the jewel in the cabbage by vimalabandhu

The Jewel in the Cabbage

cooking with metaphors

vimalabandhu

2nd edition 2013

available from www.lulu.com

Contents

Introduction 3

I

The Awakening of Faith 5

Through Wind and Fire 10

II

Back to Basics and Beyond 15

Your Own Way 20

In Search of Quality 26

The Resurrection of Spinach and Co. 30

The Buddha in the Aubergine 34

The Culinary Cult 41

Cooking Unbounded 45

III

A Pinch of Logic and Strategy 49

Blueprints from Starter to Sweet 58

Ingredients For Change 76

Lasagne beyond the Pigeon Hole 79

The Thousand Faces Of Cabbage 83

IV

Nurturing Nature 86

An Invitation to support the Vegan cause 91

Acknowledgements 92

The Jewel in the Cabbage 3

Introduction

The most important change in cooking happens when one becomes

a master of the art, when we can see through the culinary labyrinth

and experience cooking as a joy instead of a chore.

We can learn not only to cook a range of delicious food, but also

learn to prepare food with whatever ingredients are available and

work confidently in any situation.

Lack of courage or inspiration undermines our will to explore the

hidden richness of our daily cooking. The joy of creating, of sharing

and of savouring food, however small to begin with, is the

incentive, the metaphorical carrot that will help us embark on the

path of mastery.

This is an unconventional book on cooking. It is not a recipe book

although there are advice on how to create your own recipes.

Rather, it is a guide to discover the Jewel, the most precious thing

in the ingredients, in the act of cooking and in our life. The book

relates ideas and ideals to our cooking, using examples and

metaphors, to make it tangibly alive. It invites us to cook with our

whole being, with our sense of wonder and adventure. Metaphors

can help us to bring passion to the kitchen from any of our

favourite fields of activities.

How this book is organised

The book is divided in 4 parts, Part I is a short cooking biography,

from my initiation into the art at an early age in Indonesia up to

working as the chef at a vegetarian café in Manchester UK.


Part II and Part III are the bulk of the book, addressing the

subjective and the objective aspects of cooking.

In Part II we look at what cooking is all about and glimpse its

“grammar”. We also need a vision to place cooking in the scheme

of our life.

Part III consists of practical tools, cooking information and advice

for changes. It shows the mechanics of cooking such as frying,

boiling and other ways of preparing food. It demonstrates how to

work with quantities and time management. It describes how to

make various dishes and how to adapt them. It also encourages us

to use unfamiliar ingredients to expand our cooking scope and to

keep our cooking fresh.

Part IV The book ends by viewing our cooking in the world context,

with its health, environmental and ethical issues. It is an invitation

to cook a brighter future.

All the food suggested in this book is vegan.


CHAPTER 1

The Awakening of Faith

My mother woke me up and asked me to accompany her to the

market later in the morning. We lived in Indonesia, in a small city

called Sukabumi (local spelling of a Sanskrit word which means land

of happiness). So I was woken up in the Garden of Eden. Maybe I

was four years old, or it was Sunday, otherwise I would have been

at school. My mother was a very good cook. I liked to go with her to

explore the big world.

Usually she took a short cut, walking along the railway tracks,

passing through the station. It was forbidden but nobody took any

notice of it. The fascination of the hissing and steaming locomotives

was part of the excitement of the trip.

I knew that if I was with her I could request her to prepare a dish I

fancied and learn to track down the necessary ingredients. The

market was a labyrinth; we moved along through the gaps between

the stalls. It was shadowy. Pieces of cloth, palm leaf thatch or

tarpaulin suspended above the stalls protected people and the

merchandise from the fierce sunlight. The market always changed

its configuration because smaller stalls didn’t have a fixed position,

but fortunately we could use some permanent stalls as land marks.

The other part of the market was spread along the streets, on the

pavement in the front of the shops.

I liked meat but I didn’t like to be in the section where they sold it,

the smell of blood, grease, entrails and decay pervaded the place.


Of course there was no refrigeration and there were many flies. The

fish market was a little better, yes it smelt too but fish smells more

or less the same raw or cooked and there, I could watch fresh water

fish swimming in the tanks or in waterproofed bamboo baskets.

We usually didn’t buy chicken at the market, they were too

unwieldy to carry, particularly alive. In the absence of any cooling

system, preserving their life was a means of keeping their meat

fresh. Anyway there were enough sellers coming round to the

houses with chicken.

The rest of the market consisted of the fruit and vegetable stalls.

Fruit, and to a lesser extent vegetables, gave me both surprises and

disappointments; bananas, papayas and oranges for example were

always available throughout the year, but mangoes, rambutan and

many other exotic varieties were seasonal and the yearly cycle was

too long to follow for a child of four.

My father ran a dairy farm across from where we lived, just outside

the city centre. We had milk cows in the stalls, and chickens and

ducks in the yard. There was a rice mill and a garden with fruit trees

which grew pretty much at random; bananas, orange, avocado,

mango and coconut as well as shrubs with aromatic or edible

leaves.

So it was a happy land of milk and honey. Luckily enough the food

didn't come automatically to the table, otherwise how could I have

the excitement of climbing the orange and mango trees or of

entering the chicken coop with many chickens half my size, to

collect their eggs?

The kitchen was where everything happened and I watched my

mother cook. When we celebrated birthdays or festive days, cake


making was the most important event for me. She asked us children

to grease the cake tin, sift flour and separate yolks from the egg

whites. Beating and mixing yolks with sugar and butter seemed

never-ending; but to beat egg whites until they became firm with a

hand held whisk was a real feat.

Soon after the cake mixture went into the oven, the kitchen would

be pervaded with sweet, rich fragrance; the sign that the magical

process was under way. Magical because in contrast to other food

preparation, all the ingredients were transformed beyond

recognition into one delicious substance.

So I was woken to my birthright to eat, doesn’t everybody who is

born have this right? But in my case, it was not just food but good

food, not only to eat but also to make, to find and if necessary to

grow food. Naturally I played and went to school and did other

things kids used to do, but none was closer to my heart than the

magic and mystery of cooking; its seed was planted there .

Twenty years later, in Holland at the dinner table in my brother's

house where I lived, his wife asked me what I thought of the food-

my brother had cooked. I hesitated, my Dutch was not up to much,

especially not for socialising, it was barely enough to cope with the

basic issues of technology which didn't demand nuances. I had just

arrived in Holland to study physics. I fell back on Indonesian custom

of toning down the adjectives, as I understood it, in contrast to

Western exaggeration, I said it was ok, it was edible. What I meant

to say was that it was good and I enjoyed it. She was furious, she

was proud of his cooking. To add to her grievance, I said in my

ignorance that it wasn't a big deal, that anybody could cook.

“In that case” she retorted, ”you have to cook next Sunday as we

have invited guests for dinner”. I agreed and the dinner went well,


to everybody's satisfaction. I didn't tell anybody that I had never

cooked before except for heating up rice and frying eggs.

Is there a sudden path to becoming a cook? I did consult a cookery

book at that time, but I realised later that one never learned

cooking from a book. Most, if not all, cookery books are only useful

for somebody who already knows how to do it, they just add more

variety on the same theme.

What is learning? How can one become a cook? Aristotle is reputed

to have said that learning and doing take place at the same time. To

believe that one can learn before doing is the arrogance of the

intellect and believing that one learns after doing the very thing one

wants to learn contradicts logic. Knowing about swimming in theory

doesn’t make one a swimmer, but as soon as he jumps in the water,

if he is lucky, he is a swimmer and he can improve his skill by

attending to the interaction of his body and the water. It is a

sudden and gradual process.

One becomes a cook in the act of cooking. One needs courage or

faith to put the 'what ifs', the hypothetical situations, aside. Books

or other advice promise to answer the 'what ifs'; but they rarely can

rescue us. Firstly because their 'what ifs' are usually different to

ours, and secondly and most importantly, learning is not to answer

the 'what ifs' but how to deal with the 'what is really happening'.

No speculation but a direct and immediate response then and

there.

My sister-in-law gave me the challenge and my mother gave me the

faith. When these two met, the Master arrived. After this incident, I

realised that I could actually cook, I was already a cook somehow.

From then on I volunteered happily to cook for my student friends.


The more I cooked the better I became; the better I became the

more eager people were to ask me. It was an exhilarating time.


CHAPTER 2

Through Wind and Fire

A physicist by default

At the end of my school years I couldn't decide what I wanted to

study; a careers advisor couldn't help me much either. I knew only

that I wanted to be an engineer like most of my brothers. In the end

I chose applied physics just to postpone making a definite

commitment, thinking that physics was the source of all

engineering. As a kid I liked playing with Meccano, or building

simple structures or toys such as a turbine driven by the stream

running behind our house. My father kept broken tools, bits and

pieces of machinery and leftover building materials all mixed up

together in a barn, our hunting ground when I and my friends

needed something to complete our projects.

Maybe I was misled by the word "physics": "ilmu alam" in

Indonesian, which literally means the science of nature. I soon

realised that there wasn’t much nature as I knew it in physics. The

study became less and less interesting and, of course, more and

more difficult. I completed my degree, not because I enjoyed it but

just because I didn't want to fail. At the end of the five year course I

was granted the equivalent of a MSc, but the physics in me didn't

come to life, it lacked the spirit, the love which could have unified

and animated the many pieces of information.

Could one become a master of a lifeless science? Didn't Aristotle

say that one becomes a physicist by doing physics, i.e. by searching


and solving the actual problem and not by collecting the answers of

'what if's'? What I did as a kid was more like doing physics ( looking

for wire or pieces of metal in the barn) whereas what I did at

university was more like my father, gathering junk in the barn in

case it would be useful for something, sometime somehow.

The wind of cooking

Zen master Baoche of Mount Mayu was fanning himself. A monk

approached and said, “Master, the nature of wind is permanent and

there is no place it does not reach. Why, then, do you fan yourself?”.

“Although you understand that the nature of the wind is

permanent,” Baoche replied, “you do not understand the meaning

of its reaching everywhere”. “What is the meaning of its reaching

everywhere?” asked the monk again, The master just kept fanning

himself. The monk bowed deeply.

Dogen, Genjo Koan

Cycling against the wind in the Low Countries I was exhausted, the

engineering track was dusty and arduous. At the end I just laid

down on the couch to dream of other tracks and winds. The

Master’s voice became clearer telling me to go to France to follow

the fragrant wind. France, where people obeyed culinary laws,

where cafes and restaurants were the places of worship.

When I arrived in Chambery in Haute Savoy for a cookery course, I

could just understand the class room lessons and the kitchen

instructions. The cooking in spite of its French guise had its own

“logic”. However the students puzzled me, their French argot was

beyond my grasp. We learned the properties of the ingredients, we

learned basic food processing techniques and we learned to

worship food and the kitchen luminaries too.


The school applied the principle of becoming a cook by doing the

cooking. They ran a restaurant with the students as the employees

right from the beginning. While one group of students was in class,

the other ran the restaurant. This arrangement alternated weekly

and there were no other workers to fall back on.

With the new Master voice in charge I could start using old skills:

home trained mindfulness, school discipline or even knowledge of

heat transfer and construction theory. All these helped prevent

errors and accidents, helped construct pastry casing, plan and

execute menus on time.

Lack of money, blew me back to Holland where I started work as a

freelance caterer, providing food for private parties. I enjoyed the

cooking but finding the contracts was hard. So I applied for a job as

a part time cook instead. It was in a refuge for battered women and

their children. Haute cuisine for the oppressed? Unfortunately not,

the food budget was low and they wanted normal food, nothing

strange, they already had enough crisis to cope with.

A friend opened a small luxurious conference centre with hotel

facilities where they ran seminars and ongoing courses. She posed a

challenge by asking me to prepare food for the ongoing groups

without repetition over two years . They came for a week every two

months, so I worked through more than a hundred different menus.

She also organised Sunday afternoon concerts, which were

followed by a dinner. The dinner had to be adjusted to the culinary

tradition either of the main composer or the soloist of the event.

The Master fanned himself vigorously.


Through the rings of fire

The laboratory of physics was too cold. In the warmer kitchen I

came to life. Having been nourished with the gentle and rich spices

of Indonesian cooking and the succulent and sparkling Chinese

tradition, with the newly acquired French sensibility I started

roaming in the world’s kitchen happy go- luckily. Life was light and

colourful for a while.

Gradually, however, damp, smoke and tiny oil drops began to settle

on the walls, the ceiling and in my heart. Existential crisis set in.

Washing the grime with a little wine or cognac didn’t help. I needed

a thorough cleaning, through another fire, a sulphuric bath. I went

to warm Spain.

While immersing myself in a psychosynthetic workshop, I saw a

vision, a video recording of a talk by Sangharakshita, the founder of

the Triratna Buddhist Order. It was “The Taste of Freedom”, an

unlikely combination of seeing a talk on taste. However I managed

to taste the lack of it, that I wasn’t free. The kitchen fire didn’t cook

me enough. True, I could and did choose a new country and career

but I missed a deeper purpose of my life, I was still easily pulled by

greed, pushed by frustration and confused in between.

Wandering and wondering I knocked at the doors of the retreat

centres of the Triratna Buddhist Community to find the fire of the

Dharma, the Truth, the fire that can soften and evaporates the

grime that blocked my pure vision. For more than ten years I

worked with kitchen fire and Dharma fire, mainly in England but

also in Spain, on the mountain in a secluded valley.

