, tofu and bean thread (p.218, From the Earth)
2) stuffed mushrooms (p96-97, From The Earth)
3) asparagus + cauliflower soup with goji berries
4) sweet potato salad (p.300, From the Earth)
Medicine Meal
1) Basmati rice
2) Tofu saag paneer (spinach)
2) Indian style chickpea salad. (2 cups cooked chickpeas. 1 TB rice wine vinegar and 2 to 4 tablespoons minced or grated fresh ginger. 2 tablespoons peanut oil and 2 tablespoons coconut milk. Cilantro. Yields 6-8 servings.)
3) leftover soup from a previous meal -
cinco de mayo, wu yue wu tian
happy 5/5!
TAMALE PIE (courtesy of New Farm Cookbook) = a layered casserole with corn grit mush, black beans, chili tomato sauce and nutritional yeast cheese
STRING BEANS and CORN, with some red pepper thrown in for color. Seasoned with chili powder, lime, salt, black pepper and a bit of cayenne.
whilst eating, i thought about the meal chant, instructing one to contemplate whereby the food comes and how many played a role in its coming to our bowls. if it weren’t for the Mexican army beating back French colonial interests 150 years ago, i wouldn’t have been inspired to cook up some possibly bastardized version of their cuisine today. (makes you want to read up on your Mexican history, if nothing else.) Appreciate!
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Focaccio bread with kalamata olives, served with reincarnated shepherdess pie. Also from the kitchen today, tofu saag paneer using a bit of coconut cream, some homemade soymilk and a vegan ricotta cheese to bring out the creaminess of creamed spinach.
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trifecta
1) hot and sour green cabbage soup with wood ear, kelp and goju berries.
2) roasted vegetables (beet, sweet potato, brussels sprouts, red potato) with tempeh. seasoned with ethiopian berbere mixture, olive oil and ginger.
3) radish salad with carrot, raisin and just a touch of shredded lettuce. dressed with rice vinegar, vegetable oil, a dab of soy sauce? can’t remember exactly. must have been inspiration.
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pineapple stir fry express
co-starring carrots, broccoli, a few sliced brussel sprouts, red pepper, black mushrooms, a bit of celery, tempeh, malaysian “tom tom” sauce and brown rice. it’s a dish in demand of a sequel.
also did a tofu + celery salad with a few sliced cherry tomatoes. you cut the tofu and celery into thick matchsticks and marinate with soy sauce, ginger, sesame oil, sugar, hot pepper, and whatever you want. chill 3 hours and deliver.
the soup today was another favorite: cashew-carrot-ginger. too easy to be true. but it is true. and truth is good for you.
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Borscht!
it’s more than a fantastic exclamation. it’s also the beet soup what i made today. aided by very good soup stock, TVP granules (traditionally they put it flecks of meat), and a tofu sour cream i whipped up for a topping. it was a meal made with not one but two food processors. also on hand were some lovely fresh biscuits that i made from combining 3 different recipes. (i guess that means it’s my recipe now.) i’ll put it under the recipe header on here. this was inspired by leftover gravy that has been sitting around since the tofu pot pie from the last retreat.
i called this meal Slovak’s holiday in honor of Yueshan, the retreat center’s maintenance man and resident philosopher whose parents came from Slovakia after the war. the ‘holiday’ part comes from the fact that both leftover cous cous and leftover curry were served as side dishes.
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eclecticism
CURRY CAULIFLOWER AND LENTILS, served with BASMATI RICE
sometimes your dish includes dozens of ingredients—many of them with great character—and yet the overall effect still winds up tasting a bit bland. i guess that’s why there’s salt and pepper. it’s fun to imagine that S&P bring out all the other flavors. maybe they do. i wouldn’t call this dish a complete failure, though. just more understated than i was expecting. i bet the leftovers will be better.
also made ETHIOPIAN MASH POTATOES with leftover split pea soup. recipe: chop and boil 4 potatoes, drain, add 1-2 cups leftover split pea soup, mash. then season. the seasoning in question was from a batch of berbere that i made recently for ethiopian dishes. berbere is a combination of cayenne, cinnamon, allspice, salt, turmeric, and a few other things, roasted in a pan. it’s fiery hot but complex and perfect for these types of improvisations.
rounded things out today with crimini and button MUSHROOMS sauteed with GOJI BERRY over a bed of lightly sauteed CHARD.
