The Best Buddhist Writing 2010 - Melvin McLeod [53]
As a Buddhist, I vow to cultivate compassion for every sentient being, even those who are trying to legislate our love out of existence. I try to understand their fears about tinkering with an institution so fundamental to human happiness. I imagine that some of their sons and daughters are waiting patiently for the day they can finally be honest with their parents about who they really are.
The extraordinary truth about gay marriage is that it’s completely ordinary. Keith and I wake up at dawn, and I make him a sandwich to take to school. He gets kids excited about the wonders of the universe for a living, and I try to do the same thing for adults in my science writing. In a universe in which loved ones and tall buildings can turn into ashes overnight, it’s good to know where your garden is—whether it’s a committed relationship, a daily sitting practice, or a handful of earth and seeds. And it’s important to remember that happily ever after is getting shorter all the time.
The Joy of Mindful Cooking
Laura Fraser
More and more people these days are interested in mindful living—bringing the meditative mind into all aspects of their lives without necessarily adopting a new religion. This movement may have started in the kitchen of a Zen center in California, where Ed Brown, author of the classic Tassajara Cooking, and his fellow cooks meditated, produced great food, and changed the way America eats. Laura Fraser thought she’d try her hand at mindful cooking, and went to the Tassajara experts for advice.
Dinners at the Nevada Ranch, where Dale and Melissa Kent work as caretakers, are potluck. Whoever is visiting or living on the former dude ranch—now a private retreat, set up against the Eastern Sierras—shows up with a big pot of posole, fresh greens from the garden, handmade tortillas, or a peach crumble made with fruit picked from the orchard outside. The wide-open kitchen is infused with the cheerful spirit of its former owner, Maya, who passed away a couple of years ago at ninety; I can still see her kneading the sourdough bread she made in the quiet mornings, doing nothing else with her great intelligence and energy, at those moments, but kneading bread.
The ranch dinners are always fresh, and the various dishes made with love, but I’ve noticed, visiting over the years, that Dale and Melissa’s contributions to the meals taste brighter and are presented more beautifully than, say, the goat cheese and crackers I plop onto a plate. Even their simplest dishes, mere vegetables cooked with some olive oil and salt, are somehow transformed; they’re not just yummier, they’re mysteriously more satisfying to the soul. Nor do the Kents ever seem frantic getting something to the table on time, fret about the result, or burn anything in their haste to finish cooking already. It’s as if their food is seasoned with grace.
That cooking magic has something to do with the fact that they spent seven years at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, the renowned Buddhist monastery in California’s Ventana Wilderness, where Dale did a two-year stint as tenzo, head of the kitchen. Tassajara has a long lineage of great cooks and cookbooks, starting with Zen priest Edward Espe Brown and his Tassajara Bread Book (1970) and subsequent works and including Deborah Madison (who wrote The Greens Cookbook with Brown, along with her own books The Savory Way, Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, and others), and Annie Somerville (Fields of Greens and Everyday Greens). Like these other Tassajara cooks, Dale and Melissa Kent don’t just practice cooking; they’ve made cooking a practice, one that benefits not only what is on their plates and in their bellies but what is in their hearts.
The Kents now offer their next-generation Zen-inspired cookbook, Tassajara Dinners and Desserts, which sets down recent recipes from the monastery, along with their own thoughts about mindful cooking and words