Kitchen Sink Zen

New Year Cuisine - Osechi Ryori

2009-12-31T23:21:00.000-08:00

KSZ January 2010

Osechi Ryori – New Year Cuisine

Happy New Year!

Kitchen cooks in temples and homes as well as gourmet chefs around Japan spend the days before New Year busily preparing the special delicacies to be eaten on New Year’s Day, collectively known as Osechi Ryori. All of the little tidbits have special symbolic meanings of good fortune and long life, which are traditionally served in three lacquer boxes stacked on one another.

Because my youngest daughter was born on December 31^st, I was in a small private hospital in Tokyo on New Year’s Day in 1990. At that time I didn’t know about this special New Year custom and was delighted to be treated to a traditional three-tiered bento filled with wonderfully delicious morsels. It certainly put a new spin on “breakfast in bed”! I remember it as being the most elaborate and delicious meal I ever received in Japan, and this in fact started my love affair with traditional Japanese cuisine.

New Year in Japan is not an occasion for partying but rather a time of spiritual reflection. At midnight most people go to their local Buddhist temple or Shinto shrine to pray for good fortune in the coming year and to make offerings of gratitude for the year that has passed. At midnight, the temple bell rings 108 times, representing the 108 obstructions to enlightenment and the 108 heavens to be enjoyed upon enlightenment. Actually, no one really knows where the number 108 comes from, so far back into the mists of time has this number been considered sacred. It is the number of beads on a Buddhist rosary (and Hindu ones as well).

For those who go to the temple there is always a large cauldron of hot amazake, a sweet non-alcoholic rice wine flavoured with grated ginger, to stave of the cold of the night.

The following day the family gets together for the special Osechi Ryori meal.

This blog is dedicated to Shojin Ryori which is vegetarian, but actually a great deal of the traditional items in the New Year meal are not vegetarian and include a variety of shellfish which signify good luck for a long life. However, I made my own version of New Year foods for my husband and I last night – but my camera was out of batteries! I intend to make them again to show you another time. I didn’t make the three-tiered bento but instead I made a variety of yummy tidbits. Here is our menu:

- Ozoni soup: see below;

- Egg roll with steamed spinach;

- Hiyayakko tofu: “silk” tofu with grated ginger, spring onions and a light soy dressing;

- Beetroot, baby squash and carrots with toasted sesame and daikon radish relish;

- Carrot and feta flowers with baby greens and a light French dressing;

- Rice with Korean nori

My main special New Year dish was the ozoni soup, which is always served on New Year’s Eve (and during the New Year meal as well). The principle ingredient of ozoni soup is a square of mochi, a cake of glutinous rice that is very chewy to eat when it is heated. Unfortunately, mochi is the cause of a number of deaths by choking, particularly among the elderly, each New Year! So you have to make sure you bite off only small pieces and chew well!

Traditionally, ozoni soup includes chicken pieces or fish or kamaboko (a kind of fish cake), but there is no loss of flavor when you make the vegetarian version. Here is the recipe:

Ozoni Soup

This is good for two generous serves. There is a great video on YouTube about how to make ozoni soup, which you can follow if you prefer the chicken/fish version. Otherwise, watch the video and substitute the soup stock, chicken and fish with the following recipe.

Ingredients:

1 liter of hot water

2 shiitake mushrooms

Piece of konbu

2 tbsp soy sauce

2 tbsp sake

1 tsp sugar

Small bunch of spinach or other green leafy vegetable

Carrot cut into fancy flowers if you want a really special look, otherwise, just sliced will do!

Small daikon (Chinese radish) peeled and cut into slices

2 x slivers of lemon rind twisted into a knot

Juice of half a lemon

Piece of mochi for each person (if you can’t find mochi, then you can use a small whole cooked potato)

Directions:

Soak the shiitake mushrooms in hot water for at least an hour, preferably two or three hours to get a good flavor.

Make a twist with the lemon rind and put one in the bottom of each soup bowl.

Grill the mochi squares under the griller for about five minutes, turning every 30 seconds, until the mochi turns brown on the top and starts to puff up. Place one piece of mochi in each soup bowl.

