Happy to report that we finished a slew of dishes for the filming of the new cookbook, The Breakaway Vegetarian Cook, and had a blast doing it. Here’s what we made and filmed:

• Ginger Syrup
• Dutch-Indian Baby
• Gingery Oatmeal
• Dukkah
• Easy Picked Onions
• Yuzu Kale Chips with Flowers
• Green Tea Soba with Vegetable Medley
• Fragrant Umami Noodle Soup
• Three Ginger Salad
• Winter Citrus Salad with Gingery Yogurt
• Roasted Fingerlings with Saffron Breadcrumbs

It’s all very exciting for me, and finally becoming real. Now it’s time to put the finishing touches on all the recipes, and to start writing the intro, which will focus on why umami is so key to vegetarian (indeed all) cooking. Dishes are just a million times more satisfying when the umami factor is amped up. To me, dishes without umami are every bit as unsatisfying as dishes without any salt — something is sadly, and wrongly, missing.

The book is going to first appear as a digital product: it will be available as an Ipad/iphone app, and as an e-book, both for less than $10. Every recipe will have a video attached to it, with me demonstrating and commenting on the dish. Concepts, ideas, and mini-recipes within dishes will be linked to various writing I’ve done on those subjects, a feature that’s just not possible with a regular paper-based book. It will make the book vastly richer as a result, and will cost about a third the price of a paper cookbook. But for folks who still prefer a “real” book, no worries: I’ll still issue it in paperback. I just can’t help but feel the digital product will outshine the paper one by several orders of magnitude at a fraction of the price.

Here are some of the dishes we’ll be shooting next:

• Triple Tomato Eggs
• Daikon Wafuu Salad
• Green Papaya Salad, Breakaway Style
• Nutty Herby Tofu
• Freshness Itself Herb Soup
• Lotus Crack
• Breakaway Tomato Spread
• Umami Vegetarian Burger
• Ginger Potstickers
• Persimmon Udon
• Vegetarian Pad Thai with Extra Umami
• Herbed Kabocha
• Carrot Cookies with Matcha Creme

All of these are new — it’s been very difficult NOT to blog about them!

I’ll be giving regular progress updates. I can’t wait to share all of this.

In other breakaway news, I was JAZZED to get a phone call from the Commonwealth Club of California (in SF); they invited me to give a talk! It’s going to concentrate on the cult on of authenticity, why blind tasting is the shortest and best route to becoming a better cook, and why blind tasting is an excellent metaphor for living an examined life one’s own way, to not simply accept what is considered authentic to others. It will take place on November 30 — it would be fantastic if we filled the place, so please do come if you can!

And today’s last bit of news: I’m the featured chef at Cookstr on Thursday — do check it out if you can.

When I first started writing about cooking with Japanese ingredients in unorthodox yet simple and delicious ways, way back in the 90s in Japan, I knew that I couldn’t be the ONLY person interested in cooking this way. I knew that using global ingredients to breathe fresh life into simple dishes we already know how to cook — eggs, salads, rice dishes, simply prepared fish and meat dishes, pasta, etc. — was fun, nourishing, liberating, healthy, and even life-changing — because our steady stream of really happy guests confirmed it. Busy people who grew up eating “ethnic” cooking in restaurants were especially open to simple combinations of great produce/meats/fish with “ethnic” flavors like miso, tamarind, lemongrass, umeboshi, etc., with recurring starring roles from ace ingredients like Greek yogurt, pickled ginger, flavored salts, fresh herbs in large quantities, good oils, etc. Sometimes in my cooking classes I hand out the above schemata just to give the whole idea a slightly more visual flavor.

I’ve been encouraged by all the comments, emails, and feedback I get from readers. It’s kind of a cool little tribe we have here, and I’m grateful to the entire breakaway community.

My idea du jour: I’d love to open up this space to anyone who’d like to contribute a short essay and photo on some aspect of breakaway cooking. If you’ve got a killer breakaway dish, idea, or even experience that you think the community would enjoy, just let me know. I will of course continue to do most of the writing, but the parachuting of our baby daughter into the world sometime around November 21 means, perforce, that I’ll have a lot less time on my hands! Lots more on that development later!

Lordy, my tech wounds on this site have reached rather deep. Many of you have received emails from me, requesting that you resubscribe (via email or via rss). But for anyone reading this who hasn’t resubscribed, and who would like to, please do so! The links are to the upper right, just above my photo. I’d love to bring all the old Feedblitz people over to the new software, so come on, please.