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all week long
just finished cooking for a week long retreat. we had a little less than 30 masticating bodhisattvas to feed. not a huge number but not paltry either. it was accomplished with the very able assistance of 3 others in the kitchen, two of whom used to own their own chinese restaurants. (they know their stuff.) the third used to teach chinese for a long time and, as the best english speaker of the crew, served as chief communicator in both directions, when translation was required. i designed the menu from my own ideas, recipes and cook book collection but left enough wiggle room for them to bring their own ideas. the chinese specialties, especially towards the end of the week, were their creations and consistently blew me away. i learned a lot and only wish that i could have done nothing but stood by and taken notes while they did their thing.
anyway, the retreatants, when finally allowed to talk at week’s end, raved about the food. i kind of felt guilty it had been such a distraction for them, but this confirmed my own taste buds’ conviction.
here’s the menu.
MENU FOR 3/12 – 3/18 RETREAT
SATURDAY, 3/12
Lunch
1) couscous with tempeh and apricots (Bittman)
2) lemon-rosemary roasted potatoes
3) green leafy salad with avocado-wasabi dressing (dressing from 3 Bowls)
4) Apples and oranges (SERVED WITH ALL MEALS)
Medicine Meal
1) hot and sour soup
2) Buddha’s Delight with rice noodles
3) Sesame walnut slaw
4) Steamed buns
SUNDAY, 3/13
Breakfast – standard/variation
1) oatmeal served with nuts, berries, soy milk, sweeteners
2) sweet bread and multigrain bread
3) sliced cheese
4) margerine, peanut butter, jam
5) yogurt
6) dry cereal
Lunch
1) Carrot-Potato-Seitan Curry
2) Brown rice with peas and cardamon
3) Triple Mushroom soup with coconut milk (wood ear, shitake, crimini)
4) Red cabbage salad
Medicine Meal
1) Pasta Putanesca
2) Green leafy salad with balsamic vinaigrette
3) Brussels Sprouts with lemon and thyme
4) Cream of broccoli soup
MONDAY, 3/14
Breakfast – standard/variation
Lunch
1) Tofu-Spinach Pot Pie
2) Butternut Black Bean Soup
3) Leafy green salad
4) Multigrain bread
5) Spiced roasted beets
Medicine Meal
1) Herbed sesame Polenta with Roasted Vegetables (kabocha + butternut squash)
2) Peanut-Eggplant Soup
3) Curried mash potatoes
4) Carrot-raisin salad
TUESDAY, 3/15
Breakfast – standard/variation
Lunch
1) fried spaghetti noodles with cabbage, mushroom, tofu gan (tofu skin), carrot, (and a leftover tofu dish)
2) soup?
3) Leafy green salad with honey mustard dressing
4) Cauliflower with pine nuts
Medicine Meal
1) orange sautéed tempeh with kale and kabocha
2) eggplant and peanut soup
3) brown rice
4) leafy green salad w/ carrot-ginger dressing + dijon honey mustard
WEDNESDAY, 3/16
Breakfast – standard/variation
Lunch
1) mac and cheese with broccoli
2) lentil, wheat berry, and mung bean salad
3) tofu pot pie (leftovers)
4) roasted vegetables and polenta soup (from leftovers)
Medicine Meal
1) GeDa soup (little knots of wet dough) with mushroom, young seaweed, white cabbage, carrot, preserved mustard green, snow peas, corn starch
2) “Floating cloud” cabbage salad with miso dressing
3) Gingery Daikon (raw daikon chopped into half moon coins, dressed with some sugar, vinegar, soy sauce, ginger and finely chopped daikon leaves/stems
THURSDAY, 3/17
Breakfast – standard/variation
Lunch
1) black eyed peas, collards and sweet potato rice bake
2) leafy green salad with sesame dressing and grapes
3) glazed carrots and beets with tahini dressing
Medicine Meal
1) Sesame “Chicken” using wheat gluten rolls
2) Broccoli and black mushroom
3) rice
4) White cloud ear soup with goji berry
FRIDAY, 3/18
Breakfast – standard/variation
Notes from a Chan kitchen and beyond
post #1 : "how to cook your life"
in early october, i left new york city after 13 years and moved into a 3 bedroom cottage a couple hours upstate. my plan was to live simply and further my zen practice by getting more involved with a buddhist retreat center i’d previously visited.