Take the mushrooms out of the soaking water and slice them, to be added to the soup later.

Heat the stock with a piece of konbu in it, but remove the konbu just as the stock starts to boil.

Add all the other ingredients except the lemon juice and boil for just a minute or two. Switch off the heat and squeeze the lemon juice into the saucepan (don’t add too much – about a tablespoon is good). Divide the veggies between each bowl and then pour over the soup stock.

You can garnish the soup with Japanese parsley – mitsuba – or with coriander.

ENJOY! (But be careful of the mochi!)

Let's Look at Tofu

2009-07-25T23:07:00.000-07:00

Tofu still seems to be quite an enigma in Western kitchens! It comes in such a lot of varieties and people know that it’s “good for you”, but what do you do with it? I remember back in my hippie days making my own (terrible!) tofu and feeling that anything I mushed it up into must be doing me good – I felt pretty self-satisfied but secretly always thought it looked and tasted dreadful! Well, it didn’t taste like much at all and that was the main problem.

Then I went to live in Japan where tofu, which is very high in protein, has always been an essential part of Japanese temple cuisine. There was an old-fashioned tofu shop nearby to where I lived in the shadow of Mt Fuji where tofu had been made for generations by the same family. It was here that I began my love affair with tofu! The old couple who ran the store, which was also their home, said that the best-tasting tofu was made in places where the water was pure and sweet: tofu is kept in running water so in olden times the tofu shop was always beside a natural spring.

Unfortunately, it is practically impossible to find really good fresh tofu here in Australia and if anyone knows of a place where high-grade fresh tofu is made in Australia I would love to hear about it. But this doesn’t mean we need to ignore this wonderful source of protein. We can get tofu at the supermarket, even if it is prepackaged; and most Asian food stores supply fresh tofu of the “cotton” variety.

Tofu in Australia, as a plain white block, is available as “soft” or “silk” and “firm” or “cotton” – the fabric names merely indicate the texture of the tofu. The texture is determined by how much “nigari” is added to the soy milk to make the final product. Nigiri is a byproduct of sea salt manufacture: a coagulant that has properties similar to gelatin. In Japan too these two forms are the basis of most tofu recipes, with the soft tofu being associated more with summer, and the firmer tofu being associated with winter.

Although soft tofu is generally eaten in summer, I’d like to introduce you to plain tofu by giving you a recipe for a deliciously light and simple dish that uses plain tofu as the main feature.

Hiyayakko Tofu

You’ll need:

1 block of soft (or silk) tofu, preferably organic and definitely NON-GM soybeans (check the label carefully!)

Nub of fresh ginger, peeled and finely grated

Spring onions, chopped

Soy sauce

(1 block makes two serves)

Peel back the plastic wrapper on top of the carton and rinse the tofu with running water. Gently slide around the edge of the carton with a knife, to loosen the tofu so it doesn’t get stuck and break. Remove the tofu by placing your hand over the top of the caron, turn the carton up-side-down and allow the tofu to slip onto your hand. Rinse again. Then gently slide it onto a cutting board. You need to be particularly careful in handling soft tofu because it breaks easily.

Cut the block in half and carefully slide it into the bowl you are going to serve it in. Place a pinch of grated ginger on each piece of tofu, followed by a sprinkle of spring onions. When placed on the table, drizzle a little soy sauce over the top and voila!

Variations:

Chopped cucumber

Sesame seeds

Karashi (hot mustard – use sparingly!)

Roasted sesame oil

ENJOY!

Umami, Kelp and MSG

2009-07-07T18:51:00.001-07:00

In the West we consider there to be four basic tastes: salty, sweet, bitter, and sour. However, in Japan a fifth taste is added – “umami”, which means tastiness or flavour or deliciousness. This is a very subtle concept but relates to how your mouth reacts to the taste and smell of a food: Basically, if the smell of a meal makes your mouth water it is high in the quality of umami. We often say, “Mm, that’s very tasty” without realizing fully what we mean by that – would you be able to say in words what you mean by “tasty”? Perhaps the French word “piquant” comes closest to this Japanese sense of umami. Piquant is defined in the Webster dictionary as: “agreeably stimulating to the palate”. Of course, it would be right that the French have such a word, being the great European connoisseurs of taste and cuisine!

