This year my friend and extraordinary culinary whirlwind chef  Rachelle Boucher is spearheading a “Global Kitchen” series of talks and cooking demonstrations at the Marin County Fair in San Rafael. My talk and demo starts at 5:30 on Friday — if you’re at all tempted, please come! I even have a few extra admission tickets, so let me know asap if you’d like them.

(And yes, this poster is seven years old, but it’s so cool I couldn’t resist)

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.

I couldn’t be happier about my herb situation (and neither can Minna, the cat) — they’re coming in by the gallonful, which is just the way it ought to be.

Getting stoked about the upcoming workshop in Tassajara — there are still one or two open slots, so if we have any last-minuters, now’s your chance! I’m hoping that the monks and guests will be charmed and not annoyed at Daphne’s occasional screeches. Am wondering how she’ll do in those gigantic, wonderful baths.

Sunday’s Chronicle ran my piece on ginger, including a recipe for a killer salad spiked with three kinds of ginger (fresh, crystallized, and pickled). Check it out! I like the dead-tree title (“Ginger Sparks a Lively Salad”) much better — why do the paper version and online version have different titles? In any case we’ve been living on this salad — you will want to give it a shot. It just might go into heavy rotation, as it has around here!

.

What the hell is breakaway cooking, and what does it have to do with this baby?

Easy part first: This little buddha girl is our daughter Daphne, as many of you know by now. And I just turn to her whenever I need a good image for an abstract post! I often open up random spices for her to smell. She seems to enjoy it.

Harder part:

I’ve been defining breakaway cooking for more than 10 years as a style of “weeknight” home cooking that uses a lot of global ingredients and good produce in freewheeling and untraditional ways. The food tends be to unfussy, healthful, relatively quick, nutritious, and packed with flavor. It leans heavily on the great culinary ingredients and techniques of Japan, India, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia without “sticking” to any of those traditions. We’re interested in making food that makes us deliriously happy, and if we have to break a few traditions and rules to do that, so be it — we’re just not worried being “authentic” (whatever that means — it’s an endless source of argument for chefs and cooks in every country on earth).  All we want is breakfast, dinner, and lunch on the table, and we want it to be good.

So how can the breakaway approach to food make you cook, feel, and live better?

It all starts with a simple acknowledgement: that food is important, that eating has a HUGE impact on the nitty gritty of daily life. When you eat well, you feel good — you work with a clearer mind, you have more energy, creativity flows better. Your body’s various biological systems just work better. Conversely, when you eat crappy food, you feel crappy — you might feel lethargic, you tend to crave MORE food because you’re not satisfied with what you’ve just had, you might upset your digestive system. How we feel throughout the day is, at least in my experience, strongly correlated to what we put inside our bodies.

One way or another, we have to feed ourselves. Many of us cook, and many of us don’t — we just somehow get by with takeout, we go to restaurants, we succumb to fast food, we buy frozen meals from Trader Joe’s or supermarkets, we assemble salads occasionally, make a pasta here and there. We just sort of … make do.

This business of eating takes a great deal of time and energy, no matter what we do. If we cook, we have to shop for ingredients, prep them, cook them, and clean up. If we don’t cook — that is, if we outsource our need to eat to food companies — we still have to get to the restaurant or takeout counter or supermarket deli or wherever, pay (usually too much) for it, and come back home.

Once we accept that food plays such a massive role in our health and well-being, the next step seems painfully obvious: we have to make it priority to feed ourselves well.

In stark contrast to just a few generations ago, feeding ourselves well is so much easier today! Most of us can walk out our front doors and find very high quality raw ingredients, we have access to the world’s great cuisines just by visiting some ethnic markets, and we can order just about anything on earth with the click of a button and a credit card. Everything is available from anywhere, anytime! The earth continues to radically shrink, and home cooks continue to be the beneficiaries of it.

The flip side: it’s also easier than ever to buy packaged crap, heat-and-eat frozen meals, calorie-laden meals in restaurants that rely on hyperpalatability. It’s almost as if the “work” of feeding ourselves has been outsourced to those that can do it the cheapest and who can make it the most convenient. What’s missing in all this convenience, however, is the concept of “taking ownership” of what you put into your body. Breakaway cooks don’t look at the concept of feeding ourselves as work, or an unpleasant chore to get through. Taking a half hour or an hour to prepare something wholesome and tasty is the opposite of a waste of time; it’s an ideal opportunity, one that comes three times a day, to be in the moment, to become absorbed in the very old dance of connecting to the natural world. It delivers huge benefits to both the cook and to his or her family and friends. It’s a practice that has a lot in common with yoga or meditation. You get more comfortable, and freer, with it as you do it more. So please don’t think of cooking as a waste of time. It’s the opposite! And the breakaway approach can help.