“ Master Daie said “ Zen practised in a state of activity is superior a

million fold to that practised in quietude”...... like a lotus flower


which blooms in the midst of fire increases its beauty and glowing

lustre the more it faces the blazing flame................”

Hakuin – Orategame

I didn’t practice in quietude. Being the cook I was not on retreat

most of the time and although meditation was not my main

practice, I took the challenge. I assumed that Hakuin’s saying was

also applicable to practising ethics, friendliness and mindfulness,

practices that can help us to be less egoistic and to live more

genuinely. I moved to Manchester. With friends from the

Manchester Buddhist Centre we started the Earth Café, a

vegetarian café in the city centre, a fire where these magical lotus

flowers, our full potentiality might bloom.


CHAPTER 3

Back to Basics and Beyond

The spirit of cooking

Almost everybody can cook somehow, many can cook their

favourite food very well, but most of us will find cooking unfamiliar

dishes difficult. Can we cook confidently using unknown ingredients

or when we have to cook for a large number of people?

If we feel at a loss without a recipe, we will realise that we are like a

cooking machine, that can run only with a program. Unfortunately

most cookery books do program us by telling us what to do instead

of teaching us how to make decisions and choices .

To be able to cook confidently, we need to know what cooking is in

its essence. So let us look at this spirit of cooking, any cooking, from

roasting vegetables on a camp fire to creating a complicated dish in

a laboratory like kitchen. It can be represented in the following

definition.

Skilful cooking is preparing desirable food by making the best use

of the available resources.

Although it is simple, this definition places our cooking in a context

and gives us direction. Firstly it demands us to clarify our goal, we

have to consider the range of possible products we want to make,

and secondly it demands us to inspect our means, i.e. we have to

take stock of the equipment and ingredients that are at our


disposal. It also urges us to acquire some skill to carry out the task

in the best way. From the tension between what is desirable and

what is available, we can find a solution. This is the way to discover

a new dish or a new approach, the way to keep our cooking alive

and growing.

Here is an example of skilful cooking in action ;

Imagine that we stay in a friend’s bungalow during a holiday. We

are preparing a dinner and we have the ingredients our friend left

us to use. However there is no potato, rice or any other

carbohydrate containing ingredient except for a packet of flour. The

oven is broken. The shops are closed, but luckily we have enough

time to spend. So, what could we do? Although baking bread or pie

is excluded, we could still use flour to make dough pieces and cook

them by steaming, boiling, frying or even grilling on a metal plate.

How about making noodle, pasta or chapatti? So, we need to chose

the option that will go best with the rest of the meal we are

considering to make. Of course we have to find out whether the

necessary pieces of equipment are there. Could we, for example,

improvise a rolling pin by using any cylindrical bottle, to roll out

dough?

The open secret

It is almost unbelievable that to enjoy anything we need a skill. Can

we enjoy writing a story, playing the flute or even watching a

cricket match if we don’t understand what we are doing?

To be skilful in cooking, first of all we need to have interest and the

confident in learning it. However the essential elements for skilful

cooking are awareness, the ability to notice things or processes,

and care, the effort to make them go well. Without awareness and


care no matter how many other ingredients or cooking gadgets we

use, we will never accomplish our work well.

From our definition of skilful cooking we can see that awareness is

needed in every aspects of cooking. We need it to be able to chose;

* the most desirable food at that particular moment.

** the available and potential resources.

*** the best way of using the resources.

Heightened awareness cuts through our limited habitual responses

and opens up new exciting possibilities.

Cooking metaphors

We know more than what we are conscious of knowing. When we

walk to the bus stop, for example, we forget the movements of our

feet and how to keep our balance. We speak our mother tongue

even if we are unaware of learning its grammar. Usually we don’t

clutter our mind with innumerable learning steps, but if we forget

all of them completely, it will be a great loss. Some aspects of

learning are transferable and metaphors are the vehicles to carry

out this task. The word metaphor is derived from a Greek word that

means to transfer.

So, why don’t we learn cooking from other experiences? To be able

to do so we need to be specific. Recognising that swimming is like

cooking, for example, is not enough, we need to know which

aspects and in which way they are similar. We need also to

remember how we mastered those aspects of swimming and

explore their relevance to our cooking.

Before we learned swimming, maybe we were afraid of being in

water, afraid of losing our solid foothold. But seeing others, even


children younger than ourselves playing and diving into the water

merrily, helped us to override our fear.

The kitchen, with its fire, hot oven and sharp knives, is also a

strange and dangerous place if we are a beginner. There are so

many unfamiliar things to do, and to make it worse, some of them

need to be done at the same time as well. To convince us that

cooking can be done safely, we have only to see somebody

triumphantly coming out of the kitchen and serving a delicious

dinner. But the most important lesson from the swimming

metaphor is that our preconception didn’t match with the reality,

that our solid body can actually float in the water. Once we

overcome our fear, our common sense will discover the

appropriate movements for our limbs. Without fear and other

preconceptions, the kitchen too becomes a place for discovery.

From the art of painting, as another example, we would noticed

that using other colours and brushes than what we habitually

applied, could change our approach and choice of objects. To

expand our cooking repertoire, why don’t we introduce some

unknown ingredients or utensils as a prod?

If we look again at our definition of skilful cooking, we can see that

cooking is just one example of creative effort. Therefore any

effective way of revealing potential truth, beauty or goodness ,

lends itself as a metaphor for cooking.

Cooking metaphors can help us organise and make some sense of

the bewildering business of cooking. In this way they work as a

cooking grammar.


Metaphors from various activities speak to us from different sides

of our being. They will hence ‘flavour’ our cooking with our other

life experiences. Metaphors are antidotes to literal-mindedness and

fragmented life, they connect the seemingly unconnected.


CHAPTER 4

Your Own Way

I don’t believe that painting by numbers, putting prescribed colours

on numbered segments of a drawing, can teach us to paint. It

doesn’t teach the essentials, negotiating with forms and colours.

Elaborate recipes with prescribed list of ingredients and detailed

instruction might be able to help us to reproduce someone else

favourite dish, but if we don’t know why, for what purpose

particular actions are chosen, we will keep struggling to find our

own way of cooking.

When we cook, we have to find a solution for a specific culinary

situation. For example, I want to treat a friend to a good meal,

something a little bit special, colourful, with a variety of taste and

texture, to express my appreciation of her company. I don’t have

much time to do the shopping and the cooking and I can’t afford

more than six pounds. She is a vegan and she can’t eat gluten or

food that is too spicy. At home I have potatoes and a good sized

aubergine which I would like to use. Do you think that you could

find a recipe which will match all these requirements? It is unlikely,

but even if you could, you would miss the joy of finding your own

answer. The joy which will feed your confidence in living and

playing with new challenges.

“... Whether we are listening to a Bach concerto, looking at a

painting by Giotto, or grasping the logic of a theorem in

mathematics, a considerable part of the satisfaction we obtain is

derived from our appreciation of order and balance. And if we


ourselves, in however humble a way, succeed in creating order

where none existed, by making sense out of the obscure, wresting a

garden from the wilderness, or even arranging a bowl of flowers in

a way which we find satisfying, we achieve a fulfilment which can

be as gratifying as the satisfaction of our nutritional or sexual

requirements. .....”

Anthony Storr - The Dynamics of Creation

Playing piano in the battle field

In French restaurant kitchen jargon, the collection of the kitchen

equipment is called “batterie de cuisine”, a mixture of associations

of a battlefield with the chef as the chief commander and an

orchestra because they refer to the cooker as a piano too. With

efficiency the troop conquers the task through destruction,

slaughtering, cutting to pieces and then it creates by regrouping

and transforming the prepared materials into new forms. So there

you are in the middle of a battlefield, what are you going to do?

Look for a cookery book? Check the recipe? The cookery books tell

you of another battle, where there are ingredients or utensils you

don’t have. And usually they tell you to cook by numbers, grams,

minutes, centilitres or centigrade which blur your sight of things

you’ve got at hand.

The middle way in the kitchen

Was it a battle? No, not necessarily so, because we can also see it

as a game, an arena for negotiation. We transcend the struggle by

finding and following the middle way. It is not the way of

mediocrity but of excellence, it is not the middle between good and

bad, but the overcoming of two opposite bad extremes, just like

riding a bicycle without falling to the left or to the right. In cooking


we have to overcome many pairs of extremes, like burnt or

uncooked, too spicy or bland, too much or little, too wet or dry,

serving it too late or early etc., etc. To cook well, we need to

negotiate all these pairs of extremes at the appropriate time. It is

only daunting if we see it as a battle field against many errors, but

cooking is more like an exciting playing field for improvement and

perfection. If you are a pianist, why can’t you play the French

kitchen ‘piano’ with the same ease, without worrying too much

about the pitfalls of the loudness or duration, but with the joy of

homing in on the perfect phrasing, dynamics or tempo? You could

improvise or add ornamentation too.

Ziggy, our pastel-drawing teacher told us that we need to know

when to stop, not to work too long and put too many layers of

colours or our drawing will end up like an overcooked meal, dead,

having lost its character. He was of course using cooking as a

metaphor for drawing, but the metaphor could be applied in the

opposite way too.

Don’t try too hard to find the exact correspondence between

cooking and its metaphors, you won’t succeed, but let your

intuition work for you.

Unstoppable success

”.. For example, someone who wishes to steal a precious jewel, to

attack a formidable enemy, or to make the acquaintance of a

beautiful woman must, at all times, watch intently for opportunity,

adjusting to changing events and shifting circumstances. Anything

sought for with such intensity will surely be gained. If the desire to


search for the Way becomes as intense as this, you will succeed no

matter how high you must shoot or no matter how deep you must

plumb........”.

Zen Master Dogen - A Primer of Soto Zen

In addition to the two main components of cooking; awareness and

care, we also need interest and confidence. We need awareness to

know our purpose, what we want, and we need awareness to

assess our situation, to find the means available to achieve our

goal. Without being aware of our purpose, we can’t even start, we

are already lost in the jungle of possibilities. On the other hand if

our purpose is too rigid and narrow we will face insurmountable

obstacles and we will miss good or even better alternatives.

Do we have the confidence to proceed? With awareness, care and

confidence, we can walk on the middle way, maintaining the

conditions for excellence. In this way we develop our cooking

sensibility.

Cooking is not a theoretical knowledge, it is an art learned in the

kitchen and at the dining table. We learn from experience how

much flour and margarine thicken a sauce, for example. Cookery

books can only help us when we have this sensibility, without it, we

have to follow instructions slavishly, adding indigestible information

and obscuring our genuine perception.

Confidence in cooking is based on self confidence, that we can

manage our life, that we can learn to live well. Maybe we forget

how we learned confidence, as in the case of walking or speaking.

We crave for a trick that can help us to by-pass the process of

gaining confidence. Many people see a recipe as one of these tricks.


Once, when I invited a friend for a meal, he was delighted with the

food and asked me whether I had a recipe for it. To remind him, to

be in touch with his confidence and proceed from there, I asked

him whether he had a recipe for seducing a woman, something he

was skilled in. His face lit up and he smiled and agreed that recipes

were beside the point.

Actualised by myriad things

To cook well, one needs to be aware of the benchmark of good

food. For most people, it must be delicious or filling, for some

people the food needs to be healthy, for others food needs to be

ethically produced without harming the environment. Let us be

more ambitious, why don’t we aim to cook food that fulfils all the

requirements. A daunting challenge. But remember that with

confidence, awareness and care we can go far.

To accomplish anything successfully, we need to see the situation

as it really is, clearly, free from our biases. Here is what Dogen says

about understanding reality; “To study the Reality is to study the

self, to study the self is to forget the self, to forget the self is to be

actualised by myriad things...”.

To cook well, we too have to study ourselves. We need to know

who we are, where we are at, our habits, our conditionings, our

wants and needs, we have to be authentic. When we cook it is not

Delia Smith or Jamie Oliver, or our mother that cooks. To forget the

self is to forget our fixed view and ideas, to go back to “beginner’s

mind”, to be prepared to accept whatever is happening, loosening

our attachment and self identification. To forget views such as; "I

always hated spinach and I am never going to like it” or “this is my

style of cooking and there is no better way". To be actualised by


myriad things is to do what is needed, facing the challenges and

using the opportunities provided by the actual situation.

Perhaps “ to forget the self is to be actualised by myriad things”

means also that when we go back to the freshness of a beginner’s

mind, things like ingredients or utensils, will get the chance to show

their hidden characteristics. When this happens, new ways of

combining and processing food will come to the front.


CHAPTER 5

In Search of Quality

With all senses on duty

To appreciate food we use all of our sense faculties; taste, touch,

smell, sight and hearing if we include the sound of nuts and biscuits

crushed in our mouth. Our imagination, ideas and associations

colour the eating experience too. So there are innumerable

combinations of perceptions that can influence our food evaluation.

When we eat in a restaurant for example, firstly we have a concept

to deal with, the menu. Then when the food arrives on the table we

can see how the ingredients are cut, prepared and arranged into a

pattern of colours, how the gravy coats the roast or the sauce

blends bits and pieces into a warm tinted stew. Maybe we can get a

whiff of its aroma too. As soon as we start eating, each morsel

reveals its composition of flavours and fragrances. It reveals also its

consistency and its temperature. Eating takes time and the order

and the duration of these sensations determine our experience too.

