Personal essays
Buddhism on a plate
An omnivores dilemma
Maggie and I had a great week in Japan.
I’m here for next week’s try!Swift conference but came two weeks early because that’s when her Spring break was scheduled.
We started our trip in Tokyo in the Ginza and took trips to Nikko, Hakone, and Ito, before moving to the Asakusa area of Tokyo along with a visit to Chiba.
It was a lot to pack into a week but we also took time to wander around, to go to a ballgame, and to take a cooking class.
Maggie treated us to a night out at a historic ballpark (one of the few remaining in the world where Babe Ruth played) during opening weekend to see the home team Swallows lose to the visiting Dragons.
Another gift from Maggie was a cooking class. The teacher took us grocery shopping - OMG Japanese grocery stores are amazing. We then took a train and walked through the Tokyo University campus to her home.
We made a dashi broth and soaked the rice before gathering around the table to start cutting ingredients.
We made a simple salad, cut up veg for the miso soup before she showed us how to slice the waygu beef and fish for sashimi. While someone grated ginger someone else jullienned daikon and I got to use a shark skin surface to grate fresh wasabi.
I’ve never had fresh wasabi. We get that green colored horseradish in tubes or powder. The real thing was so much better.
We took turns making tamagoyaki, the japanese rolled omelette. You pour a thin layher of egg on the pan and as it sets gently roll it and add another layer which fuses with the first. You continue to roll and pour until you have this lovely complicated dish that is so simple to make and tastes great hot or cold.
The teacher put the rice on the stove and we went to the table to eat the fish and cook the beef, peppers, and chicken.
I have never had beef that good. It tasted as if it was cooked in butter.
When the rice was cooked she called us over to learn how to make onigiri. These are the triangular shapes of rice with a filling. The triangles are wrapped in seaweed and eaten like a sandwich. So good.
We ate the miso soup - she warned us about the miso we’d probably be served and what we should instead expect.
She then took out these perfect strawberries and mixed rice flour with water and cooked up mochi. We each grabbed a ball and encased the strawberry in nochi. Just like that we had a perfect dessert.
But, I thought, back home I can’t get meat and fish like this. I should probably learn to cook with vegetables.
Shojin-ryori
I took a class yesterday in cooking a vegetarian meal based on the Buddhist Shojin-ryori.
I say “based on” because the teacher pointed out that the monks didn’t believe in adding garlic, onions, or spice and she prefers to add more flavor within the other principles.
Each meal should have (at least) five colors: white, green, yellow, red, amd black.
They should also include the five tastes: sweet, salty, bitter, soud, and umami.
Finally, they should include the five cooking methods of raw, boilled, roasted, steamed, amd fried.
Our meal was all of that.
Even with her added spices the food was a little bland for me but very delicious. Every once in a while the student next to me, a vegan chef from Marseille, and I would quietly talk about what we might add to the dish but the truth is, I might need to change.
I use very little salt in my own cooking at home and so over time I’ve lost a lot of the taste for salt and often find restaurant food very over-salted. I imagine others find my food bland and in need of salt. So often the food we eat reflects where we are as much as how the food has been prepared.
We had a salad dish where the creamy dressing was made by hand from tofu.
Oh that’s another thing. We used no gadgets. No food processors or hand blenders. Everything was done with knives or mortar and pestle.
The french chef and I agreed that the dressing could use a little salt and acid. Our host overheard us and said, no, in Japan it is important to taste the tofu. “Tofu,” she told us, “is not for losing weight. It is a taste we value.”
On the other hand, she used white miso while our teacher in Tokyo had warned us against using white miso and recommmending the red miso instead.
Eating each dish separately as we cooked them was one thing. Assembling them on a plate and eating them a bit here a bit there was different. In that setting everything was well-seasoned and delicious.
The five colors meant the food was beautiful on the plate and the five tastes and cooking methods meant every bite was different.
Why five
The day before I’d taken a tour of Kyoto with Koichi (thanks to a recommendation from my friend Matt).
I never would have navigated the buses, trains, and subways to see so much on my own and would not have had the background and context to know what I was seeing without his help.
One thing he pointed out was the repetition of fives in the temples.
In one temple it was clear that the reference was to the five elements. There are the four that we know about in the west: earth, air, fire, and water.
Of course, in the east these have different meanings than the west. Earth, for example, represents our concrete self - our physical body. Wind is breath and the resulting vitality. Fire is our energy and ability to transform. Water is our emotions and fluidity including our ability to adapt.
The additional one is space. Space exists around us and beyond us. Its the infinite space around us that allows the other four to exist and flourish.
Later on the tour, Koichi gave me another meaning of five. As in the meal, other things came in fives.
In a Buddhist temple he took out a page which showed the five precepts. It is kind of the Buddhist version of the ten commandments.
The first is a prohibition against killing. This is why our meal was vegetarian. Killing includes animals. The dashi was made with dried shitake mushrooms instead of bonito flakes. In fact, our meal was vegan.
The second prohibits theft and fraud. I’ve never have seen a country as safe as Japan. I didn’t worry about Maggie navigating the streets of Tokyo in all of the crowds. I haven’t heard the warnings you hear repeated in other countries that tourists should be aware of pickpockets. It seems ingrained.
The third is about sexual misconduct. Wikipedia says it now means “sexual responsibility and long-term commitment.”
It reminded me of a couples class that Kim and I did with a priest before getting married. It was for older couple who were getting married for the first time (we were in our young thirties - so old). Someone asked about prohibitions against pre-marital sex. The priest said that this was not actually prohibited in the scriptures. That as long as you were in a committed long-term relationship, sex was part of that relationship. It surprised me to hear at the time from a priest - it’s a very buddhist attitude.
The fourth is a prohibition of falsehoods. Don’t say or do anything malicious or mean.
The final one made me smile. Koichi explained it as a prohibition against drinking. I asked about the temple where they sold sake. He said, it’s against “drinking too much.” Some versions are explicit that it’s about intoxication.
Everywhere I looked in Kyoto I encountered fives. Five elements. Five precepts. Five colors. Five tastes. Five cooking methods.
It combines to make a beautiful plate.
Essay from Dim Sum Thinking Newsletter 315. Read the rest of the Newsletter or subscribe