I couldn’t be more pleased to announce another workshop at one of my favorite places on earth, The Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, in the Ventana Wilderness, east of Carmel. It will take place from May 31 to June 3, and it’s going to be all about cooking with tea. Well, our morning and afternoon sessions will be all about tea, but there will be heaps of time to explore Tassajara, sit in the zendo, get personalized meditation instructions, take long soaks in some of the finest baths in the country, take walks, read and relax, and eat fantastic food.

There are I think four spots left (we like to keep it small). People tend to have pretty magical experiences there — do join us if you can! You can email me if you have any questions about it.

You can reserve a spot online here,  and the  official description is this:

Discover and explore an entirely different culinary universe through the lens of fine teas.

Enjoy the taste, health benefits, and ritual of tea by learning to cook with it! We’ll explore all kinds of unusual uses of favorite teas, including matcha, rooibos, genmaicha, oolong, jasmine, hojicha, and lapsong souchong. We’ll learn how to make flavored tea salts and sugars, tea sparkling waters, tea crusts for proteins, tea infusions in soups, and much more. We’ll also introduce the notion of mindfulness while cooking and preparing tea, and discover the focused, yet relaxed, energy brought on by good tea.

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Here’s a tip for those of you needing to bring something quick and easy to a bbq: pick up some (reputable) whole pork loins from your preferred butcher, and grind a bunch of fresh spices in a coffee grinder. Use whole coriander seed, cumin seed, an assortment of peppercorns, and star anise. Rub this all of over the pork, give it a spray of olive oil to keep everything in place, then dust it liberally with kosher salt. Spray again. That’s it, you’re ready! Pack it up and take it with you.

The bottle of liquid in the photo is fresh squeezed orange, lemon, and grapefruit, which had been simmered and reduced for about 20 minutes to concentrate its flavors. I like the baste the pork in this as it cooks on the grill. Try to grill the meat on the least-hot part of the bbq, and use a lid to ensure thorough cooking of the middle. The outside gets pretty dark and spiced and crusty, the perfect counterfoil for the tender, juicy inner sections. Cut it all up roughly when it’s done and rested, and toss chopped cilantro, more salt, and more citrus juice on it just before serving.

I grew up eating trout; my father actually carried a set of fishing poles in the family car(!), and would stop off for a quick hit of his addiction at the local lake on the way back from work. He almost always came home with a bucket of trout. Now the only trout I eat usually come from a farm in Idaho, but I still find them delicious..

I’ve experimented with lots of cooking methods for trout over the years, but I’ve finally settled on one that produces perfectly crispy and delicious skin and moist, wonderfully seasoned flesh.Here’s what you’ll need:

• * one big fat trout, cleaned (they’re almost always sold cleaned)

• * a cast iron skillet

• * some basic seasonings

Rinse the fish and dry it carefully and thoroughly. Then take your sharp knife and scrape along the entire sides of the fish. You’ll get some funky grayish crap on the knife — wipe it off with a paper towel, and do it some more, until you no longer produce any gray muck. This wonderful technique applies to almost all fish; it removes all impurities and paves the way for a wonderfully crispy, scrumptious skin.

Rub the entire fish, inside and out, with a light drizzle of olive oil, and liberally sprinkle everything, again inside and out, with freshly cracked pepper and kosher salt. I also like to sprinkle about a teaspoon or so of freshly ground coriander seeds on the skin — this really gives it an extra crispy blast — but you don’t have to.

Preheat oven to 400. Heat up the pan over high heat, and add a splash of olive oil and a small touch of butter, and swirl it around. When it’s very hot, add the trout, and cook it over high heat for four or five minutes, or until it gets very browned. Flip it over and brown the other side. While it’s cooking, cut up a Meyer lemon, regular lemon, or some other citrus, and stuff the wedges inside the fish. Transfer the pan to the oven for about five minutes, which should be enough time to cook the fish all the way through.

Remove it and plate it. Stand the trout up on its belly and, with the backbone facing up, and, using a knife and fork, carefully slice the skin along the backbone and gently separate the meat from the backbone. It should come off in one clean swoop. Squeeze the baked lemon over the flesh, and add a final dusting of salt, preferably an interesting salt like tangerine salt or saffron salt.

I sometimes cook two or three at a time, and put the extra meat in a Tupperware for an incredibly tasty trout salad the next day.

Most people enjoy edamame on their own; they’re fun to shuck from their pods and pop into your mouth (and one of Daphne’s favorite activities), especially on a hot day, liberally salted, with plenty of cold beer to wash them down. But edamame also make fabulous purees, and nothing could be simpler if you purchase frozen, already-shucked edamame; just toss them into boiling water for five minutes or so, drain, and they’re ready for pureeing.