Indeed the impression is influenced even before we eat. Doesn’t

food taste better when we are hungry?

Eating gives us a great opportunity to sharpen our perception, but

on many occasions we don’t make use of it because our attention

isn’t fully there. It is a pity, it is like going to a concert and reading a

newspaper oblivious to the music. We are what we eat. Without

being aware of what we eat and that we are eating, we are lost,

disoriented in one mode of our life and disconnected from the

reality of the nourishing world. It is not only that we miss one of the


sources of enjoyment, we miss knowing what is good or bad for our

well-being too.

Talking about food during a meal can give a focus to our eating

experience, enabling us to appreciate the sensations better. It is

almost like adding salt to our cooking, it can make the food more

interesting if we add a small quantity but it will ruin the experience

if we overdo it.

Sharper taste, wider palette

Our taste can become blunt because of too much and too strongly

flavoured food. How can we be aware of subtle tastes if we eat a

very hot, spicy dish, especially if we are addicted to it? Our sense of

taste will also diminish if we always eat the same type of food. The

sense of taste goes to sleep through boredom. Travelling and

exposure to other culinary traditions can open a new register. The

taste also can be masked by something like tomato ketchup or soya

sauce. It is destroyed when, without that particular sauce, we

experience the food as tasteless.

To refine taste we need to free it from the numbing effect, from the

smothering blanket and to wake it up to multi varied culinary

sensations. Woken up we can taste things beyond our habitual

responses, we can taste the real combination of sweet, sour and

bitter flavours of an orange for example. With a sharper taste we

create a wider palette to paint with, a wider palate to appreciate

and to articulate culinary refinements. Instead of only one orange

there are many shades of it.


Breadth and depth

We've been looking at widening our breadth of experience, but to

explore the whole range of possibility, we need to focus too. Self

imposed limitations release us from the tangles of trivia and force

us to look deeper for what is truly desirable.

Only after stopping eating meat and fish did I start to discover the

richness and diversity of the vegetarian world. From just a few

vegetables playing side roles, many new ones turned up on the

stage, capable of playing in the foreground.

The following illustrations show how we can use limitation to spur

our learning. We can ask ourselves for example, what kind of dish

or snack can we make with potatoes? Can we make a starter with

it? Soup? Salad? How many variations? Side dish? Main dish?

Dessert? Boiled, baked, roast, gratin, pan fried, deep fried, mashed,

grated, cut into sticks, as a pie, cake or croquettes, on its own or

with other ingredients? In this way, we can discover the rich

potentiality of the potato and learn to appreciate it better.

We can search in other directions too. For example if we can only

serve soup, can we make it with banana or peanuts or rice or

whatever is available? This will stretch our understanding of soup.

Gifts from the uninvited

Accidents happen occasionally, like overcooking, using wrong herbs

or spices, adding sugar instead of salt or burning some of the

ingredients. An “accident”, because it is unexpected and outside of

our routine can teach us a new way of cooking. We shouldn’t be

deterred by them, we can see it as an opportunity, a challenge to

make the best use of this new situation. For example, instead of

making a lightly cooked stir-fry, can we create a stew by adding


beans and a thickish sauce? Or can we substitute or just omit the

affected ingredients? Might this be a good opportunity to try an

unusual mix of herbs?

Torch for the dark corners

Recipes, like ideas and concepts, can conceal or distort our direct

understanding, but they can also help us like a pointer or a torch, to

bring light to the shady areas we are barely aware of. They can

change our perspective by giving us a new context. Although

designing our own meal by using our own intuition and experience

gives us more satisfaction than just following cooking instruction,

great recipes can take our cooking to another level. There are

always ingredients or methods of cooking unknown to us to be

discovered. So, cookery books and great recipes can be useful when

we are ready.


CHAPTER 6

The Resurrection of Spinach and Co.

We are conditioned beings; we tend to use an old strategy to face a

new situation. If we are not aware of this, we become

dysfunctional. Complete dependence on the parents, for example,

is an adequate way of living for a very young child, but it becomes

an illness if we maintain that kind of dependency throughout our

life. We too can have a richer experience of life, culinary life in

particular, if we can free ourselves from our old, no longer

appropriate ways of choosing our food.

Perhaps we buried the taste of spinach or curry ceremoniously with

a vow to never eat it again. It could also happen that some

vegetables fell out of favour in our family and slowly slid into

oblivion. Whatever the cause may be, if we end up with only a very

limited option of ingredients, then it is time for "soul" searching,

ours, and also the souls of the dead spinach, cabbage and co. to

bring them back to life again in our imagination.

We need to recall when and where we left the spinach behind, for

instance. If the event was too painful maybe it is completely

deleted from our memory, leaving us with the conviction that we

always disliked spinach. Our parents or other older relatives can be

of help in our search, but if they themselves never liked spinach, it

is almost certain that we didn't have any direct experience with

spinach and our dislike of it is based merely on prejudice. On the

other hand over exposure through having to eat it time after time

could kill our taste for the spinach too.


If we lost our liking for it when we started eating at the boarding

school, we can then ask ourselves whether it was our decision or

because other children didn't like it and we succumbed to group

pressure. If it was our decision, was it because the spinach was

always badly prepared or because we had an unrealistic

expectation, like wanting it to taste the same as carrot? Maybe

conforming with others was the right choice at that time, but we

don't need to continue avoiding spinach forever.

Some vegetables or ingredients can be sacrificed for the sake of self

image. For example cabbages being inexpensive , can be banned

from the household by a person who thinks of himself as rich and

having sophisticated taste. This happens in the other direction too,

vegetables like artichokes or asparagus because of they are thought

of as luxury food, are anathema for people who consider

themselves ordinary. Garlic and curry spices are only for the

foreigners but not for the ultra nationalists. Some people still think

that kale or millet are food for cows and birds.

Of course we don't have to like or to eat everything edible, but to

live happily we need to make our decision consciously based on

actual facts. I am a vegetarian, not because I don't like meat or fish,

but I don't want to eat them out of my ethical considerations. I

don't like to spend a lot of money on food because of my limited

resources, but if I were given chanterelles or truffles I would readily

cook them. Not only kale and millet but young nettles and

dandelion leaves are good enough to spark my curiosity for culinary

adventures.

For one reason or another, in our world of taste some ingredients

or dishes disappeared through the gate "not for me", they are dead


and forgotten or even worse, falsely remembered. Our health,

wealth and social circumstances change with years, the availability

of food and ways of preparing food change too. If we want to keep

up with the reality, we need to re-evaluate our decisions

appropriately. Only if we dare to suspend our judgement on the

damned, is there a chance that they will be redeemed. By bringing

to light the occasion when we forsook them, we might remember

the reason. Maybe we can see now that our reasoning was biased

by inadequate and out of date facts, unfounded fears, spurious

assumptions, superstitions or emotional needs. Once we have seen

the error of our ways, we can start to rehabilitate those doomed

vegetables, dishes etc. and bring them back to our dinner table.

Remember that we are exploring food we don't like, but not food

that we are allergic to. While some people say that they are allergic

to something meaning that they don't like it, it happens too that

some people are allergic to something they like. So we need to be

careful if we are genuinely allergic, because allergic reactions can

be fatal.

When we can suspend our prejudices we can learn to appreciate

the food anew through direct experience. We are able to sense it

with full awareness, giving full attention to its smell, taste and

texture. If we can keep our attention on what is happening, our

experience will override ideas, memories and associations. It is very

hard to do; maybe we have to begin with re-evaluating food we

habitually reject although we can't remember its actual taste any

longer.

The easiest way to appreciate food and to overcome prejudice, is

through love, even just falling in love. Love expands our sphere of


concern reaching to our beloved. We are curious why our lover or

friend likes spinach, for example. I started to appreciate wild

flowers and animals when I fell in love with a nature devotee.

Falling in love with a foreign country or its cultural / culinary

tradition will stretch our food appreciation too.

The process of discovering and rediscovering the culinary world, is

like enlarging and rectifying our vocabulary, it helps us to

understand and enjoy life with more scope and depth and therefore

it will improve our ability to share life’s richness with others.


CHAPTER 7

The Buddha in the Aubergine

“Handle even a single leaf of green in such a way that it manifests

the body of the Buddha. This in turn allows the Buddha to manifest

through the leaf...”

Dogen – Instruction for the Zen Cook

Arts and science in the kitchen

Kitchen activity can be mystifying to some, because they see it

either as sacred or as something below their dignity. When this

happens, their normal ability is paralysed, forgetting that in

cooking, science and common sense still apply.

My friend, a carpenter who can saw planks straight and to size,

amazed me time and again with his jagged slices of potato or loaf.

Don’t be surprised by a scientist friend of yours, if he is making

soup for 12 people and he doesn’t know the right size of pot to use.

Painters too can overlook the many colours of ingredients and mix

them up into a nondescript meal.

Calculation shouldn’t be the base of friendship, but if friends travel

together, for example, they still need calculation to know how to

plan and finance the journey. So it is in cooking, the function of

inspiration, metaphors and poetical imagination is not to replace

our rational mind but to place it in its appropriate context.


Three kitchen graces

It is common to accept that some art forms, such as music can

elevate and expand our consciousness. Dogen, as quoted above,

urges us to broaden the scope, to let even a single leaf of green

show its real nature.

How can cooking expand our awareness? We have seen before that

to cook well we need awareness and care and that we learn by

doing. Here, we are going to look at the importance of beauty, truth

and goodness, the three graces, on our cooking path.

Let us explore how we can appreciate a lemon through beauty,

even beauty from outside the culinary world, through the poem of

Pablo Neruda

..we opened

two halves

of a miracle,

congealed acid

trickled

from the hemispheres

of a star,

the most intense liqueur

of nature,

unique, vivid,

concentrated,

born of the cool, fresh

lemon,

of its fragrant house,

its acid, secret symmetry...

Ode to the lemon, translated by M. S. Peden


Was it outside the culinary world? Yes and no. It is beautiful as a

poem and because of that, the lemon becomes more vivid. The

poem makes us aware of the lemon’s fragrant fresh acidity.

When we cook well, we make something delicious, i.e. something

with a beautiful taste, in doing so we make the eaters aware of a

particular aspect of an ingredient. As an example; a lightly salted

slice of aubergine fried with little olive oil, will reveal its hidden

beautiful taste and texture. Different ways of cooking aubergine

will show us its many other qualities.

Cooking can also reveal truth hidden behind our superficial and

habitual thinking. When we think of a curry, we assume that there

is a fixed dish, apart from any other things, but when we cook we

realise for ourselves that there is no such thing as “curry”, it is only

a name added when we have prepared and put together certain

ingredients. We can also see that we are not the proper creator of

the “curry” either, our cooking is only a link of a long and complex

chain of food processing. After we cook our “curry”, soon it will

become whoever eats the meal, perhaps our friend. In this way

cooking can help us to see the interdependency of life.

We can also learn to appreciate nettles, for example through

goodness. Once I spent a whole week on my own just outside of

forest. I went there to enjoy the tranquillity and the beauty of the

nature. I brought some provisions with me to the caravan where I

stayed, but after several days I realised that my vegetable supply

wouldn’t be enough. It was in the spring and there were nettles

which grew in abundance along the footpath. I knew that nettles

were edible and nutritious especially when they were still tender.

Milarepa, a Tibetan yogi, lived on nettles for a long while. I


collected them and prepared them as if they were spinach, I made

potato and nettle soup and the day after I made pancakes with

nettle and onion filling.

Here, goodness, doing the right thing for one self and others,

consisted in clearing the nettles from the path for the caravan’s

owner and cooking them well to nourish myself. Such prepared

nettles were not only good but also had a beautiful taste.

If I serve such nettle filled pancakes to a friend on a different

occasion, as an act of goodness, this can challenge her view and

shift her awareness. Nettles are not only nasty stinging weeds.

Maybe next time when she sees a clump of weeds she will wonder

whether they are nettles and look at them with more attention.

Probably she will notice too the lively, almost transparent green

colour of the beautiful serrated leaves.

Beauty calls our attention, truth shows things as they are and

goodness urges us to act according to the beauty and truth we have

seen, they form a powerful combination and with awareness they

enhance each other.

The poetry of mashed potatoes

Oscar, a Mexican friend, used to say " It's poetry!" when it

happened that a dish turned out to be very delicate and tasty,

especially when it was made with an unexpected combination of

common ingredients or made in an unusual way.

I imagine that if there is poetry in cooking, there will also be its

parallels in the unimaginative use of language and set phrases. To

cook just following the accepted nutritional requirements of

vitamins or calories for example, is very prosaic, the same with


cooking which is dictated only by price considerations. Reproducing

dishes through standard recipes disregarding specific needs and

circumstances is like using clichés. Some people like to sprinkle

tomato ketchup or chilli sauce indiscriminately on their food, just

like a person who adds expletives or trifling words every time he

speaks.

How frequently do we take short cuts and sacrifice beauty in the

kitchen? We need to remember that no matter how busy we are,

when we cook, that moment is our life. A moment we can't afford

to overlook. There is more poetry in cooking a simple meal well

than in preparing a more complicated one with half measures.

Poetic cooking unveils beauty ignored by a pragmatic approach. It is

said that beauty jolts us from our presumed centre of the universe.

Beauty reminds us that there is something else in the world that is

more interesting than ourselves. Beauty catches our attention,

relaxes the grip of ego. When we let go of our self preoccupation,

our worry, planning and scheming, our consciousness expands so

that we can see things unnoticed before, the hidden beauty. It is

not a circular but an augmentative process, beauty cleanses

awareness and a cleaner awareness perceives more beauty.