There is however a scientific reasoning behind the Japanese taste of umami: the presence of certain glutamates, particularly monosodium glutamate (MSG), sodium inosinate, and sodium guanylate. Monosodium glutamate or MSG has become the demon of Chinese takeaway and so much negative attention has been given in health books and articles about its negative side-affects. A quick perusal of the internet will bring up thousands of items that tell you MSG is a chemical additive that causes any number of illnesses from asthma to cancer to heart disease. However, it may surprise you to know that MSG is fact found naturally in many foods we consume everyday such as fresh tomato juice, parmesan cheese and green tea! It is one of the main reasons that these foods are so tasty.

The principle source of MSG naturally occurring in Japanese food is in konbu (kelp), about which there are hundreds of internet articles in English telling you how healthy this seaweed is, especially as a detox and immune booster! Konbu is used in the stock of most Buddhist vegetarian dishes and provides a delicate tastiness.

Dashi, the basic stock used for many Japanese dishes, including miso soup, is usually made using konbu and dried bonito fish flakes or tiny dried sardines. These fish contain sodium inosinate, which is one of the other glutamates listed above that contribute to umami, the tastiness factor. So in dashi, with the combination of konbu and dried fish, there is an eightfold enhancement of flavor – no wonder miso soup and other dishes made with dashi are so popular!

But what about the dashi stock made in Buddhist vegetarian cuisine? Instead of fish, we use dried shiitake mushrooms, which might seem at first as though we are missing out on some intense quality of flavour. However, dried shiitake mushrooms contain large quantities of sodium guanylate, the third of the glutamates listed above that naturally contribute to enhanced flavour. So the vegetarian versions of many popular dishes that are based on dashi stock also have an eightfold enhancement of flavour, and are just as tasty as their non-vegetarian counterparts.

So why are there so many concerns about artificial MSG? Well, precisely because it is artificial! It is chemically produced, not from kelp but from sugar beet or molasses with a bacterial fermentation process. However, as far as I have heard and read there are no negative side-effects reported of people consuming konbu and shiitake mushrooms (other than eating too much because it is so yummy!) So please enjoy the tastiness of your miso soup by making it yourself!

Recipe - Miso Hotpot - Hōtō

2009-06-24T17:01:00.000-07:00

In Japan, I lived in a small rural village in an area that was famous for one particular dish: Hōtō – a kind of miso hotpot. People would come from Tokyo on the weekends just to enjoy this specialty, especially during winter. There was a famous farm-house restaurant nearby where you would sit around an open hearth with a big cauldron of hōtō bubbling away from which you would help yourself with a wooden ladle. The ladies who worked there dressed in traditional country indigo clothes and fussed around us always laughing and making ribald jokes! Sitting around the fire shoulder to shoulder with the other guests, on a snowy winter’s night, and sharing hot sake warmed us up physically and spiritually.

Recipe for Miso Hotpot (Hōtō)

Using about a litre of miso soup (made using the previous recipe for miso soup), you can add any number of ingredients selected from the following recommendations. This is a great recipe for a cold winter’s night when you go to the fridge and rummage about in the vegie crisper to see what’s left before you go shopping tomorrow.

The key ingredients for the right balance are root vegetables; pumpkin; cabbage; mushrooms; spring onions; tofu; wakame; snow peas; and thick wheat noodles.

The special noodles that are traditionally used in this recipe are wheat flour noodles called hōtō noodles. They are a type of udon noodle: udon noodles are now available in most supermarkets in the Asian food section. However, the kind of noodle used traditionally for hōtō is more like extra-wide fettucini, which is what I use instead of the pre-packaged udon noodles. Alternatively, I like to use fresh lasagne sheets, which I cut to the width I want using kitchen scissors. When you use fresh pasta like this you don’t have to cook it – you can just add it to the miso and let it simmer a couple of minutes.