Who’s free from May 16 through May 20? Wanna join me at the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, one of California’s greatest gems? For the past few years, I’ve been leading cooking workshops for the chef-monks at this stunningly beautiful zen monastery in the Ventana Mountains, southeast of Big Sur/Carmel Valley, to “wake up” their summer menus with some breakaway vibrancy. This year though, we decided to do something different: good friend and zen priest extraordinaire Dana Veldon and I will lead a workshop for guests (you!) on cooking and mindfulness.

We’ll be exploring the many ways that food and cooking awaken our senses and play huge roles in all of our lives. We will be doing plenty of cooking demos, hands-on participation, and experiential exercises, but we’ll also be just sitting in the zendo (meditation hall), taking walks, relaxing in the baths (Tassajara has some of the nicest baths I’ve ever encountered), eating delicious vegetarian food, and just hanging out in this surreally gorgeous spot. Visits to Tassajara tend to change the perspectives (and even lives!) of almost everyone who goes. I can’t recommend it enough.

Spaces for the workshop are necessarily limited, but you can try booking here. Accommodations range from pretty spartan to pretty luxe, and all have wabisabi in spades! None have electricity but, trust me, you won’t miss it. Info on rooms can be found here. Rates include three great meals a day and use of all facilities (the baths alone are worth it!). There is a separate charge for the workshop.  I’ll try to answer any questions, either here or in email.

Hope to see you there!

Imagine my surprise when the folks at The Food Channel published their “top 10 food trends” for the year, and almost all of them were directly related to breakaway cooking! I’m borrowing their graphics here, and adding my own commentary; you can see their original posting here.

.

.

I’ve never considered cooking from scratch to be a trend — considering it was the ONLY way to cook throughout 99.9999 percent of human history — but hooray anyway! Using great raw ingredients in very simple ways is the very heart of breakaway cooking. Nothing very fancy, and never anything fussy, just simple honest food, prepared with a global perspective in mind.

.

.

It appears that, finally, Americans are getting more comfortable experimenting in their own kitchens. Hooray again! I’ve said it a million times, and let me say it again: it’s all about YOUR palate, not someone else’s. You can, and should, tweak away in any way you see fit. You’re the one eating the results. Every culture has a kind of culinary canon, but that doesn’t mean you have to follow it. Ignore what doesn’t resonate, and dive into that that does. Canonical dishes became canonical because they tend to work, and lots of people like and reproduce them, but seriously: experiment! The food tradition police aren’t watching!

.

.

More and better stuff in grocery stores, especially in the produce aisles. I would add to this: more ethnic markets! Don’t forget: for things like fresh spices, fresh herbs, rice, and of course global flavor blasts, ethnic markets are far superior to, and vastly cheaper than, the megastores like Safeway. If you think about it, this isn’t surprising: the majority of people who shop in ethnic markets (think Mexican, Korean, Middle Eastern, Japanese, Chinese, Southeast Asian, and Indian) actually cook a ton at home, and actually USE spices! This means turnover is higher, which means their supplies are ipso factor fresher and better. Take full advantage of these markets, people!

.

.

They said it so well I’ll just quote. It’s pure breakaway!

“This is all about flavor delivery. Immigration has come to the plate, and we are now defining a new Global Flavor Curve. Part comfort, part creativity, the latest flavors are coming from the great American melting pot. So, it’s about grandma’s food, but the recipes may be written in Japanese. American food is distinctive in its lack of identity outside of the hamburger—until, that is, you mix in our heritage. This is the year we’ll do it in a big way. The presentation of food, the flavor, and the experimentation is coming into its own in 2010.

It’s really a redefinition of “ethnic” to take it beyond even traditional thinking. Flavors from Africa and Japan and Asia are joining with Mexican and Italian as top-of-mind choices—“Let’s go out for Thai” is as common in many American cities as “I’m craving Mexican.” And, the menu in that Thai restaurant may well offer a side of French fries.

It’s not just about restaurants, of course. The true American ethnic is a merging of flavors at home. We’re taking those old recipes, and we’re applying our own cooking knowledge and available spices to make them “original” all over again. We’re pairing things differently, too—a little from this country, a little from that, and we have a new flavor and texture combination that is distinctly American. It’s a great time to be a spice.”

.

.

Vet your food, folks. If you eat meat, try to find a local farmer/rancher who’ll sell you a little; you really owe to yourself and your family to KNOW where it comes from. Small family ranches will often sell you a whole animal that you can share with some friends if you have a small, inexpensive freezer. And they’ll butcher it, wrap it, label it, and freeze it for you, too. Often for LESS than you’d pay for industrial meat, whose practices you really don’t wanna know about.

Sourcing local veggies and fruit is obviously much easier: you just have to go to your local farmers’ market. There really is no reason to do your main shopping for your food staples at supermarkets (occasionally, of course, convenience and circumstances dictate that we must, but it’s more the exception than the rule for breakaway-style cooking).

.

.

Sort of the same point as #5, but throw in packaging: buying your food from farmers and ranchers you meet in person necessarily means better — that is to say, less — packaging. Just bring your canvas bags!

.

.

