Overview

Discover How to Cook-with Your Senses, Your Hands, and Your Heart ""Making your love manifest, transforming your spirit, good heart, and able hands into food is a great undertaking,"" writes renowned chef and Zen priest Edward Espe Brown, ""one that will nourish you in the doing, in the offering, and in the eating."" With No Recipe: Cooking as Spiritual Practice, Brown beautifully blends expert cooking advice with thoughtful reflections on meaning, joy, and life itself. Reading Brown's witty and engaging collection of essays is like learning to cook-and meditate-with your own personal chef and Zen teacher. Drawing from a lifetime of experience, he invites us into his home and kitchen to explore how cooking and eating can be paths to awakening. Baking, cutting, chopping, and tasting are not seen as rigid techniques, but as opportunities to find joy and satisfaction in the present moment. ""Forget the rules and forget what you've been told,"" teaches Brown. ""Discover for yourself by tasting, testing, experimenting, and experiencing."" From soil to seed and preparation to plate, No Recipe brings us a collection of timeless teachings on awakening in the sacred space of the kitchen.

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9781683640547

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Reviews

Here, Edward Brown draws on his lifetime of cooking and Zen practice to show us how eating, cooking, and caring for the kitchen are fundamental aspects of life to be deeply valued, and how they can open our worlds to each of us. --Deborah Madison, author of Vegetable Literacy and The New Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone This is the only cookbook you will ever need. True, it contains no recipes and no directives to cook this way or that. Instead, it invites you into the kitchen to explore your senses, your hands, your heart. Ed Brown is a Zen master artist; food is his medium. Cooks and non-cooks alike will be moved by his soulful meditations on topics as varied as taste-testing a single potato chip, studying a stalk of broccoli until it tells you how it wants to be flavored, how (and whether) to de-stem spinach or tear or cut lettuce, and preparing food for a bachelor party. This book of down-to-earth spiritual teachings has a simple, insistent message: find out for yourself! --Norman Fischer, poet, Zen priest, and author of What Is Zen? Plain Talk for a Beginner's Mind This wonderful book warms your heart! Original, inviting, plainspoken, unpretentious, and deep. Just by reading it you can taste more goodness. --Jack Kornfield, author of A Path with Heart No Recipe manifests the core mystery of all cooking. Ed Brown observes that 'Cookbooks tend to provide the instructions for working with the materials, while working with yourself will largely be up to you.' Rebalancing this relationship and following Ed's selfless relationship to nourishment will expand your understanding of cooking and self until distinctions disappear. Giving yourself without reservation to kitchen practice will become your savory way. --Hosho Peter Coyote, author, actor, and Zen priest

Profound and insightful...Brown's loving re-creations of cooking will stir a literal as well as metaphorical hunger. --Library Journal In a world full of diets, rigid cooking instructions, and the search for the most perfect ingredients, Edgar Espe Brown offers a chance to relax and enjoy the simple act of cooking in tandem with the Divine (as they understand It). The bonus is renewed connection to, and acceptance of, our bodies as a gift from God. --Retailing Insight (Anna Jedrziewski, reviewer) Here, Edward Brown draws on his lifetime of cooking and Zen practice to show us how eating, cooking, and caring for the kitchen are fundamental aspects of life to be deeply valued, and how they can open our world to each of us. --Deborah Madison, author of Vegetable Literacy and The New Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone This is the only cookbook you will ever need. True, it contains no recipes and no directives to cook this way or that. Instead, it invites you into the kitchen to explore your senses, your hands, your heart. Ed Brown is a Zen master artist; food is his medium. Cooks and non-cooks alike will be moved by his soulful meditations on topics as varied as taste-testing a single potato chip, studying a stalk of broccoli until it tells you how it wants to be flavored, how (and whether) to de-stem spinach or tear or cut lettuce, and preparing food for a bachelor party. This book of down-to-earth spiritual teachings has a simple, insistent message: find out for yourself! --Norman Fischer, poet, Zen priest, and author of What Is Zen? Plain Talk for a Beginner's Mind This wonderful book warms your heart! Original, inviting, plainspoken, unpretentious, and deep. Just by reading it you can taste more goodness. --Jack Kornfield, author of A Path with Heart No Recipe manifests the core mystery of cooking. Ed Brown observes that 'Cookbooks tend to provide the instructions for working with the materials, while working with yourself [and what comes up for you in the kitchen] will largely be up to you.' Ed's approach to nourishment will help you melt the boundaries between the act of cooking and the edges of yourself and make the kitchen sacred ground for unfolding and awakening. --Hosho Peter Coyote, author, actor, and Zen priest

Author Information

Edward Espe Brown Edward Espe Brown began cooking and practicing Zen in 1965. He was the first head resident cook at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center from 1967 to 1970. He later worked at the celebrated Greens Restaurant in San Francisco, serving as busboy, waiter, floor manager, wine buyer, cashier, host, and manager. Ordained a priest by Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, he has taught meditation retreats and vegetarian cooking classes throughout North America and Europe. He is the author of several bestselling cookbooks, including The Tassajara Bread Book, and the editor of Not Always So, a book of lectures by Shunryu Suzuki Roshi. He is the subject of the critically acclaimed 2007 documentary film How to Cook Your Life. He resides in Fairfax, California.

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