Zen & The Art Of Cooking Ed Brown Wants To Bring Mindfulness And Meditation To Your Food Preparations

Ed Brown doesn’t really want to teach people how to cook.

He wants to teach them how to be while they cook: trusting in their instincts, in touch with the ingredients, enjoying the journey in the kitchen as much as the destination at the dinner table.

“Cooking is not merely a time-consuming means to an end, but is itself healing, meditation and nourishment,” the California vegetarian pioneer writes in his latest book, “Tomato Blessings and Radish Teachings” (Riverhead Books, 1997).

Or, as his Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki Roshi used to say: “You are not just working on food, you are working on yourself, you are working on other people.”

“Tomato Blessings” is the distilled essence of Brown’s 30-year immersion into cooking and Zen meditation. He’ll read from it next Thursday at 7:30 p.m. at Auntie’s Bookstore in Spokane.

Actually, he doesn’t really want to read from his book.

“You can read the book any time. You don’t need me,” Brown, who turns 53 on Tuesday, says by telephone from his San Francisco area home. “I usually give a talk, and people have questions.”

That’s the way teaching works. And Brown, above all, is a teacher.

“He’s got the right blend of ‘Let me tell you how to do it’ and ‘What do you think?”’ says William Bond, owner of Spokane’s Luna restaurant, who has studied cooking and meditation with Brown.

For example, when making bread, Brown has students start with water and add flour until they feel it’s the right texture. “That’s how he teaches,” Bond says. “What he’ll say to you is, ‘After you’ve done this, write down what you did, and that’s your recipe.”’

At age 10, Brown tasted his Aunt Alice’s homemade bread during a visit back East. It was a spiritual awakening.

“I decided I was going to find out how to make bread, teach people how to make bread,” he says. “And I did.”

It all started 11 years later, when Brown took a summer job as a dishwasher at the Tassajara Hot Springs resort near San Francisco. Along the way, he learned to bake bread and make soups.

The San Francisco Zen Center bought Tassajara that December and turned it into a meditation retreat. Brown, already a Zen student, was hired as head cook - a job for which he admits he was woefully unprepared emotionally.

“We were all in our 20s. Nobody was very mature yet. There was a lot of tension,” remembers Daya Goldschlag, a Spokane massage therapist who worked in the Tassajara kitchen with Brown and later became his friend.

“People would get angry, throw things, scream, cry. I was actually terrified of Ed. I remember him coming up behind me one time and saying, ‘You put the wrong sauce on the vegetables.’ It was like a big black cloud hanging over me.”

Eventually, Brown learned to harness his temper - and to find satisfaction in helping others unleash their talents.

He expanded his reach with “The Tassajara Bread Book,” a 1970 cookbook that helped spark a breadmaking revival in the United States. “Tassajara Cooking” and “The Tassajara Recipe Book” followed.

Meanwhile, Brown left Tassajara and moved through the Zen Center’s administrative ranks, serving for a time as president. In 1979, when the center opened a fine-dining vegetarian restaurant, Greens, he went to work there - not as a cook, but as a busboy, then a waiter.

“We had several good people in the kitchen, so I ended up working the floor,” Brown explains. Besides, he says, “I like handling things, walking, moving. Being a busboy again, I actually got to do stuff.”

And as Brown discusses in “Tomato Blessings,” serving food is a spiritual exercise in itself.

“When people come into a restaurant, they’re upset, they’re hungry, they’re fussy,” he says. “But by the time people have eaten, they’re in a completely different state. It’s wonderful to be able to do that, to put them in a different place.”

Brown eventually became co-manager at Greens, and later collaborated with founding chef Deborah Madison on the classic “The Greens Cookbook.” After leaving Greens and moving out of the Zen Center, he began teaching cooking classes in the mid-1980s, about the same time he started working on “Tomato Blessings.”

Calling “Tomato Blessings” a cookbook is like calling caviar a bunch of fish eggs. It’s that, and so much more.

Warmly human, wryly humorous, it weaves together a series of stories from Brown’s life - parables, if you will - accompanied by related recipes. The result is entertaining and enlightening, in the truest sense of the word.

Topics range from such practical details as how to hold a knife (with the thumb and forefinger on either side of the blade, for extra stability and control; try it, it works) to such philosophical issues as finding the good in other people.

The lessons are as much about life as about cooking: being aware of your actions. Making the best of what you have. Celebrating your successes, and accepting your inevitable failures.

Failure plays a large role in “Tomato Blessings.” One of Brown’s more memorable miscues came when he planned to serve baked potatoes as a treat at Tassajara following a steady diet of brown rice. Unfortunately, he forgot to factor in how much longer it would take to cook them in mass quantities in jampacked ovens. At dinner time, the spuds were still rock hard.

Telling such tales, Brown says, is “empowerment, liberation from the illusory idea that you could have a life without any problems - I could be this perfect cook, everything always comes out the way it should.

“It works out better sometimes, and not as well at other times. If you do it with sincerity, give yourself to the process, it will be pretty fulfilling for you, whether it comes out the way it should or not.”

In fact, Brown had wanted to title the book “Potato Fiascoes and Radish Teachings,” but his publisher balked. They compromised on “Tomato Blessings,” a reference to what Brown calls the “essential vibrancy” of ripe summer tomatoes.

“I say, let the tomatoes sing, let them dance, let them do cartwheels in your mouth, let them awaken your heart, your soul, your spirit,” Brown writes. “Let them speak sermons, soliloquies and sonnets.”

The “radish teachings” refers, in part, to the often overlooked pleasures of simple foods, such as radishes served with salt and butter.

“To be able to see the virtue, to appreciate the goodness of simple unadorned ingredients - this is possibly the primary task of the cook,” he writes. “When radishes aren’t good enough, pretty soon nothing is good enough. Everything falls short. Nothing measures up.”

