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Overview
Discover How to Cookwith Your Senses, Your Hands, and Your Heart
"Making your love manifest, transforming your spirit, good heart, and able hands into food is a great undertaking," writes renowned chef and Zen priest Edward Espe Brown, "one that will nourish you in the doing, in the offering, and in the eating." With No Recipe: Cooking as Spiritual Practice, Brown beautifully blends expert cooking advice with thoughtful reflections on meaning, joy, and life itself.
Reading Brown’s witty and engaging collection of essays is like learning to cookand meditatewith your own personal chef and Zen teacher. Drawing from a lifetime of experience, he invites us into his home and kitchen to explore how cooking and eating can be paths to awakening. Baking, cutting, chopping, and tasting are not seen as rigid techniques, but as opportunities to find joy and satisfaction in the present moment. "Forget the rules and forget what you’ve been told," teaches Brown. "Discover for yourself by tasting, testing, experimenting, and experiencing."
From soil to seed and preparation to plate, No Recipe brings us a collection of timeless teachings on awakening in the sacred space of the kitchen.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781683640547 |
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Publisher: | Sounds True, Incorporated |
Publication date: | 05/01/2018 |
Pages: | 248 |
Sales rank: | 643,510 |
Product dimensions: | 5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.70(d) |
About the Author
Edward Espe Brown
Edward Espe Brown began cooking and practicing Zen in 1965. He was the first head resident cook at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center from 1967 to 1970. He later worked at the celebrated Greens Restaurant in San Francisco, serving as busboy, waiter, floor manager, wine buyer, cashier, host, and manager. Ordained a priest by Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, he has taught meditation retreats and vegetarian cooking classes throughout North America and Europe. He is the author of several bestselling cookbooks, including The Tassajara Bread Book, and the editor of Not Always So, a book of lectures by Shunryu Suzuki Roshi. He is the subject of the critically acclaimed 2007 documentary film How to Cook Your Life. He resides in Fairfax, California.
Table of Contents
Before Words xiii
A Meeting of Hearts
Reverential Offerings
Envisioning This Book
Love and Blessings to the Cooks!
1 The Way of the Kitchen: Actualizing Sacred Space 1
I Will Always Be with You 2
Entering Sacred Space 4
Making Sacred Space Manifest 6
Remembering We Have Choice 9
Freedom Beyond Rote and Chore 11
2 You're the Cook 13
You're the Cook 14
Trusting Your Aesthetic 16
How You See Cooking 18
Cooking Is Not Just Cooking 19
Giving Voice to What Is Inside 22
3 Coming to Your Senses 25
Tasting the True Spirit of the Grain 26
To Get Started, You Don't Need to Know 28
Permission Granted 31
Follow Your Nose 33
Round Apple, Smooth Banana, a Poem by Rilke 36
Gifts from Beyond 37
4 Bringing Spirit to Life 41
What Gets Us into the Kitchen? 42
Visiting a Spiritual Center 46
Visiting Another Spiritual Center 49
5 The Work of Being Embodied 51
The Energetics of Zen Work 52
Everybody Loves Raking 56
6 Feeling Your Way Along in the Dark 61
Cooking with Passion 62
Seeing Virtue 67
Pause and Investigate 69
7 Careful Observation of the Obvious 71
Knowing the Differences That Make a Difference 72
The Flavor of Today 75
The Ceremony of Eating Just One Potato Chip 77
8 Seeking the Way 81
Way-Seeking Mind 82
Way-Seeking Spinach 85
To Cut or Not to Cut the Collards 88
Lovely Energy in the Kitchen 90
9 Let Things Come and Abide in Your Heart 93
Receiving Flavors 94
Developing a Palate as a Busboy at Greens 97
At Work with Wines 100
Breaking the Trance of Routine 103
A Salad of Five Flavors 104
10 The Black Dragon Jewel Is Everywhere 113
Is There Anything Good about Working in the Kitchen? 114
The Black Dragon Jewel 117
A Student Asks, "Why Haven't You Enlightened Me Yet?" 119
11 Doing the Work Yourself 121
Reinhabiting Your Body: You Are the Secret Ingredient 122
Zen Master Dogen Marvels: A Mushroom Story 125
At Home, at Work, in Your Body 127
12 Food Choices 129
Choosing Food 130
Finding Out for Yourself 135
Observing What to Eat 136
Cons and Myths 138
13 Eating 143
Not What to Eat, But How 144
The Ceremony of Eating 146
Learning to Eat with Awareness 150
Please Enjoy Your Food 153
Ingredients for Living Fully 157
What We Taste "In-forms" Us 158
14 Do Not See with Ordinary Eyes, Do Not Think with Ordinary Mind 161
Do Not See with Ordinary Eyes, Do Not Think with Ordinary Mind 162
Food Is Precious 164
Agreeing to Love Yourself 168
15 Arousing Joy and Well-Being 171
Men at Work Cooking: A Bachelor Party Dinner 172
16 Handling Leftovers 181
Purifying Our Love 182
Using Leftovers 184
Not Wasting 190
17 Cultivating a Life of Feeling 195
A Cooking Class in Cleveland 198
Using Emotions as an Excuse Not to Cook 200
A Workshop at Tassajara 201
Being Cracked Open 203
Sensing Essence 206
In Service to Something Big 208
You Mean It 213
After Words 215
Full Circle
Bowing In to Sacred Space
Acknowledgments 219
About the Author 225