To use Pollan’s phrase, “edible food-like substances” are necessarily concerning themselves more with boosting the nutritional values of foods — mainly because they sell better with messages like “more antioxidants!” — but we’re not concerned with that at all, since “nutritional” processed foods are largely still crappy processed foods. Avoid them like the plague. And stock up on the real nutritional superfoods (and breakaway staples) like matcha, pomegranate, blueberries, all leafy greens, wild salmon, turkey, squashes, beans, oats, walnuts, citrus ….

.

.

Well, need we say more! This was the most personally pleasing of the ten for me. Do a search on umami in the upper right corner of this blog to get a glimpse on how often we talk about umami around here. Boosting the umami levels of your home-cooked food will make you a far, far better cook, guaranteed!

.

.

I love trading cooking classes, private dinners, or anything else for services I need and can’t really afford (things like web design, web development, legal advice, accounting advice, etc.). If you grow some of your own food, and have more than you can use, you can even trade that!  Check out Veggie Trader.

.

.

Not sure I quite get what they’re driving at here, except maybe that individual palate is king. And that many, many people these days are doing lots of DIY food projects like pickling, making jerky, making flavored salts, etc. Breakaway projects, all of them!

I’m loving that so many of the above fit so nicely into the approach we’ve been trumpeting here for years. So bravo to you, Food Channel!

Christmas this year is oddly peaceful for us — having a newborn means you don’t have to do *anything*! No one expects any meals or much socializing … it’s pretty much Daphneluv, 24/7!

So a quick note of thanks to this cool community we have here. It’s a pure pleasure for me to write this blog, and I look forward to another year of good cooking with you all. Next year should be a banner one, I hope: we’ll roll out the video series, and I hope to have the Breakaway Vegetarian Cook ready by late spring/early summer. As many of you know, it’s going to be a digital book, complete with video sections, lots of great photography, and deep links to writing I’ve done over the years. We’re also rolling out a facelift for the entire website, including a new section we’re calling “gifts and gear” — a webstore with all kinds of products I’m enamored with and use on a near-daily basis. And, most importantly….. we’ll be documenting Daphne’s growth into hypercuteness! I can’t wait till I can start feeding her solid food………..

Happy holidays!

.

Our sweet neighbor Julia welcomed Daphne into the world with a gorgeous Buddha’s hand citron. My interpretation of this generous event is thus: make a delicious limoncello-like Italian cordial with it and propose a bottleful of toasts! This is my first foray into citruscello land, but I have it on good faith that it couldn’t be simpler: zest about a quarter-cup of zest from citrus of choice, let it steep in good-quality vodka for two weeks, then add sweetener of choice, along with some water, and freeze.  If I like the buddhacello results, it won’t be long till kaffiracello, yuzucello, et cetera! I almost never drink hard booze — wine with meals and beer on a hot day keep my liver with plenty to do — but this is more like a tiny hit of boozy dessert than a slam ‘em shot of something hard … besides, they will make cool little xmas gifts in smaller bottles. Will post the results in a month or so.

I’m feeling pretty sleep-deprived these days, so not a lot of adventurous cooking. Hugely grateful to friends who are dropping off bags of both ingredients and cooked food. Even still, I feel there’s always time for a good, proper breakfast, heated-up leftovers for lunch, and simple dinners with lots of greens. Desserts, too, are in high demand. Not my forte or natural inclination, yet I’m enjoying making them — different tapiocas are showing up with regular frequency, so I hope to work up  a post on tapioca experiments soon.

.

.

I think everyone can guess what we’re most thankful for this year . . . .

It’s incredible how important food has become, even more so than before — eating well means Delia’s happier and healthier, which in turn means Daphne is, too. Even one “off” meal of takeout seems to start a somewhat negative cycle, only to be corrected by something whole and homemade and whipped up with love. I did manage to slather a bird with mole (thinned with pickled fennel brine) and stuck it in a large cast-iron chicken fryer. It’s roasting away right now and is filling the house with great smells.

Happy Thanksgiving, everybody! We’ve got enough love floating around here to sate the planet!

.

We interrupt this regularly scheduled broadcast to bring you the breaking news of the arrival of Ms. Daphne Camille Gower, who parachuted into the world on November 18,  all 3.3 delicious kilograms of her. Her father, a certain breakaway cook, managed to talk the OBGYN into letting him deliver/catch her and place her on the chest of her heroic, epidural-free mother, Ms. Delia van der Plas, to the great delight of everyone present.  Ms. Daphne and her parents, who are getting used to the life without the precious commodity known as sleep, are now home, eating all the food prepared weeks before her arrival.

Her father is resisting, often quite mightily, the urge to drizzle a few drops of pomegranate molasses on her mother’s breasts to give her a direct foretaste of what is to come! He is also being kept wildly busier than he imagined, and is still accepting ideas/submissions for guest posts that can run in this space during these next few weeks. Ms. Daphne will likely make semi-regular appearances here; if you have any bubbly around, perhaps the collective CLINK of the glasses will reach her unbearably cute ears. Ms. Daphne gratefully accepts all well-wishers.

:^)

.