From my Blog: Cooking With Business
http://cookingwithbusiness.wordpress.com/
Long term direction is something that very few people have. In fact, even people who have no long term direction and KNOW it inherently are choosing to have one. It is the same way with food. We must learn the rules, apply the rules, and then learn how to consciously disregard them altogether. This achievement itself again requires long-term direction.
Entrepreneurs are not as flash in the pan as one would think. Behind every move people make in the business world comes with SOMEONE’S countless hours of research or laboring.
The truth is, having to maintain true direction is more important, even if it means you have to be poverty stricken for while. Even the biggest Gurus will tell you that you have to wade the marsh to get to the mountain. That’s half the fun, right? But the marsh is where we learn the most, and any shortcuts we take to cross that cost us our identity will certainly cost us an equal amount of prosperity, lost in the long term. Short term shortcuts=Long term losses. It’s basic Math.
The balance of one’s physical, emotional, spiritual, and mental states is paramount to anything else. Moving ahead without it may grant temporary satisfaction, but in the long term, destroys the self and endangers others with behavior and actions that are not coming from the heart.
We cook this way when we approach the stove as chefs. We bring nothing to the dish except our honest selves. Often, a chef uses the food they prepare as part of balancing themselves in respect to the food. The food isn’t simply there, its part of it, and that’s just as beneficial to everyone and thing involved as a chef with a pure heart.
Be honest. You’re not fooling anybody. And if you are, chances are the people that you are fooling are also in the process of fooling themselves as well. That’s why they are around you and you around them.
Once you discover true direction, you have everything. From this, sprouts confidence, perseverance, determination, honor and happiness. Happiness in knowing that everything that you do is for a purpose, a reason, a particular direction. Now finding the BIG direction in our lives is a tall order to fill for many. When one sees the entire journey in each step however, the journey to the truth gets shorter.
Pay attention to what you are doing NOW. Everything in nature boils down to things at the cellular level. Such is the same with the Way in our lives. It’s the tiny interactions and things we do and say that have the most effect in our lives. Within being conscious around your tasks at hand, you may develop an appreciation for the bird you also have in your hand and leave the other two dishonest birds alone in the bush. They are a distraction. You can only truly give your attention to one thing at a time. Even if you are multi-tasking. One Thing? That’s right. One Thing. And that one thing is, drum roll please………
Honesty.
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Mantra of Cooking The Self
From my blog, The Zen of French Cooking
http://zenoffrenchcooking.wordpress.com/
Mantra of cooking the self
Feeding the world
Feeding the self
Is the same thing
Feed the world the truth of self
Feed by feeding
Teach by learning
Be by simply
being
Cooking is less
About where you have been
And more about where you are
Experience is worn on the sleeves
Of great chefs
They do not speak
Of who they have served
Or where they have cooked
The tale of their mastery
Is told
On the
Plate
http://zenoffrenchcooking.wordpress.com/
Mantra of cooking the self
Feeding the world
Feeding the self
Is the same thing
Feed the world the truth of self
Feed by feeding
Teach by learning
Be by simply
being
Cooking is less
About where you have been
And more about where you are
Experience is worn on the sleeves
Of great chefs
They do not speak
Of who they have served
Or where they have cooked
The tale of their mastery
Is told
On the
Plate
Saturday, February 19, 2011
Organic Identity Crisis
We all want to do our best in any given situation. We are all trying to make the most out of life. Sometimes, we get caught in a cycle that we cannot see as our own creation. Understanding that everything that is happening to you IS your creation is a bestselling novel. Understanding what to create and how yet alone why is the real challenge. Factor into this decision a family to support or dependent individuals who count on your actions for survival and it gets really interesting. In all cases, it is best to remember one fundamental rule.
There is always another way to look at something. There is always another perspective besides your own. As we begin to see how our emotions determine our perspective, we can then learn more about how our perspective determines our lives, or how we can enjoy them more.
Freedom is indeed a state of mind, not an actual state of being. Getting the two to mesh together is what seems to be on the minds of most individuals, in one way or another. The major difference between the truly free and the truly lost is one thing. One group truly believes that they are doing the right thing, and one group is lying to themselves.