Other breakaway news: we got four chix! They’re now quite a bit bigger than they look in this photo; they grow like little monsters. We somehow built a coop — pix of it soon. I am the original neanderthal carpenter, so it’s a total miracle it got built, but we got some crucial help from our superfriend and wonderneighbor, Dave Harp (that link includes of a photo Lucelle, the ubergardener, chicken sensei, and cook I’ve written about before; she’s married to Dave).

The middle two are aurecana chickens, the kind that lay the green/blue eggs, and two are vanilla brown crankers. We can’t wait! Look like the due date for the first batch is August. My egg habit is about to go out of control.

We leave for Holland next week. I’ll be chronicling the adventure here, so stay tuned! But I have a few posts queued up in the meantime, so stay tuned for those as well!

And welcome back to the fold, my little stray breakaway flock!

:^)

Some of you may have noticed that I got rid of the Google ads that were on the site. They started out rather promising, and generated a very small amount of income, but over time became so pathetically off-topic most of the time that I just decided to yank them altogether. I also disliked their cluttered look. So they’re gone. I also cleaned up the right sidebar in general to create more negative space. More changes to come.

I’m very interested in hearing from you on what would make this blog more compelling FOR YOU. Clean design, innovative cooking ideas, good photos, occasional cookbook reviews (next entry will be another), focus on one ingredient at at time . . . . What else would make this place really valuable to you? Any widgets? More focus on vegetarian/vegan cooking? More thoughts on shopping/ingredients? Anything that would make you want to rush out and tell your good friends about it? I’m doing my best to grow our little community here, and would love to hear from you about changes you’d like to see to make your lives easier as innovative and experimental home cooks.

I know that many of you have already done this, but: if you know anyone that might benefit from being part of this community, please tell them about it. Thanks.

Some exciting breakaway news: we moved! To Marin county (just north of SF), into an older house with lots of sweet Japanese-ish touches. It needs lots of love and attention, and the kitchen needs some serious rethinking, but I’m ecstatic to be here under these hallucinagenically blue hot skies. I look forward to sharing all the new concoctions that come out of the new space. And, for once, one goal realized: I can see all my spices!

The other day I roasted a huge batch of beef bones, since they came with my recent purchase of the amazing meat raised by Mike Gale at Chileno Valley ranch (four of us split an entire cow, yielding roughly 110 pounds of meat each — more on this later if anyone’s interested). In they went at 400, and out they came an hour later, browned and marrow a-bubble. After making a tasty little snack of toasted Tartine country loaf schmeared with marrow, avocado, and lavender salt, I threw them in two big stockpots, covered with water, and simmered for about six hours. I let it sit overnight, and in the morning each pot had a solid inch of fat on top. That got skimmed and used to make some seriously good French fries, and the stock was poured into eight ziplock bags and frozen.

Today I pulled a bag out and let it thaw. Meanwhile I chopped up a yellow zucchini, some de-backboned collard greens, a bunch of green onions, and sprinkled in plenty of smoked paprika salt and freshly ground pepper. The stock was added to that, then everything got blended in the VitaPrep. It was good, possibly even ethereally good. Another excellent quickie soup for the lunch repertoire.

It’s a rare treat for me to make beef stock — I wouldn’t really seek out 10 pounds of bones, roast them, do all the icky de-fatting (it gets *everywhere*), but when they’re presented to me in a bag, I certainly will. I normally use, and am happy with, the organic beef stock sold at TJs and Whole Foods in the tetrabox. I have a hunch my homemade would prevail in a blind taste test, but not by that much — maybe not enough to make it worthwhile on a regular basis. But then again, I did get eight quarts out of it . . . .

I do have to ask you to do one thing, however. For those of you who have subscribed by a feed, you need to change the feed address. The new address is

http://feeds.feedburner.com/breakawaycook

You could also just click on “subscribe by RSS,” above right.

My deepest apologies for the inconvenience. For those of you subscribed by email, no action on your part should be necessary.

And while I’m at it: if there’s anything you’d like to see changed, or covered, or expounded upon, or anything at all, please let me know! WP has a much easier-to-use comment section, so I’m hoping that that encourages all of you to speak up more often! Thanks.

After a long and exhausting search for the best way to incorporate a blog into my website, it finally dawned on me: as they say in Japanese, shimpuru izu besuto (simple is best). So here it is, in good old Blogger. No endless screwing around with code, no techie headaches . . . all the more time to experiment with global flavor blasts.

I’ll be writing regularly, so I hope breakaway cooks the world over will stick around and become part of whatever this thing becomes.