This is a dish I used to make often in Japan. Just toss a cup or so of cooked edamame into a food processor with big handfuls of mint leaves, olive oil, salt, pepper, and a little lemon. You can use other herbs as well; Thai basil makes and especially fine edamame puree. Sometimes I toss some fruit in as well (stonefruit works well if it’s the right season, but grapes are good, too) just to liven things up a bit, and I even add plain yogurt to it sometimes, if I want the puree to be a little thinner. You then transfer the green goo to a bowl, add some more (whole) cooked edamame for visual and textural appeal, and you’re ready to go. This can also be a fabulous and nearly instant pasta sauce: just combine with hot pasta.

But it’s wonderful as a kind of hearty dip, and has special affinity with shrimp. It’s an appeztizer/pre-dinner snack that always disappears quickly at parties.

If you ordered a “green salad” in almost any restaurant in the United States in the 1970s, they probably brought you a plate of iceberg lettuce, adorned perhaps with thin slices of cucumber and tomato. You then chose a dressing: French, Italian, Russian, or blue cheese.

And then, by sometime in the mid-1980s,  Jeremiah Tower and Alice Waters came along and showed us some new salad greens: arugula, little gem and other leafy lettuces, radicchio, endive, and sometimes fresh herbs, especially chervil. Mixed altogether they were known as mesclun, and the big supermarkets began to carry prewashed mixed bags of mesclun. The introduction of mesclun on a mass scale forever changed the way we think of salad greens.

Poor iceberg lettuce lost its predominant position, at least in terms of culinary cachet, as romaine and mesclun made their way to the top of the lettuce hierarchy. Nostalgia may play a minor role, but I’m still a fan of the classic diner special of a thick wedge of iceberg, chilled almost to the freezing point, drizzled with creamy blue cheese, eaten like a steak, carved with knife and fork.

And in the unlikely event that anyone should ever accuse me of food snobbery, allow me to relay that I still have vivid memories of myself, somewhere around age 7 or so, bugging Mrs. Meyer, my babysitter, to make me a third, or fourth or fifth, sandwich that consisted of Wonder Bread, a giant pile of iceberg leaves, and a huge smear of Miracle Whip. The beginning of the road to breakaway cooking!

Nowadays I’m going for greener, more intense salads, salads that satisfy so deeply that they can be, and often are, the main component of dinner. And salads that star raw kale fit this bill nicely.

Most home cooks think that kale must be cooked, but it doesn’t; it’s absolutely delicious raw. You do have to chop it somewhat finely, however, since big pieces of kale leaves require quite a bit of chewing.

And, unlike more delicate green salads, it benefits from a “marination” in the dressing: the longer it sits in the dressing, the better, which makes it the ideal make-ahead dish.

Raw kale also seems to go best with very bold flavor contrasts: lots of vinegar for tang, plenty of dried fruit for sweet, and a healthy dusting of crispy breadcrumbs for texture. Try the version below first, then come up with your own breakaway kale salad, using ingredients you already have on hand.

Raw Kale Salad with Dried Fruit, Aged Cheese, Spiced Breadcrumbs, and Flowers

It’s pretty rare to be surprised by a salad these days, but this one just might do it. It’s a very open-ended recipe in that you can substitute far and wide and still have it come out tasting great.

You can use any kind of kale for this, but the intense dark color of black kale, also called lacinato kale and dino kale, is especially alluring.

The dried fruit can be a big mix of any fruit, but ginger, gojiberry, cranberry, and apricot play beautifully together.

The vinegar can be a combination (apple cider vinegar, rice vinegar, and a small amount of balsamic is an excellent one), or a single vinegar; the dried fruit will absorb most of it, creating little sweet-sour blasts throughout the salad.

The aged cheese, too, can be anything: a good parmesan, asiago, pecorino, aged cheddar, or–my preference–an old gouda. The flowers are optional, and purely for color, but they are a really nice addition. Don’t skip the breadcrumbs though — they give the salad a lovely and rather surprising crunch. Makes about six large servings.

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• * 1 cup diced dried fruit
• * 1 cup vinegar of choice
• * 2 small-medium bunches black kale, backbones removed, then somewhat finely chopped
• * 1 small watermelon radish, sliced into matchsticks
• * 3 or 4 tablespoons fruity green olive oil
• * salt and freshly ground black pepper
• * 1/2 cup shaved aged cheese, chopped roughly
• * 1/4 cup or 1/2 cup (if you like more crunch) spiced breadcrumbs — stale bread, pulsed in a coffee grinder to produce something between traditional breadcrumbs and traditional croutons, with a little salt, pepper, and cayenne pepper added to it, then sauteed in a pan with some butter
• * 1/4 cup edible flowers (optional)

Place the chopped fruit in a small mixing bowl, and pour the vinegar over it. Let the dried fruit macerate in the vinegar for a while if you can (say an hour); it will plump up nicely if you do. Do that step first while you wash and chop the kale, slice the radish, and make the breadcrumbs. Place the washed and chopped kale in an extra-large salad bowl.