Learning to trust our inner selves is a difficult prospect amid such a wealth of modern distraction. It has always been distracting in the world. Trying to see your distraction as being greater than someone else’s is a distraction in and of itself. First, we must concentrate on what we are seeing in our lives. Then, we need to start to really see how we truly are being. Honesty in this regard is really a noble pursuit. The more honest we are with ourselves, the more honest our perception will be.
At this point, we can learn to decipher what really is important from what is truly distracting. To begin with, anything that would take you away from a loving place is a distraction. Seeing all life as suffering is secondary, that life itself is a challenge, and we must seek to meet it with a positive attitude.
Easier said than done? My response to this would be that we are witnessing the results of disposing of this obligation. Wearing our Sunday best would be an everyday affair. Everyday should be Valentine’s Day, and the festival of lights should last all year. We should all be able to truly BE happiness, not simply schedule it into our lives as a respite.
We need to take the bacon off of the table everyday and put it back on the Sunday table. All of the things that were once occasional and celebratory have become everyday indulgences. Within all this replication, the original message of love within the recipe becomes diluted. Further from the truth.
This type of food is a distraction from the truth. No different from falling into the lie that your life is harder than anybody else’s. When we seek true food on our tables, we are putting truth into our bodies.
When we feed our souls nothing but lies, it becomes more than difficult to sort out distractions, in turn making a decision almost impossible. The truth has been diluted so gravely that we are left helplessly dependent upon labels, diets, fads, and trends.
The return to self will eradicate this dependency.
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
Chocolate is the Way...
So its two days after Valentines, and every ones house is littered with the tattered
fragments of romantic jubilation, champagne bottles, empty boxes, little red construction paper hearts, and the occasional piece of candy unearthed on the floor found underfoot by adult morning feet only to be devoured by a happily willing customer of a family dog....
Except there is one problem: I'm not done with this holiday yet. In fact, I'm not even done with Christmas. Better yet, I am still knee deep in the festival of lights. It's a holiday all the time for me. I feel like an official Ambassador of BBQ on the fourth of July. New years is even more special for a cook, having the privilege of being the one to prepare the sacred feast of any kind is a privilege that I have always held dear.
I have told people before, my illustrious cooking career began in the Boy Scouts of America. I got sick and tired of burnt pancakes on rainy days under soggy tarps. I took over the kitchen ops, collected our little "grocery" money and did the shopping. I even got a dutch oven and started roasting chickens in them with root vegetables when i was 12 years old. Life is too short to eat badly, and I saw this right away.
If you are going to cook a meal, why not do it right? Except that what is RIGHT is up for grabs right now in our society, because unfortunately, what is RIGHT is also the most expensive. We pay extra for that Organic label from a government agency that also allows a certain amount of poison to be present in a major amount of our food. But here, have a little health. It'll cost you, however.
In the end, this attitude leads nowhere. To me, there is still the task at hand, what do we eat RIGHT NOW? Where is our next meal coming from? Who will prepare it?
This is the most sacred part of our lives, yet we are often so willing to turn over the keys, in both directions. Not enough time to consider our health in a more personal way, we enact accepted forms of health, healing, and nutrition into our lives. Too lazy to even consider health, some of us just eat whatever we want.
I say that they both have wisdom. Just like the resolution to any conflict often lays directly in the middle of both opposing viewpoints, I honestly believe that after all my years cooking for myself and others, I have come to this understanding.
That chocolate for breakfast is OK. And you don't have to equate it with doing exercise. Assimilating these two things is a horrible side effect of the health movement. We should never directly correlate "exercise" with "eating what we want".
This is in essence creating a very dangerous paradigm. Just because Americans suffer from a general increase in obesity, we are willing to overturn systems of diet and healing that have been in place for thousands of years.
A healing art, like Yoga, is not meant to be taken from. It requires the gift of you be given, and it in turn gives back. If we go to anything with a taking mind, how can we receive? If we hear wisdom and not truly listen, then it becomes useless.
I believe that the healing arts that have been Incorporated into our society are incredibly beneficial and crucial in our efforts to bring health back to everyone. It is not enough for a limited amount of people to be realizing health. Despite this occurrence, eventually the lack of health surrounding that limited healthy core will bring down the efforts. It's diffraction gradient, earth science. Things flow from more to less. What solves this problem?
