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Product Description
"With humor and vitality, Isaac Cronin's words renew our capacity to delight, to be filled with life. Flavorful recipes welcome our hearts and hands to cook and be nourished. Our presence in the kitchen makes all the difference."
--Edward Espe Brown, Zen priest, author of The Tassajara Bread Book and Tomato Blessings and Radish Teachings
The inner game of cooking--a book of essays, exercises, and recipes designed to help experienced cooks and nov-ices alike find joy and fulfillment in the experience of food preparation.
Many people enjoy cooking; others dread it. This book is for people who want to learn to love it. The Mindful Cook draws on two traditions--meditation, as practiced in East-ern spirituality, and mindfulness, as outlined by Western psychologists and in books like Diane Ackerman's Deep Play--to help experienced cooks and novices alike find a sense of wonder and fulfillment in the essential human act of preparing food. Brief personal essays by food expert Isaac Cronin explore various aspects of food and cooking--history, preparation, the sense of the kitchen as place, balancing flavors, the joy of mistakes--and are followed by exercises that involve both meditation and hands-on ex-perimentation to help make the process of creating food as rewarding as the final result.
Beautifully designed and including twenty-nine delicious recipes, The Mindful Cook enables us to nourish the soul, develop the mind, and eat well at the same time.
Amazon.com Review
What do cooks do when they're doing their best? If you answered "make great food fast," or gave another goal-directed response, you're ready for Isaac Cronin's The Mindful Cook. Positing that cooking is a journey rather then a destination, Cronin offers to help both experienced and novice cooks, cooking lovers and those kitchen-wary, find new fulfillment and self-understanding in the food-making process. Taking the time to be mindful of what we do when we cook, Cronin says, not only optimizes the possibility of producing wonderful food, but also allows us to experience greater freedom in all we do.
In a series of essays such as the "Spiritual History of Food" and "The Mindful Kitchen," Cronin explores various aspects of cooking. These include culinary history, the kitchen as a place, flavor balancing, improvisation, and dealing with cooking mistakes. Exercises follow that involve meditation, self-questioning, and hands-on experimentation, all designed to improve individual awareness. In a section devoted to focusing one's cooking intentions, for example, Cronin suggests that readers take twice as long as usual when preparing a favorite menu to appreciate the true nature of the task at hand. Cronin also provides 25 simple recipes for dishes like Tunisian Tuna Salad and Mexican Chicken Sauté, meant to nourish the body as well as the spirit. Readers will find themselves dipping into the book often as a spur to self-investigation and for timeless truths about cooking, one of humankind's most fundamental activities. --Arthur Boehm
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