I’ve been putting this cookbook review off…
So I’m going to use an analogy to make it easier to understand why this is so difficult for me.
You know when you’re in a relationship and everything should be hunky dory, but it just isn’t? You look at your partner and you see this warm, caring, gentle person. Maybe they’re not the neatest person in the world, and maybe you have better knife skills, but they always ask how your day was and don’t mind if your gluten-free peanut butter soufflé cupcakes collapsed and you had to stuff them with Italian meringue and call them “filled mini baked Alaskas” to save dessert.
Now doesn’t that just sound like a keeper? I know you’re all nodding.
But sometimes you need more than a shoulder to lean on. You need someone who’s going to come up with that baked Alaska idea for the days when all you see is a gloopy sandwich topping. You need someone who’s going to make you laugh about it, not someone who gives you that bubble of irritation in your stomach. You need someone who, when all you want to do is relax, they’re the person with whom you want to do that. And you need someone who excites you, who makes you think, and maybe even inspires you a little.
So if you’re with someone who you know is a very good person but just can’t love, you have to let that person go and find a better home with someone else. They could be filled with all sorts of good traits that someone else will appreciate more than you.
That’s how I feel about this cookbook. It’s a cookbook originally written 35 years ago at Tassajara – a Zen retreat in the Santa Lucia mountains in California. Since then it has been updated 3 times, this being the most recent edition. It’s full of stories of the retreat, learning to be at peace, and cooking as meditation. It’s about cooking by feel, not by recipes. It’s supposed to be a cookbook for the beginner cook, but it’s certainly not for the kind of person looking for Julia Child-style classic French dinners or “30 recipes in 30 minutes or less.”
To be fair, I was never very zen. Once, at 5am, lying on a couch in a green room after playing a 10-minute body percussion piece every two hours starting at 7pm the evening before, I was very zen.
“Are you always this relaxed and calm?” the solo pianist playing every other hour asked.
I smiled through my fatigue. If he only knew…
But I imagine that the people who go to Tessajara are very Zen, or are trying to be very Zen. And I also believe that the food is pretty delicious there. All vegetarian, all made with love, if not recipes or tastebuds. It’s pretty renowned for its food, actually, and who wouldn’t want some Zen with their bowl of Lemonade Lettuce (“This makes a light, refreshing salad. Maybe a bit unusual at first, but the sweetened, fragrant lemon leads right into the lettuce-ness of lettuce.” As someone who makes up words from time to time, I can forgive “lettuce-ness” but do not agree with the recipe’s ingredients and instructions, which read: “Lettuce; lemon juice; honey; salt (optional); sweeten the lemon juice to taste. Mix thoroughly). This could very well by a perfectly decent dip, but no salad newbie is going to be convinced to even try this recipe. But most Zen people probably aren’t salad newbies.
What I do like about this book…
…is that it goes through almost every well-known vegetable and gives various basic ways to use them and a rough recipe for each – no measurements. Then it talks about visualizing a meal, putting it together, and enjoying it. The planning and overall experience, I mean. It also talks about the basics of making vinaigrette and chili sauces (chilies and water…no salt or vinegar?). Later in the book it does give some actual measurements, but the recipes just don’t look very interesting (macaroni salad with tomatoes, bell pepper, and red onion. It calls for 1/2 tbsp red wine vinegar and 1/2 tsp red pepper flakes, plus a few capers. Bland.
And there are no pictures. Is food porn not Zen enough?
But I like that the book tells you not to waste the macaroni cooking water, though. And I like that the recipes can get away with being so simple because the quality of ingredients is so high.
The truth is I wanted to cook from this book. I’d often be thinking of a food (e.g. potato) and wondering what I should do with it (roast, boil, mash, bake, blanch and sauté), and I’d go to the book figuring it’d have a good basic idea and see something like “potato; oil; butter” listed and the recipe would say something like, “toss potato pieces with oil and bake until done. Serve with melted butter.” And if that makes any sense to you, you wouldn’t have needed a recipe in the first place. And if that doesn’t make any sense to you, you need much more of a recipe or you’ll never try.
I did try the baked vegetable platter. I even used the 1-2 tbsp olive oil. My vegetables were a bit burnt and/or undercooked on the inside. They tasted like…burnt and undercooked vegetables with not enough parsley and thyme (the recipe didn’t say how much), and I’ll never use this recipe again because I’d probably just make the same mistakes again.
So as much as I like some of the book’s personality traits, and as much as I know we could make decent lemon pudding cake together, I’m just not interested in it for the long term. As page 427 says, “prayer helps,” but there’s only so much the “blessedness of food” can do to help me live with polenta-eggplant gratin (the 3 cups of cheese is supposed to help. I’ll think of that as its boyish good looks, sincerity, and iron stomach – 1 cup of cheese for each positive trait).
So I’m sorry I couldn’t make this relationship work. I really wish I could. It’d be really nice to settle down and enjoy a tofu smoothie together, except I don’t like tofu and the idea of blending it with bananas. Could be delicious, but I know somewhere out there is at least one cookbook – maybe many cookbooks – that understand my needs a little more. And so I wish my Tassajara cookbook good luck at finding a new owner who will better appreciate its wisdom and comfort. Someone a little more patient than me, and probably a little more Zen.
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