How To Cook Your Life 3 of 4
This session shifted the focus from cooking to eating. To repeat a quote from the first session, Daoists and Buddhists largely eat the same diet but Daoists focus on what you eat and Buddhists on how you eat.
The talk hung around one major anecdote at the start of his talk. This was about breakfast at Tassajara and the complication of when they switched from outdoor canteen service to eating in the zendo. The cereal served was easy but everyone wanted a different combination of condiments with their cereal – variations of milk, cream, sugar, dried fruit etc. This made self serving them in a seated position slow and cumbersome. After the second day, Suzuki Roshi called the whole community together and said that he couldn’t understand Americans. If you put so much milk and sugar on the cereal, how can you taste the true spirit of the grain?
If you take the time and effort to really taste and appreciate food then you will be in a place of stillness. Mostly, though we simply want the familiar that satiates a craving. So, without an instruction from Suzuki Roshi, Ed switched the next morning to a bowl of rice with a topping of sesame salt.
He developed this further by talking about some soups that look similar, namely carrot, sweet potato or winter squash. They have a similar colour and consistency and, if the same spices such as ginger are used, it can be impossible to taste the vegetable. But, carrot soup should taste of carrot. The cooking should bring out the flavour of the vegetable.
He then described an activity on a children’s retreat of sitting in silence and carefully eating one potato chip in order to really taste it. Then a piece of orange and then one cookie. To help focus the attention on eating and not just consume the familiar to get on with the next task.
Bows
Hoshuku
Satlah
This session shifted the focus from cooking to eating. To repeat a quote from the first session, Daoists and Buddhists largely eat the same diet but Daoists focus on what you eat and Buddhists on how you eat.
The talk hung around one major anecdote at the start of his talk. This was about breakfast at Tassajara and the complication of when they switched from outdoor canteen service to eating in the zendo. The cereal served was easy but everyone wanted a different combination of condiments with their cereal – variations of milk, cream, sugar, dried fruit etc. This made self serving them in a seated position slow and cumbersome. After the second day, Suzuki Roshi called the whole community together and said that he couldn’t understand Americans. If you put so much milk and sugar on the cereal, how can you taste the true spirit of the grain?
If you take the time and effort to really taste and appreciate food then you will be in a place of stillness. Mostly, though we simply want the familiar that satiates a craving. So, without an instruction from Suzuki Roshi, Ed switched the next morning to a bowl of rice with a topping of sesame salt.
He developed this further by talking about some soups that look similar, namely carrot, sweet potato or winter squash. They have a similar colour and consistency and, if the same spices such as ginger are used, it can be impossible to taste the vegetable. But, carrot soup should taste of carrot. The cooking should bring out the flavour of the vegetable.
He then described an activity on a children’s retreat of sitting in silence and carefully eating one potato chip in order to really taste it. Then a piece of orange and then one cookie. To help focus the attention on eating and not just consume the familiar to get on with the next task.
Bows
Hoshuku
Satlah