Balance. And as we are seeing more and more, nature will balance itself, despite all our efforts to curtail this. This is The spirit of Yoga. In finding our own individual note of balance, we are able to play along in the key of the great balance that surrounds us all the time, everywhere we go.
What does this have to do with chocolate, and holiday obsession?
That eventually, within the American diet, labels will disappear. There is no difference to me between the USDA Organic label and the traveling snake-oil salesmen of early America, offering ambiguous solutions to every problem in each bottle of "Health tonic". The show is the same. Only the names have changed. What they have and still are doing is selling our health back to us in small, controlled doses of encouragement.
Only, our lives are getting harder. When life is good, one tends not to notice what one lacks. But when one is hungry, tired, and generally downtrodden, evil becomes more apparent in our lives.
The evil that surrounds someone or something that seeks to interrupt the pursuit of healthiness on the part of any individual seeking basic nutrition. It is the same as selling air to people. Food should never have become something that we pay for. We gave up our right at that point. We sold ourselves up the river.
How do we get it back? by seeing that the problem isn't the USDA. The problem is US. You and me. Every dollar we spend, or don't. They way we continue to ignore REAL FOOD all around us and carry on with what we think is important. Our jobs, our lives, our physical realities.
Often, many people that I have been with on their death bed, catch a glimpse of the perspective of what truly matters in our lives.
Like Bob Dylan said, "Everybody has to serve SOMEBODY".
We all need to serve our food, not demand that food serve us. We all need to give back to what we extract from, feed our souls again. We all know about composting, recycling, and "Organic" foods.
What we all need is a truly "Organic" set of priorities. The major one should be this:
That balance within one's physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual states of being is paramount to anything else. Without the proper mind in these aspects, anything we try to do to re mediate yet alone nourish ourselves is like throwing good after bad, like burning antiques to stay warm. Its a temporary remedy. But temporary remedies have great sales figures, because they bank on one thing.
A lack of confidence. This lack of confidence is fueled by guilt. The guilt tells us that we should watch our weight, eat this now instead of that, and generally view ourselves as inferior if we don't fit in to the norm.
Just look at the show "The Biggest Loser". I tried not to, and then I did. I wished that I could work with those people, that I could have offered then something that nobody did. Love.
We must replace the temporary remedy with that which heals, and learn how to make a healer out of the temporary remedy.
This is the way of masters.
Chocolate pounding Yogis everywhere will tell you.
Chocolate is the WAY.
Love,
Tenzo
fragments of romantic jubilation, champagne bottles, empty boxes, little red construction paper hearts, and the occasional piece of candy unearthed on the floor found underfoot by adult morning feet only to be devoured by a happily willing customer of a family dog....
Except there is one problem: I'm not done with this holiday yet. In fact, I'm not even done with Christmas. Better yet, I am still knee deep in the festival of lights. It's a holiday all the time for me. I feel like an official Ambassador of BBQ on the fourth of July. New years is even more special for a cook, having the privilege of being the one to prepare the sacred feast of any kind is a privilege that I have always held dear.
I have told people before, my illustrious cooking career began in the Boy Scouts of America. I got sick and tired of burnt pancakes on rainy days under soggy tarps. I took over the kitchen ops, collected our little "grocery" money and did the shopping. I even got a dutch oven and started roasting chickens in them with root vegetables when i was 12 years old. Life is too short to eat badly, and I saw this right away.
If you are going to cook a meal, why not do it right? Except that what is RIGHT is up for grabs right now in our society, because unfortunately, what is RIGHT is also the most expensive. We pay extra for that Organic label from a government agency that also allows a certain amount of poison to be present in a major amount of our food. But here, have a little health. It'll cost you, however.
In the end, this attitude leads nowhere. To me, there is still the task at hand, what do we eat RIGHT NOW? Where is our next meal coming from? Who will prepare it?
This is the most sacred part of our lives, yet we are often so willing to turn over the keys, in both directions. Not enough time to consider our health in a more personal way, we enact accepted forms of health, healing, and nutrition into our lives. Too lazy to even consider health, some of us just eat whatever we want.
I say that they both have wisdom. Just like the resolution to any conflict often lays directly in the middle of both opposing viewpoints, I honestly believe that after all my years cooking for myself and others, I have come to this understanding.