Continuing with our writing metaphor; to write a poem or a piece

of prose, familiarity with the language, its grammar, its vocabulary

etc. is indispensable. In prose, we use our knowledge to let the

language say what we want. Poetry is more like a dialogue with the

language to find beauty. With cooking, we need to know its

grammar too, the basic cooking principle and its vocabulary, the

wide range of ingredients. To cook poetically, we have to be

sensitive to the many qualities of the ingredients and aware of how


the ingredients can complement each other. Eating the food or

reading the books of great cooks can help us to imbibe this

sensitivity.

No poetry will emerge without a set of principles of good taste.

With cooking, taste is not only figurative but also literal. It is a direct

experience in the mouth. Presumably taste is connected with our

survival, it is our ability to discriminate good food from bad food.

Unfortunately in industrialised society many of our acquired tastes

are for processed food, that is, food without its freshness and

contaminated with additives which usually are also addictive. What

is good for the survival of the food industry may not be good for us.

We can reinvigorate our genuine sense of taste by exploring the

array of flavours of natural ingredients like fresh fruit and

vegetables, and their combination in good cooking.

The spirit of joy and magnanimity

Another way to improve cooking I received from the thirteenth

century Zen Master Dogen in the form of his “Instructions for zen

cooks”. Dogen lived in Japan when Buddhism was in decline, when

the practice became either highly esoteric and elitist or superficial

and meaningless. He went to China to find a genuine teaching and a

better way of practising to reinvigorate Buddhism in Japan. His

encounter with some monastery cooks impressed him greatly and

stretched his idea of practice beyond just meditation and studying

the scriptures. Dogen asked his disciples to “strive to maintain a

spirit of joy and magnanimity, along with the caring attitude of a

parent”. Why shouldn’t we be joyful if we have the opportunity and

capability of serving others? A magnanimous mind is like a

mountain, stable and impartial, it accepts the ups and downs of life,

the easy and difficult tasks, the inferior and exquisite ingredients,


the noble and lowly guests with equanimity. The caring attitude of a

parent is needed not only towards people we cook for but also

towards the utensils and the ingredients.

In his “ Instruction for the zen cooks” Dogen didn’t concern himself

so much with what to cook, but rather with the attitude towards

cooking. He inspired his students to become good cooks by

becoming good people. He mentioned nevertheless the traditional

prerequisites for good food which include the harmony of six

flavours and three qualities (The flavours are bitter, sour, sweet,

salty, mild and hot. The qualities are light and flexible, clean and

neat, conscientious and thorough).


CHAPTER 8

The Culinary Cult

We sometimes see things as idols, objects of worship and

sometimes as icons, symbols of greater reality. An idol is a

materialised ideal or an idea in a definite form and it is identified

with what it represents. For example, one can make sex an idol for

happiness, with one’s awareness narrowed down and coloured by

the sexual urge, one sees the world as a sexual arena and people as

sexual objects.

Food, like sex is another popular idol, worshipped through the TV,

books and glossy magazines. It is a powerful one, in the affluent

society it manages to make obesity almost the norm. Food

advertisements try to convince us that we can have a good life by

buying their goods. They make us want to consume when we aren't

hungry.

Food idolatry sets in if we over identify ourselves with our taste

sense. We keep eating, in spite of our full stomach, wilfully

forgetting its bad effect on our heart, our health in general and our

mental state. Idolatry turns food into poison. If we are too far

astray on the idol path, we are like the fly that entered the room

through the door and got trapped at the closed window. Only the

pain from banging our head again and again against the glass of

reality, will make us realise our error.

In contrast, an icon is an open door to freedom, a pointer to

something beyond itself. It provides one with a larger perspective


and a deeper understanding of reality. One can only see an icon as

an icon if one can see with clear awareness, and paradoxically with

clear awareness one can see everything, including "idols", as icons.

With awareness we can de-idolise any idol.

Overcoming kitchen’s temptations

We sometimes want to be admired as a great chef, the creator of

an exquisite dinner. Maybe we acknowledge the role of our

“special” ingredient or our favourite technique in our success.

However with just a dash of awareness we can realise how little our

contribution was compared with what went into the long

production and distribution chains of any of our raw materials or

cooking utensils.

It is seductive to think that we will become a better cook if only we

buy a new cooking gadget. How many times, for example, have I

been tempted to the point of near obsession to acquire a trendy

new set of knives, a food processor or other equipments? Most of

the time I haven't bought them and after a while realised that I

didn't actually need them. Occasionally I bought something new,

but what it mainly did was clutter the space and collect dust.

Cooking ordinary vegetable with skill and care for the satisfaction of

our guests can free ourselves from our needs of props and of self

preoccupation. With genuine awareness we realise that everything,

including ourselves, is already special. We are the result of our

particular conditioning.

To transform an ordinary thing into an icon, Dogen instructs his

monastery cook that when he cooks rice, to see the pot as his own


head and the water as his own blood, admonishing him to act

considerately in the interconnected world. Dogen also asks the

cook to handle a single leaf of a green in such a way that it

manifests the body of the Buddha.

To remind the monastery cook that cooking is a practice of serving,

before he serves the meal the cook should perform a ritual by

facing the hall where everyone is practising, offering them incense

and bowing nine times.

Transference of merits is another spiritual practice in the kitchen. It

is to remind the cook not to appropriate whatever good he had

achieved, but use it for the benefit of others, not only the food but

also his skills and reputation.

Discovering elixir at dinner table

A moment of silence before we start eating can help us to

disengage from other activities and preoccupation. This will allow

us to be more aware of our body and of the food we are going to

eat, it can make us more aware of our eating companions too.

Do we feel hungry or thirsty? Do we need rich food or just light

fare? Eating without being aware of our needs is like shopping

without knowing what we are really looking for, exposing ourselves

to the danger of overeating.

Be aware of the food in front of you. What is it? We need to go

further than its name tag, to look behind the cloud of associations

or promotion gimmicks. We can bypass these veils by being in the

present and relying on our direct experience. Look at it attentively,

smell it, feel its texture and temperature and taste it for yourself.


Be aware of our eating companions. Maybe they need food as

much or even more than we do.

Feeling hungry and thirsty is the real call of nature, it reminds us

that we are a dependent being. Acknowledging, being grateful for

the support from nature and paying close attention to the feedback

we receive through our senses, will help us to see food as an icon.

As an icon, food turns into elixir and makes us healthy. It may even

help us to realise that we have never been born as a separate

identity, and we are just part of the interconnected and changing

reality.


CHAPTER 9

Cooking Unbounded

We cook for different practical purposes; some people cook for

relaxation as I did when I had a nine-to-five job, to wind down from

the working day and rush-hour traffic. Trimming, cutting and

arranging vegetables of different shades of colours can be very

soothing. It is like preparing a zen garden on a chopping board.

Some see cooking as a hobby, an opportunity to try out new

recipes, or to play and improvise, creating new dishes, or recreating

those seen or tasted before. Now and again we cook to express our

care for our friends by treating them to a special meal. Sharing food

can communicate sentiments that words cannot. Of course many

cook simply to live well and healthily. Using ingredients which are in

season, is not only important due to quality and price

considerations, but also it will keep us in touch with the cycle of

Nature.

If we cook regularly, whether it is every weekend or every day,

some routines will creep in and we can lose our enthusiasm.

Cooking something different can help us to refresh our vigour.

Inviting new friends or cooking in other environments can help us

too.

But the most important thing is to remember that cooking can be a

powerful and joyful exercise. It is a practice that can help us to be in

the real world, rid us from our fantasies and be alive to what is


actually happening. Cooking is joyful only if we are committed to

learning, if we can accept our mistakes as teachings.

In the talk mentioned earlier “The Taste of Freedom”,

Sangharakshita points out that one cannot be free unless one

breaks the fetters of habit, superficiality and vagueness. Here we

are going to apply this only to one aspect of us, our cooking. When

our cooking becomes free, by using metaphors we can expand our

freedom to other activities, maybe even to our whole life.

Habit, superficiality and vagueness are the antitheses of our

definition of skilful cooking, namely “ preparing desirable food by

making the best use of the available resources”. Our appetite, need

and desire for food change during the day, the week and the year,

so do the available resources. Habit wouldn’t be able to respond to

these demands. With superficiality we can only make a botch of our

cooking. Vagueness, not knowing what it wants, will mess up

opportunities, it will make our cooking grey and insipid.

Overcoming habit

Do we cook the same food most of the time? Perhaps we cook with

regularity, like preparing the same roast for Sundays or another

fixed menu for each day of the week. Maybe we always cook curry

or pasta without consideration of the changing circumstances, we

cook it for lunch, for dinner, at home or when we are on holiday

abroad. To break the habit we need to be aware of it and convinced

that habit is not always advantageous to us. It is like having the

same answer to all sort of situations. It is boring and utterly

unsatisfactory. Habit evades questions we need to face.

For example, if people praised a curry when we made it once, we

may become attached to it. Our early success can compel us to


reproduce again and again the same ‘frozen’ curry. Our fear of

taking new challenges prevents us moving further on our culinary

path. Habit is also not as practical as commonly believed. When we

do our shopping, it is more profitable to buy whatever good stuff is

on offer than to blinker our eyes just looking for curry ingredients.

Do we only invite curry lovers for dinner?

Why don’t we retrace our cooking back to where it was free from

the smothering habit. It doesn’t matter how far, even if it leaves us

with only a simple food preparation, like frying eggs. The important

thing is to regain the feel of genuine cooking, with life in it. We

know for example, why we use a certain number of eggs, why we

break them in a particular way or add other ingredients, what sort

of pan and type of fat we use, the fire intensity etc. If we know

these, we can adjust our cooking to match the need, whether it is a

simple fried egg for breakfast or a Spanish tortilla for high tea.

It is like retrieving the living ember from an untended bonfire,

buried under a thick layer of ash, and kindling it back to its vigour.

The joy of the rediscovery of creative cooking will evaporate our

stale habit.

Overcoming superficiality

Our cooking will be superficial if we always follow recipes, tips and

tricks without understanding. Tinkering and patching our dish with

readymade sauces to make it look different, may actually confuse

us further. To overcome superficiality, we need to free ourselves

from bewildering and incoherent do’s and don’ts. We need to learn

to see that each handling has a different function and how the

steps we take are in line with our scheme of skilful cooking.

Our curiosity to find an alternative to the familiar can help us pierce


through superficiality. We can even use craving for some less than

ideal food, for a breakthrough.

Eating a certain type of food can only be wrong in a context. With a

deeper understanding we can breach the superficial rule of not

eating it and find a way to compensate the action. Sugar rich and

greasy food is bad if we are overweight. Maybe when we take a

slice of rich cake we could restore the balance by having less fat and

less sugar in our meal. Isn’t this an opportunity to discover or invent

low calorie dishes?

Overcoming vagueness

Vagueness will creep into our cooking when we start without

deciding what to cook, hoping things will be o.k. of their own

accord and proceeding aimlessly. With vagueness, our cooking will

be pushed in different directions by our changing mood and pulled

by varieties of irrelevant external conditions.

Free from vagueness, we can make a strategy and prioritize our

actions. It doesn’t mean that we should exclude intuitions and odd

chances, but we need clarity to be able to discern the helpful from

the unhelpful ones.

Once we overcome habit, superficiality and vagueness, we can taste

freedom in cooking. We can cook anywhere, anytime, just as having

learned to walk or to speak, we love to exercise these skills on any

appropriate occasions. The spirit of cooking has manifested in us

and we are ready to respond to the changing culinary challenges.


CHAPTER 10

A Pinch of Logic and Strategy

We can plan our cooking successfully only if we have a clear target

and we know our facilities and restrictions.

Here is an example from chapter 4:

... I want to treat a friend to a good meal, something a little bit

special, colourful, with a variety of taste and texture, to express my

appreciation for her company. I don’t have much time to do the

shopping and the cooking and I can’t afford more than six pounds.

She is a vegan and she can’t eat gluten or food that is too spicy. At

home I have got potatoes and a good sized aubergine which I would

like to use.

Our target: meal which is colourful with variety of taste and texture

Ingredients available: aubergine, potatoes and others worth less

than six pounds

Restrictions: vegan, gluten free, not too spicy, not much time for

shopping and cooking.

I would choose the aubergine as the main feature, as the ingredient

for ratatouille. Flavoured with garlic, herbs and olive oil, this

aromatic dish is coated with red tomato sauce.

To balance the soft texture of ratatouille, we can make crisp potato

“pancakes” as a side-dish. A quick way to prepare, is by grating the

potatoes and spreading a portion in a hot and lightly oiled frying


pan and frying it until it turns golden.

To complete the play of colours and the protein requirement, I

would chose dark green spinach leaves dotted with marinated

white tofu pieces for salad. With good planning, this three part

meal can be prepared in forty five minutes or less.

In this way, the cooking strategy, plan of action, appears almost of

its own a accord. However a grasp of basic cooking methods,

techniques and familiarity with the preparation of model dishes,

will make our task easier. We will deal with these issues in the rest

of this chapter and the next one.