In Japan they have a wonderful variety of mushrooms and use several different ones in hōtō. You can use the shiitake mushrooms that you used for the miso dashi stock. If you can obtain enoki or shimeji or other Japanese varieties, which I have seen recently in gourmet green grocers, then use them for a delicious gourmet touch. However, oyster mushrooms or portobello or swiss brown or champignons are good too.

Regarding the tofu, you need to use a hard tofu so it doesn’t disintegrate when mixed with the other ingredients. Whereas with miso soup I use a very soft “silk” tofu (more about tofu in a blog soon), in hōtō I use chunky squares of deep fried tofu – the kind you get at Asian grocery stores. Otherwise, use the plain “firm” tofu or the fried “Japanese” tofu from the local supermarket.

It is important to use spring onions and not regular onions because the flavour of onions to too strong and is not found at all in shojin ryori. You can replace the spring onions with leeks if you wish but the balance won’t be as delicate. Chives are okay to use, sprinkled on top after cooking.

It is best to steam or boil the vegetables before adding them to the miso, in order to preserve the healthy enzymes in the miso. However, in Japan they do just boil up everything together and serve it when the vegetables are cooked. It certainly makes life easier on Sunday evening when you want something quick and easy.

If you have snow peas, add them right at the end and only cook for a minute or so, until they just wilt a little – this keeps their lovely bright green colour which is so welcome on a wintry night. Ordinary peas are also okay to use.

Essential ingredients:

Thick noodles

Miso soup

Plus any of these ingredients are great in hōtō:

Root vegetables – potatoes, sweet potatoes, carrots, parsnip

Vine vegetables – pumpkin, zucchini, beans, peas, sugar snap, snow peas

Leafy greens – chinese cabbage, savoy cabbage, white cabbage, silverbeet, spinach

Mushrooms – shiitake from making the miso stock, white mushrooms, portobello, oyster, swiss brown, Japanese varieties

Wakame seaweed – added at the very end when you’re ready to dish up

Tofu – deep fried, firm tofu, supermarket labelled “Japanese” style fried tofu, or specialty Japanese deep fried slices known as “abura-age”

Spring onions (or leeks or chives)

ENJOY!

Retreat notice

2009-06-14T02:53:00.000-07:00

Thank you for all your positive responses to my Kitchen Sink Zen blog. I apologise for the inconvenience of interupting the flow but I will be on retreat for the next week in preparation for the Fire Ceremony that marks the final offering of the prayers that I took on the pilgrimage. I look forward to continuing the blog after Sunday June 21st.

Buddhist Meal Prayers

2009-06-10T18:54:00.000-07:00

In the Buddhist way, any activity that we underatke is a meditation and this is especially so in preparing food and eating it. Before each meal there is a prayer said that helps to bring our minds out of our narrow ways of thinking and expand it out into the universe and at the same time bringing our awareness to how intimately connected we all really are. When we say these prayers we no longer take our food for granted and eat with an attitude of respect for those who have helped us and also with gratitude. And when we start to eat after bringing this kind of awareness to our full attention, the food tastes delicious!

Here are the prayers that are said before meals at Buddhist temples and monasteries in Japan:

Hitotsu niwa ko no tasho wo hakari, ka no raisho wo hakaru.

First, reflect upon and be grateful to the many people who have labored and undergone hardship to bring to you this food that you are about to eat.

Futatsu niwa onore ga tokugyo no, zenketsu wo hakatteku ni ouzu.

Second, ask yourself whether your behavior has been of merit or your deeds helpful enough to the people you have encountered today for you to deserve the food you are about to eat.

Mitsu niwa shin wo fusegitoga wo hanaruru koto wa, tonto wo shutosu.

Third, receive the food, determined to discipline yourself so as to suppress the Three Poisons of Greed, Anger, and Ignorance that can cloud your innately pure body and mind.

Yotsu niwa masa ni ryoyaku wo koto tosuru wa, gyoko wo ryozen ga tame nari.