That chocolate for breakfast is OK. And you don't have to equate it with doing exercise. Assimilating these two things is a horrible side effect of the health movement. We should never directly correlate "exercise" with "eating what we want".
This is in essence creating a very dangerous paradigm. Just because Americans suffer from a general increase in obesity, we are willing to overturn systems of diet and healing that have been in place for thousands of years.
A healing art, like Yoga, is not meant to be taken from. It requires the gift of you be given, and it in turn gives back. If we go to anything with a taking mind, how can we receive? If we hear wisdom and not truly listen, then it becomes useless.
I believe that the healing arts that have been Incorporated into our society are incredibly beneficial and crucial in our efforts to bring health back to everyone. It is not enough for a limited amount of people to be realizing health. Despite this occurrence, eventually the lack of health surrounding that limited healthy core will bring down the efforts. It's diffraction gradient, earth science. Things flow from more to less. What solves this problem?
Balance. And as we are seeing more and more, nature will balance itself, despite all our efforts to curtail this. This is The spirit of Yoga. In finding our own individual note of balance, we are able to play along in the key of the great balance that surrounds us all the time, everywhere we go.
What does this have to do with chocolate, and holiday obsession?
That eventually, within the American diet, labels will disappear. There is no difference to me between the USDA Organic label and the traveling snake-oil salesmen of early America, offering ambiguous solutions to every problem in each bottle of "Health tonic". The show is the same. Only the names have changed. What they have and still are doing is selling our health back to us in small, controlled doses of encouragement.
Only, our lives are getting harder. When life is good, one tends not to notice what one lacks. But when one is hungry, tired, and generally downtrodden, evil becomes more apparent in our lives.
The evil that surrounds someone or something that seeks to interrupt the pursuit of healthiness on the part of any individual seeking basic nutrition. It is the same as selling air to people. Food should never have become something that we pay for. We gave up our right at that point. We sold ourselves up the river.
How do we get it back? by seeing that the problem isn't the USDA. The problem is US. You and me. Every dollar we spend, or don't. They way we continue to ignore REAL FOOD all around us and carry on with what we think is important. Our jobs, our lives, our physical realities.
Often, many people that I have been with on their death bed, catch a glimpse of the perspective of what truly matters in our lives.
Like Bob Dylan said, "Everybody has to serve SOMEBODY".
We all need to serve our food, not demand that food serve us. We all need to give back to what we extract from, feed our souls again. We all know about composting, recycling, and "Organic" foods.
What we all need is a truly "Organic" set of priorities. The major one should be this:
That balance within one's physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual states of being is paramount to anything else. Without the proper mind in these aspects, anything we try to do to re mediate yet alone nourish ourselves is like throwing good after bad, like burning antiques to stay warm. Its a temporary remedy. But temporary remedies have great sales figures, because they bank on one thing.
A lack of confidence. This lack of confidence is fueled by guilt. The guilt tells us that we should watch our weight, eat this now instead of that, and generally view ourselves as inferior if we don't fit in to the norm.
Just look at the show "The Biggest Loser". I tried not to, and then I did. I wished that I could work with those people, that I could have offered then something that nobody did. Love.
We must replace the temporary remedy with that which heals, and learn how to make a healer out of the temporary remedy.
This is the way of masters.
Chocolate pounding Yogis everywhere will tell you.
Chocolate is the WAY.
Love,
Tenzo
Monday, February 14, 2011
It's all in the verbage
I was reading Food Arts magazine and came across the following
wine description:
"Jean-Louis Chave Selection Cotes du Rhone Mon Cooeur 2008"
Now come on, that ALONE sounds like a good time...
It went on futher:
"This CdR delivers serious intensity, its dark berry fruit aromas swirling with smoke, tar, and espresso. On the medium-bodied palate, the fruit reveals licorice and spice, with pepper and toast permeating the finish with soft tannins and ample acidity-"
Score:90 Cost:210 Cases:2600
That alone, to the educated palate, is like a free glass of wine. I was there, experiencing that glass of what would be like a bottle you grab when a child is born or someone comes home from a war.
Awesome.
I then realized that food in this day and age had become encased in vivid descriptions and imagery, such as
"Tonight we have a fabulous salad of miniature wild shiitake mushroom charlotte with balsamic roasted shallot and red rasberry vinaigrette with a raw wilted salad of catskill fiddlehead ferns and dandelion shoots in lemon and maple roasted garlic.