Cooking methods

From the frying pan to the open fire A recent study reveals not only that we need to eat a variety of

vegetables, but also that we benefit most if we eat each different

vegetable prepared in various ways. Of course cooks have known

this for ages, intuitively or guided by their taste, as it is apparent

from the plethora of recipes. There are many ways of cooking such

as frying, boiling, steaming, using an oven or an open fire. Each has

its own merit. Although most of the cooking methods are straight

forward, I would like to draw your attention to some less obvious

aspects.

With pan frying we make use of the heat from the bottom of the

pan as much as possible. Cutting the ingredients into flat and thin

slices and adding a little oil will improve the contact with the pan’s

surface. Oil will also prevent the pieces from sticking to the pan.


Deep frying is a quick way to cook chunks or compound pieces. The

heat comes through the hot oil from all directions, it evaporates

water from the food and makes it dry and crispy. If the oil is hot

enough it will seal the surface of the pieces quickly by forming

crusts. The crust will prevent the oil penetrating from the outside

and also keep the inside of the piece moist. Certain pieces need a

coating like batter to provide the crust.

Cooking in the oven is cooking in dry hot air. It is relatively slow, air

is not a good heat conductor, but some ovens have a fan to blow air

through the heating elements to spread the heat better. Obviously

cooking in the oven is a way to make food that shouldn’t be soggy

or greasy, food like bread, cake, pies or pieces of vegetable like

parsnip or pumpkin. It can also be used as an alternative to frying, it

is practical when we have to cook in batches or when we have to

cook items too fragile for pan frying. Compared to ordinary frying,

oven cooking can produce less greasy food, the pieces need only a

thin coating of oil.

Boiling food in water was an ingenious invention, in spite of its low

profile. How can we eat rice, dried pulses, pasta and many other

dehydrated foodstuff without boiling? It gives the moisture back, it

cooks and with other condiments it enhances the taste too. Unlike

oil, water being free from high calorie fat, animal or even plant

products, is free from dietary restrictions. Its boiling temperature

being lower than oil, prevents food from getting burnt.

Steaming is a gentler way of cooking, but beware steam can burn

our fingers easier than dry hot air. Steaming keeps the food moist

and retains more of its flavour and nutrients than boiling. We can

also cook delicate forms, food that otherwise would disintegrate in


boiling water; stuffed vegetables for example. If the steamer is fully

loaded, with only small gaps between the pieces, the heat will be

unevenly spread. A two tier steamer is more practical than a simple

one, it provides larger floor surface and exchanging the positions of

the tiers will improve the heat distribution.

Open fire is the natural heat source, working with the elemental

force directly can invigorate us. Potatoes or sweet potatoes cook

well in the hot ashes under the embers of burning wood. In

Indonesia people used to cook some types of food by wrapping it

tightly with banana leaves and immersing it in the hot ash. Corn on

the cob or skewered vegetable pieces will be enriched with a smoky

flavour when they are grilled on the fire.

Cutting to size It is important to cut ingredients into a regular size, the size can be

different for each different ingredient. This will give a pattern, a

sort of rhythm to the dish we make, an important aspect that is

frequently overlooked. Also if we cut the harder-to-cook vegetable

into smaller pieces than the softer one, the vegetables will have the

same cooking time. To create more variety, we can cut carrots for

example, into half moon slices for one dish and into sticks for

another. Naturally we have to cut the vegetables into manageable

sizes depending on how the food is going to be served and eaten.

Planning and timing When I cooked at a friend’s place, he was amazed that I cooked the

same meal he frequently did in less than half the time he usually

needed. The meal consisted of lentil stew, stir-fried vegetables and

brown rice, He cooked the dishes in sequence and prepared each of


them in progressive steps. He didn’t realise that he could cook parts

of a dish separately. The simple logic is; the more elements of the

menu we can cook simultaneously, the shorter total cooking time

will be. We have also to make sure that the various dishes will be

ready at the required time during the meal.

The brown rice has the longest cooking time and it can be cooked

straight away, so we should start with this.

The lentil stew consists of lentils and vegetables. Although lentils

cook relatively quick, it is good to start boiling it soon after we have

started cooking the rice. Except for washing, the lentils can be

cooked straight away to make use of free gas rings.

The preparations of the vegetables for the stew can be done while

the lentils are on the fire. To finish the stew, we have to fry the

vegetables and add them to the simmering lentils. My friend would

start with preparing the vegetables before starting to cook the

lentils, making the total cooking time of the stew longer.

The same principle is applicable for preparing stir fry; don’t wait

until all the vegetables have been washed and chopped, but start

with the ingredients that need to be fried first. Onion and ginger for

example, because they are the givers of the background taste.

Harder vegetables like winter carrots need to be cooked earlier

than the others because they need a longer cooking time.

Using herbs and spices Here too our experience is the best source of learning, but why

shouldn’t we find out how the people in Italy, South of France or

Spain for example, use thyme, oregano or rosemary, these herbs

grow in abundance there and have been used for hundreds of years

in the regional cooking. Adding herbs or spices is like putting


colours on a drawing to reveal and emphasise a feature or to invoke

a mood. Spices are usually stronger than herbs. Beware of

overwhelming delicate-tasting vegetables.

An Indian friend doesn’t like potato very much, most of the time

when potato is served to him, he leaves the bits on his plate. But he

can cook amazing potato curry, one of his favourite dishes. For him

the potatoes are the carrier of added taste, maybe he is an abstract

painter.

Right quantity People tend to misjudge quantities and cook too much, either by

oversight or because of fear. We often forget that things add up.

When we prepare a dish with many ingredients we need only a

small quantity of each, but we are tempted to use more because

each seems too little on its own. If we plan a meal with more

courses, we need to adjust the quantities too.

Cooking too much for fear of not having enough food to serve is

regrettable. We need to learn to cook just enough. Food

appreciation diminishes soon after we have satisfied our need. We

would like to eat beyond that point when our sense of ‘having’

overrides our judgement. Serving too much food is wasting

resources and the opportunity to enjoy it in the best way.

Cooking for a large number If we are used to cooking for four it will be easy enough to cook for

eight or ten. But when we have to cook for fifty people or more, it

will be more complicated even if we can cook in a bigger kitchen.

We need to cook differently; just multiplying the amount of the

ingredients and extending the cooking time won’t do.


As an example, consider the preparation of vegetable curry for a

large number of people. We need carrots, courgettes, aubergines,

garlic, onions, ginger and other spices, things we know from our

usual way of cooking curry, we can also guess roughly how much of

each ingredient is required.

When we have trimmed and cut the vegetables, keep each

separately, we can make a better estimation of the portions we can

produce. Firstly we have to estimate how many servings the heap

of carrots would provide if we were to cook a dish with carrot as

the only ingredient. In the same way we estimate the servings

obtainable from other heaps of vegetable. We can then add the

portions together and adjust our initial guess if necessary. We have

to bear in mind that the vegetables will shrink, but this will be

compensated for by the added liquid and other ingredients, during

the cooking process.

It will take a long time to cook a large amount. To prevent the

vegetables from becoming mushy, we have to cook them

separately. This will also shorten the cooking time as we can fry

different vegetables on separate gas rings simultaneously. We can

start preparing the curry base using the onions, garlic etc., at the

same time too. The vegetables need to be slightly undercooked

considering that they are to be finished as a whole. At the end we

have to put all the parts together in a large pot and cook them until

ready.

Another way of cooking the right amount of a stew-like dish is by

calculating the volume. If a person needs a serving of 150 ml, then

for 50 people we’ll need 7.5 litres, of course we’ll need more if we

make allowance for second helpings. Before we start cooking, we


can fill our cooking pot with water just to see what 7.5 litres looks

like in the pot. We can then mark the surface level or measure its

distance from the rim as an indicator for the desired quantity.

Dealing with dietary requirements In a group of twenty, it is likely that there will be a person who has

to avoid certain ingredients, such as wheat, dairy products or

particular spices. For someone who isn’t used to catering for a large

number, having to take an extra precaution, can be stressful. I’ll

give you three approaches to deal with this challenge.

i) Plan a menu, which doesn’t need any of the problematic

ingredients. In theory, this would be the easiest solution, but it can

be difficult if we have to avoid common ingredient such as onions.

It may also mean that we have to sacrifice the opportunity of using

strawberries, as another example, when they at their best just

because of one person.

ii) Plan two different menus to fulfil two different requirements.

This is easier because the choice is larger, however it needs more

time and equipment/facilities to prepare two separate meals.

iii)The combination of the previous approaches; firstly prepare the

common base with ingredients permissible for all and then

supplement it with other ingredients to make different meals as

required.

As an illustration of the last approach, we are going to cook a Dutch

style green split pea soup, which uses celeriac and black pepper as

ingredients. But one of our guests can’t eat celeriac and another

one can’t eat black pepper.


Except for the celeriac and the black pepper, we can make the soup

in the usual way, i.e. simmering the split pea with onion, leeks,

carrots, potato, thyme, bay leaves and salt. Cook the celeriac

separately. When the soup is done, take two portions, to make one

portion without celeriac and the other portion without black

pepper. For everybody else add the cooked celeriac and season it

with pepper to taste. For one of the guest, you could replace the

missing celeriac with mushroom for example and for the other

replace the black pepper with a herb or another spice.

If none of the three approaches can help alleviate your worry, you

can still ask someone else to prepare or buy the special meal, or

you can even explain and request the person concerned to provide

her or his own food. Acknowledging our limitations can reduce

pressure and anxiety.


CHAPTER 11

Blueprints from Starter to Sweet

The previous chapter is to familiarise ourselves with the technical

aspects of cooking, such as heating processes, planning, time and

quantity management. This chapter deals with the way we prepare

the parts of a meal, such as soups, salads, sauces etc.

There are recipes that can lift one’s cooking up to a dazzling level

but leave one perplexed and helpless without them. It is like

reaching a mountain’s top by using a cable railway. The guidelines

in this chapter are more like instructions for hill walking and

climbing. They are to help you to find your own way and to make

your own discoveries in the culinary landscape.

The blueprints, the cooking procedures presented here, do not

specify ingredients and quantities rigidly. We have to chose the

herbs or spices and the cooking time according to the need of each

occasion. Being aware of what is needed and adjusting the process

to achieve our goal is essential for learning. The procedures

selected here are from various cooking traditions.

Grains, pasta, potato and pastry

The basic preparation of staple foods is simple and straight forward.

In hunger no one can afford to wait for elaborate procedures.

You can cook rice or pasta by boiling it in water and drain it as soon

as it is ready. To cook pasta you need a lot of water to facilitate


stirring and moving the pieces, to prevent them from sticking to

each other.

However, cooking rice or other grains like millet, buckwheat and

quinoa, with surplus of water and draining it afterward, will dilute

the taste and reduce the nutritive value. So, try to cook rice in a

covered pot, with water just enough to be completely absorbed

when it is done. The instruction provided on the packaging, usually

with water about twice of the amount of rice, is good enough, but

you can adjust the quantity of water to get moister or dryer rice

according to your preference.

Pilaf, risotto or paella. This is a rich rice dish, prepared with

vegetables and other ingredients. It can be served as a meal on its

own. To bring the taste out, you need to fry onion, garlic and/or

other ingredients lightly, before you add the rice grains. Fry the

mixture with rice for another minute or so and add boiling water or

stock. Estimate the quantity of the water as for plain rice, or less if

the other ingredients contain a lot of moisture. Cover the pot and

cook on a low fire, stir occasionally and add more boiling liquid if

needed. The Indian, Italian or Spanish variant differ from each other

due to their specific herbs or spices. You can treat other grains in a

similar way too.

Potato is a miracle, it responds well to all cooking treatment, from

the most primitive bonfire method to microwave cooking, from

simple boiling to deep frying in a wire mould to create bird’s nest

like casings.

For change, here is an alternative, a way of preparing potato “pan

cakes”. Grate the potatoes and put a portion in a hot frying pan,

spread it with a spatula into a pan cake form. You need just enough


oil to prevent it from sticking to the pan. Fry until it turns golden

and drain it on absorbent paper. An average size baking potato is

needed to make a portion.

Bread We don’t need a bread machine to make bread. Kneading

the dough, forming or rolling it out with our hands to make pizza

base or buns, nurtures our sense of touch and connects us

intimately with cooking.

The basic ingredients of bread dough are flour ( preferably strong

flour, white or wholemeal), yeast ( fast action dried yeast in sachet

is the easiest to get and to work with) and warm water. Salt and oil

in small quantities are also usually added to the mixture. Traditional

French bread, for example, is fat-free but it needs to be eaten fresh.

To make a large loaf of about 1 Kg:

Mix 800 g flour and 1 sachet of dried yeast in a large bowl add salt

and oil if needed. Mix all the ingredients together.

Add ca. 1/2 L warm water, mix it to make a sticky ball and knead it

on floured surface for 5 to 10 minutes into a soft elastic dough.

Shape it and place into the tin, cover it and leave it in a warm place

to rise until it has doubled in size.

Bake it in a hot oven ca. 200 C for about 45 minutes.

We can design the taste, the texture and the shape of our bread, by

adjusting the ingredients for the dough and forming it

appropriately. Why don’t you try to make beautifully green or

orange coloured bread by partially substituting the warm water for

the dough by spinach or pumpkin purée. Part of the flour can be

substituted with rye or other flour. For sweets, besides sugar you

can add cinnamon, raisins, nuts, banana or whatever you fancy.


