When it was first issued, Tassajara Cooking became an overnight classic. Ed Brown's recipes for cooking—for learning to appreciate all the steps involved in making a meal, from selecting the ingredients to serving the finished dish—struck a chord with people who care about food and nutrition. This groundbreaking book, in a completely redesigned format, is just as timely and relevant today, more than thirty years later. Brown discusses methods for working with vegetables, grains, beans, dairy products, and fruits; cooking techniques; and suggestions for planning good tasting, nutritious meals, from soups and salads to desserts. Generously seasoned with illustrations that detail every part of the cooking process, Tassajara Cooking is a comprehensive guide to inspired cooking, with joy.

“The bible for bread baking”—a favorite among renowned chefs and novice bakers alike—now updated for a new generation (The Washington Post) Beloved by professional and at-home bakers for decades, this indispensable bread making guide is the perfect book for new bakers building their skills or for those looking to expand their repertoire. In this deluxe edition, the same gentle, clear instructions and wonderful recipes created by the then-head cook at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center in California are now presented in a new paperback format with an updated interior design. Edward Espe Brown’s easy-to-follow instructions for a variety of yeasted breads, sourdough breads, quick breads, pastries, and desserts will teach you about the baking process and turn you into a bread making expert. “A baking Zen priest after [our] own heart!” —O, The Oprah Magazine

Featuring gourmet recipes from the renowned Zen retreat center, this vegetarian cookbook is a celebration of cooking, spirituality, and tradition California's Tassajara Zen Mountain Center has long been renowned for its gourmet vegetarian cuisine. In this comprehensive guide to the Tassajara way of cooking, the retreat center/spa's most celebrated chef, Edward Espe Brown, presents hundreds of recipes using fresh, whole foods. In addition to recipes, Brown includes detailed notes on preparing seasonal ingredients and, perhaps most important, inspiration for cooking with joyful intention and attention. Presented with humor and warmth, this book is full of insights for living a life that celebrates simple food.

The author introduces a 100 or so vegetarian recipes with charming stories and poems about where they came from, suggestions for how and when to serve them, and precise instructions for making them perfectly.

Dishes made with mindfulness that reflect a “love of Asian flavors and current tastes for lighter vegetarian meals” from the legendary Buddhist monastery (Edible Monterey Bay). In Tassajara: Dinner & Desserts, readers will not only find recipes filled with the flavor of Zen practice but also stories from past guest cooks, such as Deborah Madison, Ed Brown, Gloria Lee, and many others, whose calm and peaceful minds were truly tested behind the doors of the Tassajara kitchen, whose monastic kitchen differs from a normal restaurant kitchen in that the activity of preparing the food is understood to be spiritual practice. The Tassajara Zen Mountain Center teaches that every aspect of one’s day can be lived with mindfulness—even food preparations and choices of what we eat. A few of the fifty recipes include: Frittata with Caramelized Onions, Goat Cheese, and Sage Coconut Curry with Mixed Vegetables Tofu Neatballs Sweet Tapioca Soup with Honeydew Ricotta Chevre with Ginger Berry Compote “The book includes lots of amusing parables from the kitchen and makes Kent the latest in a long lineage of cooks who’ve contributed to the Tassajara mystique.” —Edible Monterey Bay

As a groundbreaking chef and beloved cookbook author, Deborah Madison—“The Queen of Greens” (The Washington Post)—has profoundly changed the way generations of Americans think about cooking with vegetables, helping to transform “vegetarian” from a dirty word into a mainstream way of eating. But before she became a household name, Madison spent almost twenty years at the Zen Center in the midst of counterculture San Francisco. In this warm, candid, and refreshingly funny memoir, she tells the story of her life in food—and with it, the story of the vegetarian movement—for the very first time. From her childhood in Northern California’s Big Ag heartland to sitting sesshin for hours on end at the Tassajara monastery; from her work in the kitchen of the then-new Chez Panisse to the birth of food TV to the age of farmers’ markets everywhere, An Onion in My Pocket is a deeply personal look at the rise of vegetable-forward cooking and a manifesto for how to eat (and live) well today.

Discover How to Cook—with Your Senses, Your Hands, and Your Heart "Making your love manifest, transforming your spirit, good heart, and able hands into food is a great undertaking,” writes renowned chef and Zen priest Edward Espe Brown, “one that will nourish you in the doing, in the offering, and in the eating.” With No Recipe: Cooking as Spiritual Practice, Brown beautifully blends expert cooking advice with thoughtful reflections on meaning, joy, and life itself. Reading Brown’s witty and engaging collection of essays is like learning to cook—and meditate—with your own personal chef and Zen teacher. Drawing from a lifetime of experience, he invites us into his home and kitchen to explore how cooking and eating can be paths to awakening. Baking, cutting, chopping, and tasting are not seen as rigid techniques, but as opportunities to find joy and satisfaction in the present moment. “Forget the rules and forget what you’ve been told,” teaches Brown. “Discover for yourself by tasting, testing, experimenting, and experiencing.” From soil to seed and preparation to plate, No Recipe brings us a collection of timeless teachings on awakening in the sacred space of the kitchen.