Now I want to be completely honest with you. I just made that up.
But the words are from my heart, and they represent something I would want to serve to exite someone, yet keep it real and grounded in peasant cooking, as I often like to do.
I never got that expression. Peasant cooking. But thats what a Charlotte is considered, because by taking old bread and baking it in a muffin form pan or a ramekin with butter rubbed on the sides, you've got a shell to fill with WHATEVER you have at hand. Thats the spirit. Over the years in my own kitchens I started calling it "Rustico".
But what occured to me whilst I was fantasizing of a picnic at the perfect time with this wine, which by name alone sounded like a front row seat to a Steely Dan concert in the 70's (hence the smoke and tar) and yes, the perfect cheese, which for me would have to be some French raclette left to melt in the sun and spread on a fresh wild apple wedge (there I go again, making stuff up), was that what if food were to be described in a simular manner to a fine wine, something like this:
The chicken pot pie underpromised and overdelivered homey flavor like a parcel arriving just in time for Christmas with a creamy yet tangy bechamel which lingered long enough in the song of flavors to suggest another sip of smoky egg nog spiked with fresh grated nutmeg. The perfectly roasted vegetables carried notes of love and care, gently suspended and cradled within the sauce, guarded yet complimented by gentle strength yet fragility of the non-judgemental crust which carried me back to childhood like an unexpected ride to the candy store with my grandma.
This is what I would do if i was marooned on a dessert island.
I would not need a "Spalding"
I have an active imagination. Add to that a sincere desire to make dreams come true, and your close.
Put some amazing ingredients in the hands and the rest sounds something like this:
Maple-pecan pretzel crusted free-range pork tenderloin with red potato and leek mash and blueberry merlot compote topped with thyme whipped creme fraiche.
Love,
Tenzo
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
The second rule of Cooking with Business
Never trust a skinny chef, or so the adage says.
the chef should be plump, robust, rosy cheeked and chock full of the wares and dishes that they pro port such goodness in...
In other words, they should be happy. So one could easily say,
"Never trust a chef who isn't smiling".
Whoa. Hold on there. None of those Iron chefs on Sunday night are smiling...but wait, sometimes they do, and when they do, it is gorgeous...does that mean that they are smiling all the time?
You guessed it. And so begins the second rule of Cooking with Business.
If you have already applied the first rule, which was always being prepared for being unprepared, how one behaves afterword is crucial to adhering to the second.
One must smile all the time. We mustn't demand that life evoke this action, we must create it within ourselves. In this way, we haven't to prepare for anything. We remain the same, unfettered, between before and after.
So in this way, a chef who always has that "face" they wear is smiling. They are smiling when he is busy at work, presenting his food, simply being themselves. And they are smiling afterwords, because they know they truth about what just happened.
They handled it like they handled it. And they did their best. Just like the last time and the next time will be. But here we are again, doing our best, smiling.
If you tell the truth the first time, you never have to remember what you said. This is the second rule of Cooking with Business. This guarantees a smile before, during, and after anything you are doing.
Ask any chef. If a dish starts with a lie, or a bad ingredient, it never goes away. it just comes through in the end. No matter what we do, it still is there.
But a great dish, just like a great business deal, starts with great ingredients, and great people.
Cheers!
Love,
Tenzo
the chef should be plump, robust, rosy cheeked and chock full of the wares and dishes that they pro port such goodness in...
In other words, they should be happy. So one could easily say,
"Never trust a chef who isn't smiling".
Whoa. Hold on there. None of those Iron chefs on Sunday night are smiling...but wait, sometimes they do, and when they do, it is gorgeous...does that mean that they are smiling all the time?
You guessed it. And so begins the second rule of Cooking with Business.
If you have already applied the first rule, which was always being prepared for being unprepared, how one behaves afterword is crucial to adhering to the second.
One must smile all the time. We mustn't demand that life evoke this action, we must create it within ourselves. In this way, we haven't to prepare for anything. We remain the same, unfettered, between before and after.
So in this way, a chef who always has that "face" they wear is smiling. They are smiling when he is busy at work, presenting his food, simply being themselves. And they are smiling afterwords, because they know they truth about what just happened.