Shortcrust pastry As bread dough, this pastry is versatile and easy

to make. It can be used as the base for a quiche, a pie or as pasty

cases. Its basic ingredients are flour and cold margarine. We need

twice as much flour as margarine in weight. Put the flour in a bowl,

add the margarine and start cutting the margarine with two knives,

continue cutting until the mixture becomes a heap of crumble, add

a pinch of salt if desired. Sprinkle a little with cold water, just

enough to help the crumble to stay together when we press it to

form a ball. Avoid kneading the mixture, or it will become a dough

and the crust will be hard during the baking. With a food processor

and its cutting blades we can do this operation in a few seconds.

Soup

All sorts of soups, clear, smooth or with soft bits in, can be

consumed with ease. Eating soup soothes and relaxes us. Soup is a

flexible dish, it can accommodate luxuries or very strict diets, it can

fulfil refined or simple taste and it can be served throughout the

day. Although soup is a foolproof dish, to make an excellent one,

some imagination and creativity are indispensable.

The very,very basic way to make soup is to put water and the rest

of the ingredients in a pot and bring it to boil and let it simmer till

done. Surprisingly, even that isn’t basic enough, because people still

can make soups like Gazpacho without any cooking at all.

To make the soup more interesting you could fry some of the

ingredients before you add the water or stock.

For a velvety thick soup, you have to add and mix flour into the

fried ingredients before you add the liquid, about a tablespoon full


is enough for four portions. Alternatively you can include root

vegetables or ‘floury’ vegetables such as garden peas and

cauliflower as the ingredients. You have to liquidize the soup at the

end of the process.

Beans are excellent for soups, but if you use dried beans, soak and

cook them before hand. Liquidizing some of the cooked beans will

thicken the soup too.

Adding some bouillon powder or yeast extract to our soup, will give

it “body”, will make it tasteless watery. The soup will become richer

if we add fat in the form of coconut cream or tahini. Try a sprinkle

of freshly chopped herbs, toasted nut flakes or seeds as garnish.

Sauces

Sauce with its power to transform ordinary fare into a culinary

highlight used to be considered as a magic concoction. The fame of

traditional French cooking was based on its extensive range of

sauces. Even now, the vast assortment of ready-made sauces

available on the market, suggests that we still believe in their

power.

Unfortunately the magic wears off when it is mass produced or

when we use the same one too frequently. So we need to create

our own sauce, our magic, purposefully for each occasion.

Here we are going to look at some basic sauces as examples:

Tomato Sauce This sauce is widely used, beyond the boundary of

pizza or pasta dishes. Enriched and concentrated it can be served as


spreads and dips. It is also readily to be transformed into soups or

as an important part of stews.

The ingredients of basic tomato sauce are; chopped sun ripe

tomatoes, fresh or tinned, olive oil, chopped garlic and onions,

thyme, basil, oregano, salt and pepper. Fry the garlic and onion in

the olive oil and add the rest of the ingredients. It needs simmering

for about 30 minutes to develop its taste and to get rid of some of

its acidity.

White sauce Traditional white sauce is made with flour, butter and

milk. It is popular in non vegan cooking due to its creamy texture

and cheesy taste. The vegan version can be made with flour, olive

oil or other fat and soya milk, this creamy sauce can carry the

flavour of garlic or other condiments efficiently. It mixes well with

steamed and boiled vegetables. We can make an au gratin dish by

putting a layer of white sauce over the prepared ingredients and

topping it with bread crumbs or sesame seeds. It will turn golden

under the grill or in the oven.

Here is the procedure to make the basic white sauce. To make

about 1/2 litre of sauce; heat up 50 ml of olive oil in a saucepan,

add 50 gram of flour, stir the mixture until it bubbles, add a pinch of

salt, pepper, nutmeg and 1/2 litre of soya milk. Keep stirring and let

it simmer for 5 to 10 minutes till the flour is cooked.

The sauce will have a nutty taste and a light brown colour if you fry

the flour a little bit longer. The sauce thickness can be adjusted by

changing the amount either of the flour or the liquid. To give it a

garlicky taste, you can fry chopped garlic before adding the flour.

Salt can be replaced by stock powder and you can add mustard

paste or other condiments to the sauce. With less oil, you can still


make white sauce but you’ll need a blender to eliminate the lumpy

flour bits.

Nut and seed based sauces These sauces are substantial due to the

protein and fat content. Of course you can just add peanut butter,

coconut cream or tahini as it is to your prepared food, but try the

spicy Indonesian gado-gado sauce below. This sauce is usually

served with steamed vegetables or uncooked vegetables like sliced

cucumber/ tomato or bean sprouts. It is also good for dips. As a

barbecue sauce it is known as satay sauce.

Gado-gado sauce With freshly roasted and crushed peanuts you

can make a crisp sauce, but short of these, crunchy peanut butter is

also o.k. To make 0.5 litre of sauce you’ll need about 125 gr. of

peanut butter. Other ingredients are; 1 clove of garlic, 1 medium

size onion, about 1 cm of fresh ginger and 1 green or red chilli, you

need to chop each of these finely. Further you need a half

teaspoonful each of ground cumin and coriander, about 125 ml

coconut cream, half of lemon or lime, some salt, oil and soya sauce.

In a sauce pan fry the chopped garlic, onion, chilli and ginger for a

couple of minutes until the onion becomes soft, add cumin and

coriander, fry further for another couple of minutes. Turn the heat

down and add peanut butter, coconut cream, lemon juice, one or

two tablespoons of soya sauce and a cup of water, stir the mixture

to make it smooth. Keep stirring and bring the sauce to boil. Add

water if the sauce is too thick, and adjust the taste with more

lemon juice, spices or salt as you wish.

Mayonnaise This sauce is to be served cold or at room

temperature, it can be used as a salad dressing, as a dip or as a

component for sandwich filling. Traditionally it has egg yolk as an


ingredient, but here is a vegan version. Being home- made we can

assure that it is free from artificial flavouring, thickening agents or

colourant too.

Its basic ingredients are soya milk, vinegar or lemon juice and oil.

Put the soya milk in a jug, add a dash of vinegar or lemon to curdle

the milk, add salt and other ingredients of your choice such as

garlic, herbs or mustard. To make it you have to whisk it vigorously

or to use a blender. Start whisking or blending and add the oil

gradually until the mixture coagulates and reaches the desirable

consistency. It needs about three times as much oil as soya milk to

make a thick and creamy sauce, so for a trial, 100 ml of soya milk

will be enough. If you want to reduce its fat proportion without

making it too runny, you have to add liquidized fine textured tofu,

low fat purée or finely chopped pickled vegetables.

Stir-fry

When we don’t have much time to cook but fancy a dish with a

zest, stir-fry is the answer. The efficiency of the preparation is

reflected in its vitality. Stir-frying is a quick way of cooking over a

high heat with little oil. It is as simple as the word suggests, but you

still need to pick up the knack of frying various vegetables to

release their aroma without burning or overcooking.

Experimentation will give you the chance to know their cooking

time. You have to manage that the different ingredients get cooked

perfectly at the same time. Try one or the combination of the

following options.

- cut harder vegetables into smaller pieces than softer ones.

- start frying with the hardest vegetable and add the softer ones in

turn.


- fry the vegetables in batches according to their cooking time and

add them together at the end.

Another practical point, if you want to include a sauce in the stir-fry

you have to add it after the frying is done, cooking the ingredients

in the sauce will change your stir-fry into a stew.

Here is an example of how to make a sauce for a Chinese style stir-

fry; fry chopped onion, garlic and ginger, add small amount of soy

sauce and tomato purée, a dash of sesame seed oil and finally add

about a teaspoonful corn flour mixed with a small cup of water. The

sauce will thicken and be ready as soon as it boils.

Stew

A stew is a homely dish, a thing that we can prepare between other

housekeeping activities. While it cooks slowly and steadily, its

aroma pervades the place invoking sensations of warmth and ease.

We prepare a stew by simmering the ingredients in a sauce, which

can be either made during the same cooking process or made

separately beforehand. Let us look at the preparation of a

vegetable curry as an example of the former and at the preparation

of ratatouille as an example of the latter.

Vegetable curry Basic curry ingredients are garlic, onion, fresh

ginger, chilli, coriander, cumin and mustard seeds and ground

turmeric. To discover your own curry you can add one or more

ingredients such as; curry leaves, cardamom, galangal, lemon grass,

lemon rind, coconut cream, tomato purée and coriander leaves.

Most vegetables can be used for curry, but for the sake of the

quality and to keep our curry distinct, don’t blur the intricate taste

with too many varieties of vegetables.


Cooking procedure. Heat up a small quantity of oil in a pot to pop

cumin and mustard seeds, the oil needs to be very hot. Add

chopped garlic and chilli, fry them till they become slightly brown,

add chopped onion and fry for a couple of minutes. Add the rest of

the spices and if you use hard vegetables like carrots, add this too,

turn the fire down, add some water and let the pot simmer for a

while. If you use a softer vegetable add it now, the same with

coconut cream, continue simmering till the stew is ready. Check

and adjust the seasoning and garnish it with chopped coriander

leaves.

Ratatouille is a stew of aubergine, pepper and courgette in tomato

sauce. Prepare the sauce as indicated earlier in this chapter. The

aubergines need to be sliced or cubed and sprinkled with salt to

extract some of the unpleasant sap. The process will take at least

20 minutes, so start with this as soon as possible. Meanwhile slice

the peppers and courgettes and fry them lightly in olive oil. Rinse

and drain the aubergine pieces and fry these until they become

soft. Most of the vegetables are acceptable or even preferable

when they are slightly under cooked, but not so for aubergine.

Finish the cooking by simmering the vegetable pieces in the tomato

sauce.

Eggless egg dishes

I remember a vegetarian who said that he avoided eating any living

thing that would run away from the threat of being killed, so he was

at ease with eating vegetables, fruit and eggs. But if you happen to

be like him, you don’t need to be shy of enjoying egg less egg

dishes, because they are tasty and better than egg dishes as they

can be cholesterol-free and more ecologically produced.


In the following examples I use tofu as an egg substitute. Tofu is

rich in protein, low in fat and easy to process. Egg less egg dishes

give me an opportunity to combine two established culinary worlds,

the traditional egg dishes from the West and the use of tofu from

the East.

Here are some examples;

Scrambled tofu You need a piece of tofu about 250 g, crumble it

with your fingers or chop it into small pieces. Fry some chopped

onion and garlic with olive oil in a frying pan, add some herbs like

basil or oregano, add the tofu and finally season it with salt and

pepper or chilli sauce if you prefer. Don’t fry too long, the tofu

pieces should stay moist. You can spread it on toast for example, it

will serve three or four portions.

Perico is a Venezuelan egg dish, the name means “parrot”, because

of its colour. Besides the tofu, you’ll need onion, garlic, tinned

peeled tomatoes, about half of a 400 gr. tin for one block/ 250 gr.

of tofu. You’ll need also a pinch each of cumin and turmeric,

chopped fresh coriander leaves, oil, salt and pepper. Fry the onion

and garlic, add the cumin and turmeric. Drain the tomatoes, chop

them roughly and add to the frying pan. Chop the tofu into small

pieces, add these also to the pan, finally adjust the seasoning and

mix the coriander leaves in.

Mushroom and spinach “quiche” (for 5 or 6 portions)

We will need a quiche dish or a small baking tray (about 20 cm by

20 cm and 2,5 cm deep) to be lined with the shortcrust pastry.

Prepare the pastry by using 125 g of margarine and 250 g of flour as

indicated a few paragraphs earlier.


For the filling;

250 g mushroom, wash and slice or quarter them

250 g chopped spinach, fresh or frozen

1 onion medium size to be chopped finely

1 block (about 250 g) of tofu

2 tbs. of chickpea flour a.k.a. gram flour

ground black pepper

a pinch of nutmeg

salt and/or vegetarian bouillon powder

2 tbs. oil

Fry the onion in a cooking pot until soft, add the mushrooms and

add the spinach. Just cook until the spinach and mushroom pieces

reduce some of the liquid.

In a blender liquidize the tofu, add the gram flour and add the liquid

from the fried vegetables, add some water if necessary to make the

mixture like a thickish porridge. Add the mixture to the cooking pot

and combine it with the pieces of the vegetables. Add the pepper,

nutmeg, salt/bouillon powder to your taste.

Roll out the pastry with a rolling pin. Line the quiche dish with the

pastry, add the filling and spread it evenly. Put the dish in a

preheated oven with medium setting for about 45 minutes. The

tofu and gram flour mixture will solidify a little during the baking

making a firm but moist “quiche”.

Salad

Salad is a model of culinary freshness, it perks us up, its taste and its

crisp texture refresh our appetite, its colourful ingredients revive


the eyes and it is usually served cold too. The uncomplicated way of

preparation combined with a mind that is open to new possibilities

ensure the salad freshness.

The very name “salad” betrays its origin, it is derived from the word

salar, which means to season with salt. To keep the salad fresh, not

wilted, it is very important that the seasoning, the salad dressing

should be light. It is just to harmonise and unify diverse ingredients

without smothering their character.

To dress is an art of revealing and concealing, even for a salad. It is

to make the salad more attractive. Let us look at the salad

dressing’s basic components. Salt stimulates the production of our

saliva, making us more sensitive to subtle taste. It can also mask

bitterness and acidity. Oil softens stark contrast of taste, it

lubricates and makes chewing easy. Lemon juice or aromatic

vinegar enhances salad freshness. Try and discover for yourself the

effect of various herbs and spices. The dressing can be liquid,

creamy or emulsion like mayonnaise.