Add the vinegared fruit, watermelon radish, and olive oil to the kale and, using your hands, mix well. Dust with salt and pepper as you mix (this is important–it makes the difference between a good salad and a great salad). Top with cheese, breadcrumbs, and flowers.

(photo by Craig Lee)

A much-belated happy new year to all. A month seems like the new week now, and an entire year goes by in a quarter, doesn’t it? I’ve been pretty inactive here lately, though hyperactive on the fronts of matcha, cooking for events, editing, and ghostwriting. One big change of late: I’ve discovered that having an office away from home (even if it’s just a five-minute walk away) means that my food photography has waned, since most of my cooking is done in the evenings now, and I’ve never mastered the art of the flash — I just can’t seem to make food look good without natural light. I still feel that having a good photo on top of these blog posts is pretty necessary; it just makes it more fun to look at and read. And my lack of photos recently has impeded blogging, for sure . . . .

Another problem with this blog is the crazy amount of spam it generates. For some reason the blog attracts all kinds of black-hat SEO types who want to sneak links in through the comments section, despite the otherwise-excellent Akismet antispam software I have installed; battling them has become such an unpleasant chore that I’ve decided to disable comments altogether for now, I’m sorry to say. (It’s still easy to reach me via email though, and I do enjoy email exchanges with readers). And there’s plenty of commenting opportunity on twitter and facebook, where I love to engage. I also think I’d like to make this space a tad less formal, to publish shorter pieces on all kinds of subjects, and to just write a little more freely.  I do love hearing comments from genuine readers, and even like the comments sections of many blogs, which are the key attraction to so many, but I think it’s time to try something else.

Thanks for hanging here with me, I do appreciate it! Lots more breakaway goodness to come.

If you’ve never tasted yuzu, you’re in for a delightful surprise. It is usually translated as “Japanese citron,” but that doesn’t tell us much. It is about the size of a tangerine, and has a yellow-orange rind. The mature fruit is very seedy, and produces little juice, but  is mostly highly prized for its fragrant and florally zest, which seems to combine the best flavors of meyer lemon, mandarin orange, and grapefruit. The unripe fruit, with its green rind, does provide some juice, which is exceedingly sour yet delicious.

It’s almost impossible to find fresh yuzu outside Japan, but bottled yuzu juice—which is almost as good, and certainly more convenient—is becoming widely available in Asian markets, especially Japanese markets. A 10-ounce bottle will cost you around $12, but it will last a long time, since you need only small quantities at a time.  Yuzu powder—dehydrated and pulverized yuzu zest—is also becoming increasingly easy to find. Googling “yuzu juice” will yield a list of online purveyors. Intrepid gardeners can even try their hand at growing this thorny yet beautiful citrus. I’ve ordered two from Four Winds Growers, and both are doing well in our Marin climate, but, because it’s one of the few citruses that actually tolerate frost well, it should do well in chillier areas, too, as long as it has excellent drainage and at least six hours of direct sun a day.

In Japan, yuzu zest is used mainly to accent cooked vegetables, hotpots, custards, and fish, and is sometimes added to miso and to vinegar to infuse them with its florally wonders. Juice from green yuzu is often mixed with soy sauce (and often other ingredients) to form a dipping sauce known as ponzu. Many Japanese women love to put cut-up yuzu in their baths; there are even hot springs on the island of Shikoku, the heart of Japan’s yuzu country, that specialize in yuzu baths.

Yuzu has become the darling of many brand-name chefs, who are discovering its many joys and pushing the boundaries as they use it in ice creams and other desserts, cocktails, salad dressings, and all kinds of savory dishes. I’m told that the waiters at Jean-George, in New York, even put yuzu juice in an atomizer and spray it tableside on a scallop dish.

I like to use a small amount of yuzu juice—its intense power means that one must be careful of quantity—in braising liquids for fish and vegetables, and to combine some yuzu with raw tuna and eat it spooned over good bread. It’s also delightful mixed into a spoonful of miso, and then spread on fish and broiled. Or try some in a salad dressing along with some good olive oil, yogurt, and maple syrup.

Hunt it down–you’ll be really glad you did.

(photo by Craig Lee; originally appeared in the SF Chronicle on October 9, 2011)

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Toro Avocado Yuzu Crostini

Makes about 24 small or 12 full-size crostini

These make wonderful starters for a dinner party. The secret, as usual, is to use the freshest of everything, especially the toro. You can substitute halibut or hamachi, or even cooked Dungeness crab works, too. The yuzu is well worth seeking out, but you can substitute a combo of Meyer lemon and grapefruit juices.