at one point in the dreaming stage, it occurred to me that i might be able to cook for the people living at the center and for the folks who come to the retreats (usually held once or twice a month). i’ve always loved to cook and the idea of contributing what skills i have to the overall mission of the place through the simple (and also complicated) process of creating and offering meals, made me giddy as a pre-school girl. lo and behold, after volunteering for just a couple weeks chopping wood, cleaning windows and whatever else, i mentioned that i’d like to work in the kitchen and my humble request was granted. it helped that the center is rather understaffed and the Chinese nun who had been toiling away 6 days a week amidst the pots and pans and stoves and rice makers, was happy to relinquish some of the responsibility. Which is not to say that she resented the work. (nor is it to say that i don’t still help out with other tasks at the retreat center when i’m able.) CG (I’ll just use most people’s initials here as a courtesy) is cheerful by default, though she also has flourishes of pensiveness and becomes as serious as a cleaver when matters of Dharma are brought up.
after my first or second day cooking on her turf, she said to me, “wow, you really like cooking, don’t you?”
“yes, i do.” i hesitated, then asked, “don’t you?”
“i am a nun,” she replied. “If there was a question of ‘like’ and ‘don’t like,’ i would be in big trouble.
by the third day, I had decided that she should be my teacher.
the name for this bloggy blog comes from Uchiyama Roshi’s celebrated commentary of Eihei Dogen Zenji’s “Intsructions for the Tenzo,” a 13th century text by the founder of the Soto branch of Zen Buddhism. in it, he provides specific guidelines for a monastery’s cook to follow in order to keep the community healthy and harmonious. He also recounts anecdotes from his own travels in medieval China where he studied and, it’s said, attained enlightenment. Dogen strongly believed that the tenzo has one of the most important roles in the monastery’s functioning and that the practice of tenzo was extremely powerful to anyone who should fully engage it. he writes, “taking up a vegetable leaf manifests the Buddha’s sixteen-foot golden body; take up the sixteen-foot golden body and display it as a vegetable leaf. this is the power of functioning freely as the awakening activity which benefits all beings.”
i started reading this and Uchiyama’s commentary (along with translator Thomas Wright’s superb notes) soon after beginning work in the Zen kitchen and it’s been highly instructive. monasteries and training centers have used this text for centuries. Dogen also writes, “having received the rice, vegetables and other materials for that day’s meals, you should handle these things and all of the monasteries property, with the care you would reserve for your eyes… Do not waste even a single grain of rice.”
as it happens, a documentary, also called “How To Cook Your Life” was made a few years ago by Doris Dorrie about Edward Espe Brown, the Zen priest who wrote the book on bread making (“The Tassajara Bread Book”) and followed that up with the book on cooking for a Buddhist training center (“The Tassajara Cookbook”). i’d owned the bread book for a while but —having had a decades long anxiety about breadmaking— I had never gotten around to using it. the past few weeks changed that. I feel so fortunate to have found myself in this situation; a set of circumstances in which i’m challenged to explore and push myself into making new meals for others every day, but where i’m having a blast doing it. remaining mindful, thankful and epicurious. it doesn’t hurt that i get to play in a giant, industrial quality kitchen with loads of equipment and ingredients, and windows on 3 sides looking out onto marshes and woodlands.
anyway, i don’t plan on doing too much writing on this web log. there’s a whole lot i could say but time doesn’t give itself freely and anyway, what really needs to be said? and this is not intended to be a food blog, of which there are already so many good ones. i’d like to use this to document what i’m making, mostly to help myself keep track, and to show a few friends what i’m working on these days. so, whomever winds up reading this, better for you to be reading something valuable and instructive to your own practice, or taking up some ingredients and any one of the millions of great recipes out there and going to town. or to turn off the computer altogether, unplug your life, and cook it.
