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And we continue with our ghetto breakaway cooking video series with a quick run-through of my favorite fats: a few grades of olive oil, walnut oil, sesame oil, duck fat, butter, and ghee. I also demonstrate my simple method of making ghee. Enjoy!
Are there any fats not included that you can’t live without?
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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:
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:
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.
Man it’s been chilly here in Marin, and all over the SF bay area. Low 40s at night, Jesus! So I needed something with a little body-heating firepower, and came up with this easy and pretty healthy soup.
Chop a big onion, a big carrot, and a big knob of ginger, and saute in plenty of olive oil and butter, along with some umami blasts: shiitake powder and dried tomato powder. Add wild rice and beans (quantities don’t really matter, but I keep them on the modest side) and spices (ground star anise, coriander, black peppercorns), and add stock, water, or a combo of each (I used chicken stock), plus a small hit of fish sauce, soy sauce, and Bragg’s Amino Acids. Bring to a boil and let simmer, covered, for a good hour, or until the beans are soft, then add a large bunch of trimmed kale, and cook for another 15 minutes or so. Taste for salt — it shouldn’t require too much, thanks to the fish sauce and soy sauce, but you will need some; I finished this pot off with some buddha’s hand salt.
Soups like this are really low-effort, and high-payoff. Freezes well too, if you can’t polish off the entire pot in two days.
But enough of this cold already — I’m ready for some scorching summer!
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I’ve been thinking a lot about vegetarianism recently, since I’m putting the final touches on my new book, which I’m calling The Breakaway Vegetarian Cook: An Umami-Intensive Journey Into Vegetables. I’ve long played with the idea of writing this kind of book, but I was nudged along by some close vegetarian friends of mine and by all the email I’ve received over the years from vegetarians.
I am thrilled with the all dishes in the new book. I guess I’m finding that a vegetable-centric diet, supplemented with occasional meat cameos, is, in the end, extremely satisfying (the book has no meat at all in it, however). I know that I have consumed far less meat in the past few years than I used to. And that meat comes from ranchers that I personally know.
That said, while I applaud veganism and vegetarianism as sound choices for anyone no matter what their reasoning, I find that a welfare-based approach to eating animals is the way to go for me personally. The nightmare that is factory animal farming is shameful and horrifying beyond all description, but the ranchers I know give their animals pretty damn nice lives — open pasture, water everywhere, uncrowded, leisurely conditions … certainly worlds beyond anything these animals would find in the wild. And with quick, painless deaths, it’s hard to imagine better conditions for both living and dying.
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I’ve been thinking about something Elizabeth Kolbert wrote, in her New Yorker review of Jonathan Saffron Foer’s gripping, if sickening, book, Eating Animals:
“Vegetarianism,” she writes, “requires the renunciation of real and irreplaceable pleasures.”
And it’s true — the pleasures derived from eating meat are some of life’s finest. There is something primal — primordial, even — and powerful about cooking and eating meat. At times it feels as if our brains are predisposed to consume as much of it as we’re able to; it satiates like nothing else.
The question is: how far are we willing to go in pursuit of our pleasures?
Foer presents many powerful arguments in the book, but I would say the overarching one is: there are more important things in life than maximizing one’s pleasure, and that the moral imperative of treating animals in the most basic of humane ways — that is, not killing and eating them — trumps whatever pleasure you personally derive from their consumption.
Foer rails throughout the book on the horrors and atrocities of factory farming — hours of the some of the most depressing reading you’re likely to come across anywhere — but he’s especially infuriated against the people who call him, and all vegetarians “sentimental,” that his decision to not eat meat is a delusion of innocence:
“Two people are ordering lunch,” he writes. “One says, ‘I’m in the mood for a burger,’ and orders it. The other says, ‘I’m in the mood for a burger,’ but remembers that there are things more important to him than what he is in the mood for at any given moment, and orders something else. Who is the sentimentalist?”
I don’t think that Foer realizes it, but in one way he’s a classic Buddhist. What he’s most concerned about — alleviating suffering (of animals) — lies at the deepest core of Buddhism.
Like Foer, I’m soon going to be in the position of making dietary decisions on my child’s behalf, and the story of meat is one that will have to be told to Daphne sooner or later. If we do eat meat together, we will do so with our eyes wide open, and not be lulled into “forgetting” where it came from. Which is all, in the end, that Foer is asking of us.
Foer’s occasional forays into shrill (but hardly preachy) territory will turn off many thoughtful and sympathetic readers, but don’t let that stop you from picking up the book. There’s a boatload of wisdom in it, much of which centers around his Holocaust-surviving grandmother.
Although Foer’s book looks an awful lot like an argument for vegetarianism and even veganism, it’s actually not: it’s an argument toward informed consent, and taking responsibility for one’s choices. “Cruel and destructive food products should be illegal,” Foer writes, which makes total sense to me.
Well this event, organized by the SF Professional Food Society, ought to be fun. I’ll be sharing the stage with three legendary Japanese chefs, talking about interesting things to do with Japanese ingredients. Takes place in a cool building too, in Ketchum’s space, on Battery in SF. The food and drink should be fantastic, and the conversation scintillating! Please come if you can (and please introduce yourself if we haven’t yet met).
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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!
We started out this video making three pickles: pickled ginger, pickled fennel, and pickled daikon. But some technical difficulties meant a reshoot, leaving only enough time for the pickled fennel!
It would be insanely great to have a ready-to-shoot kitchen. Push record, do it, push stop, push publish! That is sort of the Gary Vaynerchuk model, and it obviously works for him. Harder to pull off with cooking though….
Do try this pickle if you can — I still haven’t met anyone who doesn’t go gaga over it! Unique, refreshing, healthy, gorgeous — it’s got it all. Got a pickle you can’ t live without? I’d love to hear about it!
I was pleasantly shocked at how much space the Chronicle devoted to the inaugural essay, replete with multiple photos, long side bar on 10 key breakaway ingredients, editor’s intro, and five recipes! Can’t publish the whole thing here for a while, but please do read it online here. Thank youuuu! It’s going to be fun doing it on a regular basis.
(And maybe all non-food short posts here are good excuses for recent Daphne pix!)
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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.
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Think miso soup. What comes up? A bowl of brown, oddly separating soup — half is clear, and half isn’t! simultaneously! — with perhaps some squares of white tofu, maybe some wakame (sea kelp), possibly another veggie or two, yes?
Today I was really in the mood for some miso soup, but had to move a gigantic pile of chard to get at my tub of miso in the back of the fridge. Out came the chard. It looked so nice on the cutting board. Hmm, I wondered what would happen if I made my green soup the usual way — saute leeks in butter/oil, add chard, add stock, and puree — but just added miso at the end? Would it fulfill my jonesing for miso?
I’m ecstatic to report that yes, it did! I added about two tablespoons of miso to the last little batch of pureed soup, and mixed that into the rest of the soup. Satisfying, and then some. And just for a little textural fun, I julienned the chard backbone and sauteed the strips in breadcrumbs and ghee, and tossed that on top. This one’s going to be going into the regular rotation, and definitely into the new vegetarian book.
You could use any kind of stock for the broth; today’s was duck stock, but it would be equally good with veg stock or chicken stock.
I’m finding myself using more and more miso these days, in all kinds of dishes. I used to be a fan of the gutsy red misos from Nagoya, but lately I seem partial to the more delicate white misos from Kyoto. Less intensity, but more layered flavor.
Anyone use miso in unusual ways? Let’s hear about it!