Fourth, receive the food with the right purpose, knowing that it is good medicine, relieving hunger and curing physical and mental weaknesses.

Itsutsu ni wa jodo no tame no yue ni, ima kono jiki wo uku.

Fifth, receive the food with the ideal of being mentally and physically strong and attaining the Buddha way.

How to make miso soup

2009-05-26T23:12:00.000-07:00

I’ll be talking some more about the ingredients of miso soup because they form a basis for a lot of shojin ryori cuisine. However, I’ll give you the how-to first so at least you feel like you’ve got something to start with!

When making miso soup it is important to remember not to boil the soup – the idea is just to keep it just under boiling point. This is because the beneficial bacteria that is in the miso – koji (Aspergillus oryzae) – is a living organism that is very good for your digestion and will be killed off if you boil the soup. Also, the konbu seaweed you use will produce an interesting chemical effect in your body when it mixes with the miso and this delicacy will also be destroyed if you boil the soup. More about this later… let’s make the soup!

Dashi stock:

1 litre cold water

15cm piece konbu seaweed

3 dried shiitake mushrooms

Miso soup:

2 heaped tablespoons miso

3-4 spring onions finely sliced

½ block of silk tofu cut into small cubes

1 or 2 teaspoons of dried wakame seaweed

First, let’s make the dashi stock. This is a stock that is used a great deal in Zen cuisine for many dishes. Usually, “dashi” is a combination of konbu seaweed with dried bonito fish, but shiitake mushrooms replace the fish in vegetarian cooking. You can always make extra dashi stock and just put the remainder in the freezer for later use. Shiitake mushrooms can be easily purchased at Asian food stores - they are also used a lot in Chinese cooking so they might be called just “dried Chinese mushrooms”.

Put cold water into a saucepan. Wash the shiitake mushrooms and then add them to the water. Using scissors, cut several snips about two-thirds across down the length of the konbu, or else cut the konbu into several pieces. Don’t wash the konbu – the white powdery substance on the seaweed is essential minerals. Gently heat the water keeping an eye on it so it doesn’t boil. When it’s just about boiling, turn it off and leave the konbu and mushrooms to soak for at least 15 minutes – the longer the better.

Strain out the konbu and mushrooms. You can chop up the mushrooms and put them back into the soup at the end, or you can use them in something else (great in stir-fry) or discard them for compost. Although the konbu won’t be now added to the soup, it can be used for another dish but is better off in the compost because this kelp adds really good nutrients to compost in the form of beneficial minerals.

Now we’ll prepare the miso paste. Because miso is the texture of peanut butter it is not so easy to just spoon into the stock to dissolve. In fact, the miso doesn’t actually dissolve at all, as you will notice if you leave the soup in the bowl for a while – the miso will sink to the bottom of the bowl but be easily integrated again by gentle stirring. Put a little stock in a jug or bowl. Take a spoonful of miso and using the back of another spoon mash the miso gradually off the spoon into the stock. In Japan they use a really nifty device that looks like a large tea-strainer with a spoon or wooden paddle that makes it a breeze to mash the miso directly into the saucepan.

After dissolving the miso, pour the miso and stock back into the saucepan and return it to the stove. Preventing the soup from boiling, add the chopped spring onions, then the tofu and wakame. Wakame is a kind of seaweed with a very mild flavour that is full of nutritious minerals. I’ll talk a bit more about this in the coming blog.

You can actually add the wakame and tofu directly to the serving bowl and just pour the miso soup over the top. The wakame looks like dried tea-leaves but expands dramatically when wet – so don’t be deceived by looks and think there’s not enough seaweed in the bowl. I say this because I learned the hard way. In the temple where I learned Zen cuisine, the wakame had been added to the bowls beforehand and now I was to pour the miso soup into the bowls and immediately serve it to six guests awaiting their dinner. I thought that the amount of wakame looked a bit slight so just scooped some more leaves out of the container into the bowls and then poured the hot soup over the top. Well, by the time I had carried the tray of hot soup into the waiting guests and placed it before them, there was seaweed flowing over the edges of the bowl like little monsters of the deep trying to get out! So remember – less is more!