To Brown, cooking doesn’t start with recipes, but with ingredients.

“Somebody once asked me, ‘How did you learn to cook like this?” Brown says. His typically simple Zen reply: “I taste what I put in my mouth.”

It’s like learning to see in new ways, says Brown, who’s also an avid photographer.

“My photography changed completely the day I learned to look at what’s in the viewfinder,” he says. Before, he would decide what kind of picture he wanted to take, then point the camera in that direction. “But when you actually look through the viewfinder,” he says, “you see what the picture is going to be, what the different angles are.”

Cooking is similar, Brown says: “A lot of times people will have a concept in mind, what a dish should come out like, rather that tasting what it is and bringing out the best … You can be much more creative when you let the ingredients inspire you.”

Of course, all those years of experience help. “He has this incredible sense of how things should taste, and how to get them that way - does this need more sugar, more sour, more bitter?” says Luna’s Bond.

But it all begins, not in the tongue, but in the mind.

“In Buddhism, what’s called enlightenment, freedom, is freedom from all these concepts - what you’re supposed to be, what your life is supposed to be like, instead of working with what it is,” Brown says. “In cooking, it’s about tasting what you put in your mouth, not worrying what it should be.”

He advises cooks to taste ingredients both before and after they go into a dish, one at a time, to better understand how they contribute to the whole.

Sure, it all sounds soulful and serene. But how do such deepbreathing principles apply in today’s hyperventilated world, where people want to get dinner on the table in 10 minutes - if they bother cooking at all?

Brown readily admits his approach isn’t for everyone.

“I’m not trying to tell people, you should all be cooking, all paying more attention to your food,” he says. “It’s more if you see this could be something nourishing to you, the activity of cooking as nourishment, in some way you can make a commitment to it.

“You say to yourself, I will find time, ways to make this work for me, because it’s something satisfying in my life, not because it’s something I ‘should’ be doing. We’re all struggling with that, how to make our lives more satisfying.”

And, he adds: “If you’re saying, I’m too busy, there’s nothing I can do about it, that’s the way it is, I don’t think that’s quite right. We’re all participants in creating our lives.”

Brown offers this menu in “Tomato Blessings and Radish Teachings” as an example of how his cuisine is simple, yet satisfying. It combines foods from what he considers the three major taste groups: “earthy” (potatoes), “stemmy” (asparagus) and “fruity” (tomatoes).

Writes Brown: “Beautiful colors, pleasing aromas - though completely ordinary, the meal feels absolutely unique. It’s just this: not too exciting, not too dull, something with which to connect and resonate.”

Potatoes Baked With Wine and Cream

2 pounds red potatoes (about 10 medium)

1 head garlic (about 25 cloves)

1-1/2 to 2 cups red wine

Salt, to taste

Black pepper, to taste

3/4 cup cream

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

Wash potatoes and cut them into chunks. (Usually it will do to cut the potatoes in half and each half into 4 pieces.) Peel the garlic and cut the largest cloves in half. Place potatoes and garlic cloves in a casserole dish or baking pan. Pour in the wine so it comes about halfway up the potatoes. Sprinkle with salt and pepper.

Cover and bake for a good hour and a half or longer. If it ends up being 2 hours, that’s probably fine too. If you are around and think of it, you can stir the pot now and again, enjoy the developing bouquet, and return it to the oven.

After the minimal 1-1/2-hour baking, stir the potatoes and add the cream. If you are trying to be modest about butterfat, you could try adding a little less. Uncover, and continue baking another 20 to 30 minutes while you prepare the rest of the menu.

Yield: 4 to 6 servings.

Tomato Salad With Provolone and Fresh Herbs

2 pounds fresh, ripe tomatoes

4 ounces provolone cheese

3 to 4 green onions, thinly sliced (both whites and greens), about 1/2 cup

1/4 cup flat-leaf parsley, minced

2 tablespoons fresh thyme, minced

2 tablespoons olive oil

2 to 3 tablespoons balsamic vinegar

Salt, to taste

Freshly ground black pepper, to taste

Cut the tomatoes in half vertically. Then cut out the stems and cores, and cut the tomatoes into wedges. Place in a bowl. Cut the provolone cheese into thin strips and mix with the tomatoes. Toss with the green onions, the herbs, the olive oil and some of the vinegar.

Since the salt will draw water out of the tomatoes, wait to add it until right before serving. At that time season with salt, black pepper and perhaps additional vinegar.

Yield: 4 moderate servings.

Asparagus Sauteed With Roasted Almonds

1/4 cup whole almonds

2 pounds asparagus

1 tablespoon olive oil

Several pinches of salt

1/2 teaspoon grated lemon peel (yellow part only)

Roast the almonds in a 350-degree oven for 8 minutes until toasty, or in a dry skillet over moderate heat. Let cool, and then slice them. (Already slivered almonds will not provide the same flavor; somehow they always taste stale to me.)

Snap off the tough ends of the asparagus by hand. Then cut into 3-inch-long diagonal strips.

Heat a large skillet and add the olive oil and a sprinkling of salt. Saute the asparagus for 2 to 3 minutes. Taste, then cover and cook over low heat until tender enough for your taste. The asparagus should still be bright green.

Toss with the lemon peel, check the seasoning and serve, garnished with the almonds.

Yield: 4 to 6 servings.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: THE MASTER’S WORDS Ed Brown will read from his latest book, “Tomato Blessings and Radish Teachings,” March 26 at 7:30 p.m. at Auntie’s Bookstore, 402 W. Main; admission is free. Brown also will present a Zen lecture, “Enlightenment in Everyday Life,” March 27 at 7:30 p.m. at Cobblestone Bakery, 620 S. Washington; admission is $8 at the door.