The great freedom we have in composing salad, makes it an ideal

dish to enliven our menu with the appropriate colours and texture.

Mysterious bites Occasionally we want to be pleasantly surprised. We are curious

about things concealed, especially when they are beautifully

wrapped. A shepherd’s pie, for example, although familiar holds

under its golden crust a secret. There is no recipe for a surprise,

except avoiding the standard and surpassing the average. Why

can’t we try to make the shepherd’s pie base green with spinach or

yellow with a curry taste?


The real joy of eating pie or pasty is to discover a matching taste to

its attractive appearance. So, forget any old leftovers, unless you

can transform them into something delicious first.

As well as looking good, pie casing or wrap needs to be firm enough

to hold the stuffing together and to give an extra texture. As a

casing we can use puff, filo or shortcrust pastry or even bread

dough. Vegetables like peppers, cored courgettes or cabbage leaves

can also serve this purpose. Obviously vegetable purée, such as

mashed potato, although it can serve as a crunchy pie’s topping,

needs a mould to hold it together.

The filling, on the contrary, doesn’t need to look brilliant on its own,

it can be soft, crumbly or even runny. It is an irony that a confined

stuff is freer to behave. However, a stronger tasting filling will give

these snacks more character.

A stew can be use as pie filling, a stir-fry is ready to fill pasty but we

can also prepare a simpler filling such as chopped olives, fried

mushrooms, nuts, spiced up beans or tofu.

Dangerous food I avoided as much as possible writing recipes in this book because I

don’t believe that readymade recipes will help us to understand the

basic principles of cooking. But life is full of inconsistencies. In the

following pages you will find quick-fix tips and recipes. Worse still, it

is about how to make tempting but unhealthy food. Unhealthy if

you eat it too often. It is about fritters, cream and cakes.

The crucial step in learning to cook is to go into the kitchen. The

fritters and cream are not only delicious and seductive but also easy


to make. They might lower your kitchen threshold and once you are

there enjoying your successes, your courage will grow.

Fritters batter

The main ingredient is chick pea flour, also known as gram flour,

you can find it in Indian shops or large supermarkets. It is almost

ready for use, you need only to whisk/blend it with water. The

batter is prolific, it gives a crispy coating for deep-fried vegetables.

It also binds a vegetable mix together, such as sliced onion and

mushroom, to make flat and round fritter pieces known as bhajis or

tempuras. The batter can also be used for preparing sweets such as

apple or banana fritters. As well as water we need to add salt or

sugar and herb or spices to the chick pea flour according to our

purpose. The batter should be thick enough to give a spoon a good

coating after being dipped in it. To make the fritters crisp, the frying

oil needs to be very hot.

Soya cream This cream is like the vegan mayonnaise described

earlier but here we use sweetener instead of salt and we can add

vanilla or other flavouring. The basic ingredients are soya milk and

sunflower oil. To make ca. 1/2 l of cream; put 125 ml of soya milk in

a jug, add a tablespoon of concentrated apple juice which will

curdle the soya milk. Add other flavouring if needed. Start whisking

and add the sunflower oil in a gradual trickle. The curdled soya milk

will absorb the oil to form an emulsion, which will thicken as we

add more oil. Stop the process as soon as the cream reaches the

desirable thickness. With a blender we can make it in seconds.

If we use sugar or concentrated juices with little acidity, we need to

curdle the soya milk with a dash of lemon juice or vinegar before

whisking. We can use almond oil or other fancy oil, but avoid strong


flavoured oil such as olive oil for a delicate cream, bear this also in

mind if you decide to use aromatic vinegar.

Cakes Why do we need a recipe to learn to make a cake?

Cake making differs from the straightforward way of preparing

soup, stew or stir-fry. Here we cannot follow or adjust our handling

during the cooking process. Once we put our cake mix in the oven

we can only hope that it will turn out all right. We can still design

our own cake later by using the cake we made as a starting point,

we can adjust the quantities of its ingredients to our taste. Limit the

changes to one or two ingredients to begin with, otherwise we’ll

lose track of the effects of our attempt. As an experiment we can

substitute some of the ingredients too.

Carrot cake This is one of my favourite vegan cakes. If you are used

to making an ordinary cake, this cake will challenge your idea of

cake. It doesn’t contain any eggs or butter and it contains vinegar!

Nevertheless it is delicious, so some magic must be involved in the

process.

You’ll need a spring form cake tin. Line it with grease proof paper.

Ingredients;

400 g peeled carrots

400 g wholemeal flour

225 g sugar

2 tsp bicarb soda

2 tsp ground cinnamon

1 tsp ground nutmeg

1 tsp ground cardamom


100 g raisins

250 ml soya milk

150 ml sunflower oil

2 Tbs. vinegar

Grate the carrots. To make them soft, put these in a cooking pot,

sprinkle with a little bit of oil and water, cover the pot and put it on

a low fire for about five minutes.

Sift the bicarb and the ground spices into a large bowl, add the flour

and the sugar and mix these dry ingredients evenly.

Put all the liquid ingredients in a jug, mix them together.

Add the soft grated carrot to the dry mixture and gradually stir in

the liquid ingredients to make a smooth paste. Pour this into the

lined spring form and bake it in a preheated oven with medium

setting for about 50 minutes.

If you want to try to make a banana cake from this recipe by

replacing the grated carrot with mashed banana, bear in mind that

banana has more sugar and moisture content than carrot.

Pumpkin pie Use a quiche dish and line it with the shortcrust pastry

in the same way as for a quiche.

For the filling;

500 g of pumpkin or butter nut squash, peeled and diced

100 g of margarine

100 g of sugar

grated rind of half of a lemon

1 tsp of ground cinnamon

200 g of ground almonds


Put all the ingredients except the ground almonds in a cooking pot,

add some water, about 50 ml, just to prevent burning. Simmer it

and cover the pot until the pumpkin becomes soft and

disintegrated. If the mixture is too liquid, remove the lid to

evaporate the water, it needs to be like a paste. Cool it down a little

and mix the ground almonds in. Fill the lined dish with the mixture

and bake it in preheated oven, medium heat for 50 minutes.

Leave it to cool and taste it. Enjoy it, but keep the mind open to

evaluate your work. Adjust your pie next time if it is needed. If it is

not firm enough for example you can make the paste drier, either

by evaporating it longer or by adding more ground almonds or even

flour. You can add or reduce the sugar or other flavourings too.

This chapter and the previous one deal with cooking processes and

procedures, showing us the mechanics of cooking and how to

prepare various elements of a meal. The next three chapters are

suggestions for expanding our repertoire.


CHAPTER 12

Ingredients For Change

Even if your mother didn't take you to the market when you were a

child, the opportunity to be enchanted by food is still there, even

now. However visiting the familiar markets is unlikely to mystify

you. For the sake of discovery you could explore something

unknown like ethnic food stores.

Following the noodle thread

As an example I would like to take you to a Chinese food store.

Don't be deterred by strange things you'll find there such as dried

lotus leaves, desiccated shrimps or ‘thousand year’ ducks eggs.

Look at the varieties of fresh vegetables, roots, aromatic leaves and

exotic fruit. Notice also the ranges of tofu, rice and other enigmatic

colourful jars, tins and packets of food. All this stuff and ordinary

things like flour, oil and onions are set out seemingly at random as

if specially to sharpen your attention.

I wasn't bewildered as a kid in that chaotic Indonesian market, but

my mother was there. So to encourage your first visit and to

prevent you from disorientation, here is a pointer in the form of a

task: buy ingredients for a simple but delicious noodle soup. What I

have in mind is a substantial soup to be served on its own for a

lunch, a dinner or even as breakfast, which is popular in the Far

East.

Try to find :

-a packet of fresh or dried noodles, not that ubiquitous flavoured


instant noodles with hardly anything except taste enhancer, just

plain noodles.

-a packet of fresh tofu.

-a packet of dried tofu, in the form of sticks. You need to cut the

sticks into short pieces and discard the hard bits. Soak the pieces in

hot water for 20 minutes. The texture is like that of chicken meat.

-a packet of dried Chinese mushrooms; their caps are dark and the

flavour is much stronger than ordinary mushrooms. They need

soaking in hot water for about 30 minutes.

-a small amount of sesame oil. It is for flavouring rather than for

frying.

-a small bunch of Chinese greens, a variety from the Brassica family,

known as pak choi.

-a small bunch of coriander leaves or spring onions.

Of course you can find the more common ingredients like ginger,

garlic and soya sauce too. Hopefully the description of these

ingredients is intriguing enough for you to want to discover, to

experiment with and to taste the things themselves.

If you have never had Chinese noodle soup before, the quantities

and the procedure given below might give you some idea. To make

two portions of soup, you’ll need about 100 g of dried noodles, 2 or

3 pieces of dried mushrooms, 1/4 packet of dried tofu (ca. 50 g). A

table spoon of chopped onion, a clove of garlic, a small piece of

fresh ginger, 100 g of cubed fresh tofu, a handful of shredded

Chinese greens, a table spoon of cooking oil, a dash of sesame oil, a

dash of soya sauce, salt or bouillon powder, black pepper and

coriander leaves for garnish.

Cook the noodle in boiling water, drain and leave it aside. Prepare


the dried tofu and mushrooms as indicated. The stalks of the

mushrooms are tough, so use the caps only; cut them into thin

slices.

Fry chopped garlic and onion in cooking oil, add finely chopped

ginger, add 2 cups of water. Bring it to boil, add the prepared dried

tofu and mushrooms, add the fresh tofu, the greens, add salt (or

bouillon powder), pepper, a dash of sesame oil and soya sauce.

Bring it back to boil and let it simmer for a couple of minutes. Add

the cooked noodle and adjust the seasoning. Serve it hot in two

bowls and sprinkle the coriander leaves on the top. Chilli sauce goes

well with this soup.

If you are familiar with the Chinese shop already, why don't you

give an Indian supermarket a try, a gateway to another rich cooking

tradition, another world with different colours and scents.

However, if order is more appealing to your imagination than

labyrinthine shops, South European outdoor markets or market

halls, can help you. I have good memories of them in France, Spain

and Italy. They looked like a large mosaic, fruit and vegetables were

arranged neatly revealing their vivid colours and textures. If you

happen to be in one of these markets, buy some fruit or vegetables

just because of their beauty or unfamiliarity. Ask the seller for some

advice if needed or just prepare them according to your intuition

and fantasy.


CHAPTER 13

Lasagne beyond the Pigeon Hole

We don’t achieve the mastery of the culinary art by reproducing

stereotypical dishes, but by being able to modify and multiply them

with new variants.

Lasagne, for example, doesn't have to be firm and garlicky, neither

creamy nor saturated with tomato sauce. You can have it as you

wish, tailor-made just to fit you! Let us explore the range of

budding lasagne hidden in this multilayer dish.

Basically lasagne consists of three components; lasagne sheets,

tomato sauce and white sauce. Unless you make the sheets

yourself, which is rather elaborate, you don't have much control

over their quality, so buy your favourite brand! Everything else is in

your hands.

Ask yourself how much lasagne you want to eat. A piece consisting

of three single sheets interspersed with layers of white and tomato

sauce, will make a good portion. Lasagne is not meant to be made

for one portion, probably not to be eaten alone either, it is not

practical. It takes almost as much time and energy to make one or

four portions and it is difficult to find a one person lasagne dish too.

Why don't you invite a friend or two who are eager to participate in

your culinary exploration for dinner, maybe even to cook together.

You might have to compromise your taste, but sharing activity with

friends is a joy and who knows, their taste might be better than

yours.


Let us continue with our estimation, for one portion of lasagne, as

well as the three sheets you have to estimate how much sauce will

be needed; probably half a mug of tomato sauce and half a mug of

white sauce. So, for four portions of lasagne we need two mugs of

each sauce.

Tinned peeled tomatoes are more suitable for making sauce

because the fresh ones we can get in Britain usually lack the taste

or colour of the Italian tomatoes. For the quantity we need, open

two of 400 g tin, drain and liquidize the tomatoes. Prepare the

sauce as indicated on page(xx) but to make the lasagne a complete

meal you need to add some protein source. Traditionally lasagne

contains mince meat. For vegetarians, you can use one of the

following alternatives; finely chopped tofu, cooked lentils, quorn

mince or boiled tvp mince. When you decide on the quantity of

ingredients, bear in mind that the lasagne sheets will absorb some

of the liquid.

To make two mugs of the white sauce you need margarine (or olive

oil) and flour in equal weights. To give you some idea, say 50 gram

each. Further you need milk, salt and some herbs or spices. A

simple way of preparing it is as follows: melt the margarine in a

cooking pot, add the flour, leave the mix to fry a little until it

becomes bubbly, add a pinch of nutmeg and black pepper, finally

whisk the mixture and add milk gradually until you get a sauce with

the right thickness and free of lumps. Add salt if you wish. Leave the

sauce to simmer for about five minutes.

For the white sauce alone, if we consider two alternatives for each

ingredient, like the choice between margarine or olive oil, white

flour or wholemeal, frying the mix ( also known as roux) lightly or


until it becomes slightly brown, cow’s milk or soya milk, with or

without nutmeg, pepper or no pepper, salt or bouillon powder, you

will have more than a hundred variations to choose from. The

possibilities are almost inexhaustible: you can add spinach or

cheese or its vegan substitute, mustard or whatever you prefer to

adjust the sauce to your taste. Of course, in the same way there are

abundant varieties of tomato sauce to choose too.