They handled it like they handled it. And they did their best. Just like the last time and the next time will be. But here we are again, doing our best, smiling.
If you tell the truth the first time, you never have to remember what you said. This is the second rule of Cooking with Business. This guarantees a smile before, during, and after anything you are doing.
Ask any chef. If a dish starts with a lie, or a bad ingredient, it never goes away. it just comes through in the end. No matter what we do, it still is there.
But a great dish, just like a great business deal, starts with great ingredients, and great people.
Cheers!
Love,
Tenzo
Cooking with business
Imagine being a well accomplished chef, who has faced a variety of situations both in their professional life, and in the kitchen environment. They have produced food in multiple ways, multiple times, for multiple people.
Yet each week, millions of those people gather for a visual feast. They all build with anticipation at the thought of watching said chef take on a seemingly impossible situation. Preparing a multiple course meal from a "secret" ingredient provided to then seconds before a showdown, open kitchened, in front of the world to be judged by an irrelevant panel of food related and often not "professionals".
Most business people would shrink at the thought of this surrounding their "work" day. But true business people will tell you, they treat what they do the same as the Iron chef. It's true, I have found a few...But unlike the chef, they often do not get the satisfaction of meeting those whom they serve. Thats another department. Thats marketing.
The ingredient is not all that "secret" to the chefs. We know this. We all know that they get a possible list of three types of things, that are similar in its constituency, such as three types of "fish", and that the chefs then request a certain list of ingredients ahead of the show. So much for spontaneity. But still, they don't know which "type" of fish. And they don't know what the other chef is going to do. Or do they? They do if they are a true business person.
This goes to show something. That true spontaneity happens only in front of you. What appears to be someones improvisation is actually a well orchestrated event, even if it was in part created by other outside forces.
This is the first rule of cooking with business. Everything comes from somewhere. Somebody had something to do with it. And you have to find out who, if you would like to succeed in business. There is no "secret" ingredient. Deep inside the true businessman, they know whats coming. To know what is coming is true business.
Everyday, flocks of business people hit the streets running towards a goal. For some, it is profit, for others cutting losses. But for the true business person, it is simply about one thing.
Making the most out of whatever whoever throws at you, wherever and however they do it. This is the same as what Iron chefs do. It doesn't matter that they "kind of" know what is coming. They know that one thing is definitely coming. The true secret ingredient.
Themselves. And how they are going to handle it.
And if they can smile afterwords, well, that's the second rule of cooking with business.
Yet each week, millions of those people gather for a visual feast. They all build with anticipation at the thought of watching said chef take on a seemingly impossible situation. Preparing a multiple course meal from a "secret" ingredient provided to then seconds before a showdown, open kitchened, in front of the world to be judged by an irrelevant panel of food related and often not "professionals".
Most business people would shrink at the thought of this surrounding their "work" day. But true business people will tell you, they treat what they do the same as the Iron chef. It's true, I have found a few...But unlike the chef, they often do not get the satisfaction of meeting those whom they serve. Thats another department. Thats marketing.
The ingredient is not all that "secret" to the chefs. We know this. We all know that they get a possible list of three types of things, that are similar in its constituency, such as three types of "fish", and that the chefs then request a certain list of ingredients ahead of the show. So much for spontaneity. But still, they don't know which "type" of fish. And they don't know what the other chef is going to do. Or do they? They do if they are a true business person.
This goes to show something. That true spontaneity happens only in front of you. What appears to be someones improvisation is actually a well orchestrated event, even if it was in part created by other outside forces.
This is the first rule of cooking with business. Everything comes from somewhere. Somebody had something to do with it. And you have to find out who, if you would like to succeed in business. There is no "secret" ingredient. Deep inside the true businessman, they know whats coming. To know what is coming is true business.
Everyday, flocks of business people hit the streets running towards a goal. For some, it is profit, for others cutting losses. But for the true business person, it is simply about one thing.
Making the most out of whatever whoever throws at you, wherever and however they do it. This is the same as what Iron chefs do. It doesn't matter that they "kind of" know what is coming. They know that one thing is definitely coming. The true secret ingredient.
Themselves. And how they are going to handle it.
And if they can smile afterwords, well, that's the second rule of cooking with business.
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