This recipe is for a very basic miso soup and it lends itself now to be made into a more substantial meal by adding ingredients. More about this later…

Until then… ENJOY!

Miso soup ingredients...

2009-05-18T03:18:00.001-07:00

Since the secrets of miso paste production were introduced from Korea in about the 7th century, miso soup has been an essential staple food of the Japanese. The ingredients are so highly nutritious that you might well be able to survive on this delicious soup alone! Traditional vegetarian miso soup contains the following ingredients (non-vegetarians will use a special kind of flaked dried fish called bonito in the dashi stock instead of mushrooms):

- miso paste
- dashi (stock made from konbu seaweed plus dried shiitake mushrooms)
- tofu
- spring onions

Before I write about how to make miso soup, I’d like to explain about some of these ingredients, which form the basis of a lot of Zen cuisine, especially as you might already be put off by all the Japanese names! Let’s start with “miso”…

Since the eighth century, Buddhist monks have made miso paste: at first it was made for the aristocracy and the imperial court, but from about the twelfth century Buddhist monks began to teach the common people how to make a simple nutritious vegetarian meal of miso soup accompanied by barley or rice and pickled vegetables, which has remained the staple diet of monks and country folk until the present day.

Miso is made from a mixture of grains – soy beans, barley, rice – plus salt and a naturally occurring fermenting culture called koji (Aspergillus oryzae). There is a wide variety of different types of miso, depending on the proportions of each grain used in its making: aka miso (red miso) is very strong tasting and salty and is predominantly made of soy beans; shiro miso (white miso) is quite sweet and mild, made with less soy and more rice.

The barley and rice are first steamed; then when it cools down a bit the koji culture is added and so the fermentation process begins. Shortly after, the crushed cooked soy beans and salt are added, and then the whole thing is left to ferment in deep cedar vats for a very long time: the best miso is left for at least two summers. The resultant paste is about the texture of peanut butter and has rich earthy smell a bit like Vegemite.

Although having about 14% high-quality protein, miso is also very high in salt and should be used with discretion by those who have high blood pressure (shiro miso has less salt than the dark red aka miso). Miso is available at Asian food shops and is now stocked in many large supermarkets: it usually comes in little tubs of 500g. It will keep for at least a year in the fridge – actually, it would probably keep indefinitely but hopefully you’d have eaten it all before you’d need to worry about it going off! I would suggest starting out with shiro miso because the flavour is not as strong and you can then experiment with other kinds of miso as you get more familiar with its taste possibilities. Although it is called ‘white’ miso, it is in fact a golden caramel colour.

Check the label on the miso to make sure the one you are buying is “GMO free” or “Non-GMO”; that is, the soy beans are not genetically modified.

Coming up…
More miso soup ingredients!

Never cook when you're angry

2009-05-13T18:46:00.000-07:00

“An elegant cream soup is not necessarily better than a humble broth made of wild grasses. When you gather even wild grasses, make it equal to a fine cream soup with your true, sincere and pure heart… nourish your sacred body.”

Dogen Zenji (1244)

How you feel when you prepare a meal is going to affect the way the food tastes: when you are happy, the meal you serve will taste delicious, no matter how humble the ingredients; likewise, when you are upset or agitated, the meal you serve will not be tasty, even with the most gourmet ingredients. Therefore, if you are really agitated, I believe you might as well just get takeaway food! Even though it doesn’t seem a healthy choice it is no worse that cooking a meal yourself in a bad mood. Of course the ideal situation is to be happy every time you cook. But who am I kidding?! At the end of a busy day when every traffic light is red and everything you touch is a victim of Murphy’s Law it is totally unreasonable to expect you to just put on a happy face, tie on an apron and become Nigella, Queen of the Kitchen! Get takeaway instead… and relax.

