cooking
I am inordinately pleased with the food I made tonight (it was going to be dinner, but I got too hungry, so I'm saving it for lunch. I made an egg salad sandwich for lunch. Homemade egg salad is so much better than the stuff you buy, it's not even funny. Maybe I just think that because I like to go heavy on the mustard.) The other foods I made were:
Japanese and French cuisines are my two veryvery favorite cuisines in the world. I absolutely love cooking Japanese food--for years, I've only cooked Zen temple food, because that's what my mom cooked, but watersong just got me Harumi's Japanese Home Cooking, so now I can branch out a bit. Zen temple food is great for the sorts of cooks who see cooking as an end in itself, because each recipe seems to be designed to make you pay attention to each ingredient. Also, the cookbook I use (The Heart of Zen Cuisine, with my mother's notes) was written by the abbess of the Sanko-in temple, who included a substantive introduction explaining how food preparation and consumption fit in with the Zen temple way of life. She talks about turning rice-washing into a meditation, focusing one's entire being on cleaning and purifying the rice, emptying one's mind of everything except the gradual shift from milky water to clear, looking for chaff and dirt and stones in the rice. I find washing rice to be incredibly mesmerizing, even when I'm not actively meditating while I'm doing it. Watching the stubby little grains change from powdery, opaque cylinders to shining translucent pearls is beautiful, and feeling the grains run through my fingers as I pour cold water over them is like being a child again and playing with my food. Really well-prepared food--Japanese or otherwise--gets "played with" a lot anyways, as the cook arranges, adjusts, pours, chops. Japanese chefs are taught to arrange food on a plate as if depicting a seasonal landscape--green "mountains" in spring, brown in winter--much like parents arrange food in smiley faces or landscapes on the plates of children. (I was a particular fan of the broccoli forest in the snow-clad mashed potato landscape when I was wee.)
Cooking is one of the humblest of hobbies--single-source-chocolate-melting, varietal olive-oil-sniffing food snobs aside--but also one of the most rewarding, I think, not just because you get a meal when you're finished, but also because it engages every sense, makes you solve puzzles, do math, laugh, experiment, fuck up, chop, mash, squeeze, stir, play. It really fits with Diane Ackerman's description of "deep play."
On a completely unrelated note: I'll be uploading Bay Area pictures to my Facebook account tonight. Enjoy!
- parboiled beet greens (I still haven't decided whether to put a miso-soy sauce dressing or a vinegar-gomasio dressing on them)
- beet "tofu," which is a shojin [Zen temple] dish made using kuzu starch
- ginger rice balls
Japanese and French cuisines are my two veryvery favorite cuisines in the world. I absolutely love cooking Japanese food--for years, I've only cooked Zen temple food, because that's what my mom cooked, but watersong just got me Harumi's Japanese Home Cooking, so now I can branch out a bit. Zen temple food is great for the sorts of cooks who see cooking as an end in itself, because each recipe seems to be designed to make you pay attention to each ingredient. Also, the cookbook I use (The Heart of Zen Cuisine, with my mother's notes) was written by the abbess of the Sanko-in temple, who included a substantive introduction explaining how food preparation and consumption fit in with the Zen temple way of life. She talks about turning rice-washing into a meditation, focusing one's entire being on cleaning and purifying the rice, emptying one's mind of everything except the gradual shift from milky water to clear, looking for chaff and dirt and stones in the rice. I find washing rice to be incredibly mesmerizing, even when I'm not actively meditating while I'm doing it. Watching the stubby little grains change from powdery, opaque cylinders to shining translucent pearls is beautiful, and feeling the grains run through my fingers as I pour cold water over them is like being a child again and playing with my food. Really well-prepared food--Japanese or otherwise--gets "played with" a lot anyways, as the cook arranges, adjusts, pours, chops. Japanese chefs are taught to arrange food on a plate as if depicting a seasonal landscape--green "mountains" in spring, brown in winter--much like parents arrange food in smiley faces or landscapes on the plates of children. (I was a particular fan of the broccoli forest in the snow-clad mashed potato landscape when I was wee.)
Cooking is one of the humblest of hobbies--single-source-chocolate-melting, varietal olive-oil-sniffing food snobs aside--but also one of the most rewarding, I think, not just because you get a meal when you're finished, but also because it engages every sense, makes you solve puzzles, do math, laugh, experiment, fuck up, chop, mash, squeeze, stir, play. It really fits with Diane Ackerman's description of "deep play."
On a completely unrelated note: I'll be uploading Bay Area pictures to my Facebook account tonight. Enjoy!