• 1 tablespoon butter
• 1/4 cup finely diced shallots
• – Sea salt
• – Freshly ground black pepper
• 1/2 pound toro (fatty tuna belly), finely chopped
• 1 tablespoon fruity extra virgin olive oil
• 1 tablespoon (or more) yuzu juice
• 1 ripe but firm medium avocado, sliced into 1/2-inch cubes
• – Zest of 1 Meyer lemon, minced or grated
• 1 tablespoon minced Italian parsley
• – About 24 lightly toasted baguette slices or 12 thin slices of sourdough batard

Instructions: Heat the butter in small skillet over low-medium heat. Add the shallots, and cook, stirring, until they brown and become crisp (about 5 minutes); be careful not to burn them. Transfer the shallots to paper towels, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and set aside.

In a bowl, gently mix together the toro, olive oil and yuzu juice. Taste for salt. Gently fold in the avocado cubes.

Spoon a heaping tablespoon (or more) onto each slice of bread, Top with the crisp shallots, lemon zest and parsley.

It’s happening again! For those of you who couldn’t make it last year, we’ll be frothing up cups of the tastiest matcha on earth next Saturday, Dec 3, in Larkspur Landing, in Marin County. It’s sponsored by the wonderful folks at Remodelista, headed by my long-time good friend Sarah Lonsdale.

It’s an excellent chance to pick up all your xmas gifts early (and be done with it). Breakaway Matcha is in excellent company (check out the list of vendors below), but here ar the essential details:

• Date: Saturday, December 3rd, 10am to 4pm
• Location: Marin Country Mart, 2257 Larkspur Landing Circle, Building B, Larkspur CA 94939.
• Parking: Free, or just hop on the Golden Gate Ferry to Larkspur Landing (Marin Country Mart is across the street). Coming by car? Directions here.
• Admission: Free; lunch offerings from The Farmer’s Wife.

I’ve also got a good supply of lovely black cotton furoshiki, in which I’ll be wrapping matcha gift sets. Do come by, say hello, and have a cup if you can.

Vendors include: Ambatalia Fabrics, BFF Bags, Breakaway Matcha, CC Made, Cocoa, Dagmar Daley, Erica Tanov, Foraged Flora by Louesa Roebuck, Heidi Swanson 101 Cookbooks, Heritage Culinary Artifacts, June Taylor Jams, Marie Veronique Organics Skincare, Mato Creative, Mint Design Play, Pope Valley Pottery, Public Bikes, Richard Carter Studio, Rough Linen, Sefte Living, Studiopatro, Whim and Caprice.

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Many of you are no doubt doing some last-minute scrambling to get your Thanksgiving table in order. It’s a fun and meaningful holiday (imagine that!), as long as the THANKS gets more emphasis than the GIVING. Give all that you’re capable of, to be sure, but don’t sweat it too much. You’re never going to have some textbook, idyllicized day and meal, no matter how hard you plan it, so why not take most of the pressure off yourself and just relax into it, knowing it’s all going to turn out just fine, or better than fine?

That said, I might try a few different things year, including spatchcocking and grilling the bird, maybe with some Vietnamese influences (fish sauce and chile and fresh herbs and grilled turkey sound great to me), plus maybe a new, fruit-based stuffing with a few kinds of rice (lately I’ve been combining brown, red, wild, and japonica, held together with olive oil and minced herbs), and maybe some simple persimmon-based dessert. I’m also going to try making quince paste/membrillo, except I plan to use persimmon instead, to be served with some fresh-baked bread and good cheeses. With some good wine, that ought to do it. Some effort, yes, but no going crazy.

The best part is consciously being thankful for this surreally blessed life of ours. Try to list a few things you’re insanely grateful for, and — this is the harder part — sustain that feeling for a good 10 minutes, multiple times throughout the day. Drop whatever you’re doing, and just let that gratitude flow, unencumbered, for a while. It’s an instant cure for any anxiety you might be feeling about the meal.

And thanks for reading and participating here. I’m grateful for our little community, too.

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A simple but amazingly satisfying sandwich:

• * goat gouda (Trader Joe’s sells a really nice and inexpensive one)
• * chevre
• * slices of very ripe fuyu persimmon

All dusted with good salt and pepper, of course. The bread is the magnificent TJ English muffin bread, but any good sturdy bread will do. The perfect five-minute lunch. Well, true perfection would be a bottle of Belgian abbey-style ale, some lotus chips, and a plateful of breakaway superkraut, but perfection’s elusive anyway.