On the other hand, it doesn’t have to be that desperate. Sometimes it’s simply the expectations that we place on ourselves that increases the stress levels around mealtime. Perhaps you do indeed expect yourself to be a pristine gourmet cook at the end of a long and tiring day. Here’s a true story related to me by a busy mum, who had been coming to my home to learn about Zen cooking. She was exhausted and frazzled after a particularly busy day but managed to provide a perfect meal for her family and offer it with the most important ingredient of all… love.

Christine had three children, all primary school aged, and her husband worked away on a mining site. This day had been particularly long and hard, and after a poor night’s sleep the night before, she was ready for bed by 6 o’clock. Opening the fridge, she just stood and looked inside hoping for inspiration but not feeling remotely motivated to prepare a cooked meal. And the fridge was pretty bare because she hadn’t had time to go shopping anyway. Change of plan…

She sat the kids down around the low coffee table on cushions, laid out folded paper napkins, got out the special china dishes that had belonged to her grandmother and crystal wine glasses. When the children asked why they were seated at the coffee table, Christine replied, “This is how they eat their dinner in Japan, so we’re going to be Japanese tonight.” They were intrigued by this and sat quietly on their cushions. Christine then brought their meal to the table: tuna and lettuce sandwiches, crusts cut off, and cut into ‘soldiers.’ The wine glasses were filled with orange juice from a crystal carafe. Sean, who was eight years old, then said, “Well if we’re Japanese tonight, I want to eat my sandwiches with chopsticks!” And so all four of them ate their sandwiches with chopsticks – with great hilarity at the messy results!

At the end of the meal, Taryn, the eldest, got up and gave her mum a big hug and said, “Mum, that’s the best dinner I ever had!” When Christine told me this story, she said that when she decided to make just sandwiches, she prepared the meal with absolute care and attention, and all the time feeling the deep love she had for her children. So even though she was frazzled, it took such little effort to serve a loving meal… and it tasted delicious!

Coming next…
Miso soup – a complete meal in a bowl

My Introduction to Shojin Ryori

2009-05-07T01:16:00.000-07:00

Ama-san, an elderly nun who lived in the temple next door, introduced me to the art of shojin ryori when I was living in a small rural village in the mountains of Japan.

The ancient weeping cherry tree in front of the temple was a cascade of pale pink as the women of the village gathered to prepare the boxed lunches for the hundred or so villagers who would be coming for the Spring Festival that afternoon. It was a fresh sunny day and we were all laughing and chatting, eagerly looking forward to the day’s celebrations. But before we started, we stood in reverent silence as Ama-san slowly and gracefully prepared three beautiful dishes of special treats and placed them carefully onto a red lacquer tray, all the while chanting prayers in a practiced melodic voice. On this tray was the food to be offered before the festivities began at the altar of Kannon, the goddess of compassion, the principle deity enshrined in the temple.

Ama-san bowed to the offering tray with her hands clasped in prayer, then turned to us all and with a big smile and clap of her hands we began preparing the festival food under her watchful eye. Although the mood was very upbeat and rowdy, there was a calmness and a reverence about the way we proceeded that had been affected by witnessing Ama-san’s ritual preparation of the altar tray. I suddenly became aware that preparing the food for the villagers and then offering it to them was also a sacred act. And the food really did taste so much better when prepared with this awareness!

This event made a deep impression on me and I began helping Ama-san in the temple kitchen several times a week, even though at that time I wasn’t really interested in Buddhism in a religious way. As well as learning about the way that food is prepared for offering on the Kannon altar, I began to learn the principles of Zen cuisine that completely changed the way I viewed cooking and eating. After becoming a Buddhist priest myself I continued to learn about shojin ryori in the kitchen of my home temple on Mt Koya under the guidance of the chef, Kinoshita-san. The knowledge I acquired from my teachers Ama-san and Kinoshita-san is what I would like to share with you in the coming instalments.

Next installment:

"Don't Cook When You're Angry!"

Recipe: Miso soup

“When we live our life fully, our life becomes what Zen Buddhists call ‘the supreme meal’. We make this supreme meal by using the ingredients at hand to make the best meal possible…and then by offering it.”
- Bernie Glassman (American Zen master)