Adhering to a single recipe will deprive you of discovering new

varieties, and are you going to let yourself forgo the lasagne just

because of the lack of a particular herb?

Let us proceed with the cooking. Switch the oven on and set it at

medium heat, about 180 centigrade. Now you can start to assemble

the lasagne, you need an oven proof lasagne dish about 5 cm deep,

preferably a rectangular one. Put half of the tomato sauce at the

bottom of the tray and spread it evenly, cover this with a single

layer of lasagne sheets without overlapping each other, maybe

you'll need to break some to fit the edges. Spread half of the white

sauce over the lasagne sheets and cover the white sauce with more

sheets as before, continue with spreading the rest of the tomato

sauce, another layer of lasagne sheets and finally the rest of the

white sauce on the top.

You could improve this basic lasagne by adding grated cheese or its

vegan alternative or grated tofu mixed with some oil and stock

powder as the topping. Put the assembled lasagne in the oven until

the lasagne sheets become soft and the topping becomes golden.

Without evaluation there will be no mastery. Are you happy with

your lasagne? You’re lucky if you are, but if you’re not, you can see


it as an experiment and you have to pinpoint the sources of your

dissatisfaction. To improve your next lasagne is usually

straightforward, it is a matter of reducing salt if it is too salty and

adding liquid if it is too dry. If one sticks to one's observations, how

can cooking be difficult? Of course you have to start with the

gravest problem, if the lasagne is burnt, any speculation whether it

might be too peppery for example, is beside the point.

Experimentation needs measurements, or at least reliable

estimations as points of reference, so, numbers can be useful to

help you to establish your knowledge. Don't fix the numbers too

rigidly though, or your lasagne will lose its vitality


CHAPTER 14

The Thousand Faces Of Cabbage

“ Put your awakened mind to work, making a constant effort to

serve meals full of variety that are appropriate to the need and the

occasion...”

Regulations for Zen Monasteries .

Even in the monastery where people live with simplicity they try to

ensure the food is served well. Life is not for self punishment nor

for indulgence. We do have to eat but we do not have to eat bad or

boring food. Maybe we can’t afford or we don’t want to spend

money on expensive ingredients. We need to remember that cheap

things are not necessarily inferior, they are cheap only because they

are in great supply or are easily available.

Cabbage is one of the most common vegetables and is often

underrated. To bring about a new appreciation of it, let us look at

the many possibilities of preparing cabbage, on its own or in

conjunction with other easily available ingredients.

To begin with, there are various types of cabbage; each possesses a

different texture, smell and shade of colour. If we want to use a

particular cabbage, we need to know its characteristics. Consider

for example, how the white cabbage with its rather strong taste and

crispy texture matches the creaminess of mayonnaise and the smell

of fresh onion when we make coleslaw. With the deep green of

savoy cabbage or the purple of the "red" cabbage we can

effectively change the colour composition of our meal.


Instead of asking which soups or salads we can make with cabbage,

we are going to look at using the features of different cabbages. Its

large leaves for instance, are suitable to wrap and hold crumbly

mixtures. Bearing in mind this property, we can design various

snacks, side and main dishes, that can be cooked under the grill, in

the oven, as a casserole or in a steamer. We can improve the

flexibility of the leaves by soaking them in boiling water for a couple

of minutes.

As an illustration, to make a succulent side dish we can steam small

packets of cabbage leaves stuffed with cooked rice, grated cheese

or smoked tofu and herbs. We can grill them too, but we need to

brush them with oil and secure the wrapping with cocktail sticks. As

a casserole we can chose more substantial fillings like beans and

nuts and also we can use more sturdy cabbage leaves. Covering

them with sauce will improve the taste and the cooking process.

As well as using cabbage leaves as wrappers, we can use them as

filling for pasties or pies. For pasties, we need to cut them into

small strips and fry lightly to develop a nutty taste. Adding other

vegetables or finely cut tofu, and some herbs or spices, we'll have

spring roll or samosa stuffing. Chopped cabbage makes a good

ingredient for vegetarian shepherd's pie.

Shredded savoy cabbage leaves are firm enough for deep frying,

either straight away which will turn them dark green and very

crispy like fried seaweed , or with a batter to make fritters with

moist cores. On the other hand, Chinese cabbage has tender and

light green leaves, an excellent ingredient for a refreshing salad.

Combine peeled orange segments and toasted almond flakes to

bring the colours more alive and enrich the texture.


Red cabbage, because of its distinctive colour and its milder taste, is

suitable for making an attractive fruity side dish if we add sweet

smelling spices like cloves or cinnamon. We can stew the cabbage

with a small amount of sliced apples to make a good complement

for a roasted dish. Sprinkling a dash of vinegar will brighten the

colour of the red cabbage.

One of my favourite cabbage dishes and easiest to prepare, is

sautéed cabbage almost on its own with just a little bit of garlic, salt

and seeds like fennel or herbs such as dill.

For those who really enjoy the taste of cabbage, sauerkraut

presents an amplified aroma. It can be used to add an interesting

flavour to various dishes like soups, salads or even mashed

potatoes. Because of its acidity, it is a good complement for greasy

fried food.

We can add cabbage into rice dishes such as risotto, paella or fried

rice and it is also good for noodle dishes.

All types of cabbage lend themselves to stir frying or soup making,

because with these flexible cooking processes we can incorporate

cabbages with different texture at different time.

By watching attentively from every side we allow the cabbage to

reveal its many faces and we also notice that behind the cabbage,

scores of other vegetables are waiting to be considered in the same

way.


CHAPTER 15

Nurturing Nature

Cooking changes us profoundly

To cook well we need to know what to cook, the techniques tell us

only how to do it. We need to know both but the first is more

difficult to find out. Some traditions prescribe the characteristics of

good food, like having six flavours and three qualities, as quoted by

Dogen.

Here in the West, we are more concerned with its nutritional

contents and we also tend to follow the French style of cooking,

which avoids the repetition of predominant ingredient at the same

meal.

However cooking has far reaching consequences, more than what

we usually think of. It has shaped us in the last hundred thousand

years, not only our social life but also our very body. Eating food

that needs cooking requires more organisation and co-operation

than eating raw food, which can be consumed wherever one finds

it. Cooking and eating together promoted primeval bonding.

Cooked food is easier to digest and gives the body more nutritive

energy to survive, maybe this is the reason why no culture without

any cooking skill has been discovered. Agriculture would not have

developed without knowing how to process wheat, rice, potato or

other difficult to digest produces. Eating more nutritious food

changed our digestive system, it made our gut smaller, compared to

other primates, and our brain larger.


We are still cooking and eating, and undoubtedly it continues to

shape us. Our world with its mighty food-producing and processing

businesses is different than the world at the past; the forests are

disappearing, the sea and the oceans are overfished, the globe

becomes warmer and dirtier. Our body too is different; it is more

susceptible to food related illness such as obesity, cancer and heart

disease. Can we let our civilisation be doomed by our cooking?

To meet the new challenges, we have to re-asses our cooking ideal

and resist the alluring products that stealthily harm our body and

destroy the earth. This is an arduous task, because we have to

change our eating habits and acquire new tastes for good food and

also because the vested interests will undermine any efforts that

threaten their position.

However, with a clear and appealing alternative, a large number of

us can shape a better future. No government, or multinational can

afford to disregard the choice of billions of people. We can vote

directly and compellingly, every day, by buying only wholesome

products. The question of what to cook or not to cook, is indeed of

utmost importance.

A call for compassion

‘Hate is not overcome by hate; by love alone is hate appeased ....... ’

Dhammapada

Sooner or later we will realise that some food can cause illness and

death, not only to us, the eaters, but also to others who suffer from

starvation and pollution due to its production.


I single out meat and dairy products, firstly because research

asserts the correlation of the consumption of meat products with

cancer and heart disease, and secondly because it is reported that

the livestock sector generates 18 percent of greenhouse gas

emissions, more than transport, and it is also a major source of land

and water degradation.

Meat production has other dark shadows. It is a wasteful process

that depletes the world food resources, it uses about three times as

much grain or pulses to yield the same amount of nutriment and it

pushes the price of the crop up. While hundreds of millions of

people suffer from hunger, a large proportion of corn and soy

grown in the world feeds cattle, pigs and chicken. And of course

billions of these animals are suffering. They are maltreated,

confined, drugged and fed unnaturally to push their meat or egg

production. They end their life in a horrible way.

To guard our health, to improve the environment and to abolish

suffering, we have to co-operate, including with the perpetrators of

the harm. The meat industry can change and start producing veggie

burgers, for example, if there is less demand for meat products. It

won’t happen tomorrow and it won’t start happening before we

ourselves change.

We need each other for support and inspiration. Any action in the

right direction, from just reducing meat consumption, becoming

part-time or semi- vegetarian, to becoming a strict vegan, will help

erode the meat establishment. Dogmatism will only estrange

ordinary people and we cannot bring about significant changes

without the majority support.


The inexhaustible carrot

The threat of meat engendered illness and environmental disaster,

like a big stick, spurs us onto the vegetarian path. However most of

us are not strong enough to stop our meat consumption, not for

long, if our rational decision is not supported by our emotions.

Fortunately, the vegetarian path is strewn with juicy carrots in the

form of Truth, Beauty and Goodness.

Beauty, the exquisite taste and visually attractive vegetarian food,

can give our choice an emotional backing. The appreciation of the

beauty of the living animals and of nature, will also call for our

feeling of care. It takes time to acquire new taste and new way of

seeing, remember that for some, an animal’s ‘beauty’ is only to be

found in the butcher’s shop or on the plate.

The goodness of being a vegetarian, consists of eating healthy food

and harming less animals and the world. To eat is to destroy but

vegetarianism gives a brake to our tendency of treating living

beings as mere objects, it reminds us that the defenceless animals

can suffer and need protection. The joy of having a clear

conscience, will help us to stay on the vegetarian course.

Without a Truth-seeking attitude, changes for the better are

unlikely to happen. More and clearer information about food can

strengthen our resolve. It is easy enough to find new recipes, but it

is less straightforward to find our way amongst diverse diets.

Harder still is to see the pervasive cruelty against animals, because

we prefer not to feel upset. We would like to believe, for example,

that eating eggs and using dairy products are free from killing,

ignoring that half, the male genus of these species, are killed in

their early life and the other half follows the same fate as soon as

their productivity drops. We will also realise that some vegetarian


products are harmful, either in their production or when we

consume them. Finding the truth can be uncomfortable, but it is a

process of waking up.

Vegetarian cooking is a mission amongst the non-vegetarians,

nevertheless when we cook our task is not to talk about it, but to

cook well. The intention of this book is just that.

Cooking a brighter future

“A real tradition is not the relic of a past that is irretrievably gone; it

is a living force that animates and informs the present........”

I. Stravinsky -Poetics of Music.

The precariousness of the environment gives our cooking a new

turn. Our definition; skilful cooking is preparing desirable food by

making use of the available resources, is still applicable, but we

have to re-evaluate its terms e.g. desirability and availability. The

effects of our cooking reach far beyond the boundaries of our

neighbourhood and circle of friends. In this larger context, if we

also take Truth, Beauty and Goodness as our guidance, as ‘ a living

force that animates and informs’ our cooking, then a new tradition

will emerge. A tradition that can inspire and help us to make

choices in the many steps of our cooking.

As our food becomes more beautiful and tasty, more ethical and

beneficial, it turns into an irresistible message for change. To purify

the world’s food production by cooking with awareness, will take

long a time and it is surely not going to happen without other

measures. However we don’t need to be disheartened because

every step forward toward Truth, Beauty and Goodness is a reward

in itself. Our joy of discovery and sharing our creation will loosen us

from the grip of food fads and consumerism.


An Invitation to support the Vegan cause

This book has been produced and is being sold at the lowest price

possible to make it available for many. If you enjoyed reading it,

you can treat your friends with a copy. All readers are warmly

invited to donate to the Triratna Vegan Project to promote

veganism in the wider Buddhist Community and beyond.

For more details please visit: www.justgiving.com/triratnavegans


Acknowledgements

This book wouldn’t come into being without the encouragement

and assistance of many people. For many years café customers

asked me to write about my cooking, but I had to wait until

Manjusvara with the “Wolf at the Door” workshop convinced me

that everybody could write. The Earth Café gave me the laptop. A

dozen of friends, kindly helped me, with limited success, straighten

my English. I also, at different stages of the draft, received feedback

from Padmakara, Vilasavajra, Anjali, Paul Thung, Vajradevi,

Yogaratna, Rosemary Wild, Amritasukha, and Ratnaghosha. They

assisted me to weed out errors and cut through the tangles of

unclarity. Ratnaghosha also helped me to open new windows on

my impenetrable computer screen. Jayaraja took my photograph

and Guhyaraja put the cover together. I feel very grateful to all of

them. I only hope that I have managed to make good use their

generous offering.

I’m much indebted to my devoted mother who shared her love for

cooking unstintingly, to Vajrayogini who helped me to re-orientate

my life and to Venerable Sangharakshita who brought the Buddhist

treasury to light and created the Triratna Buddhist Order, the

context for practising the Dharma in the modern world.

And finally, this second edition is published thanks to kind support

from Lokabandhu.

the jewel in the cabbage by vimalabandhu

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