A friend gave me a cookbook called Tomato Blessings and Radish teachings by Edward Espe Brown.  If that name is familiar to you, you may remember him from The Tassajara Bread Book or The Greens Cookbook.  Edward Espe Brown is a Zen monk and a chef.  He ran the famous Greens Restaurant in San Francisco for many years. 

I love Tomato Blessings and Radish Teachings as much for its teachings as its recipes.

Here is one of his teachings in the chapter called:  Struggling to Get it Right and Eating the Results.

Anger Appears Unannounced

Before I became a cook or a Zen student, I rarely thought of myself as an uptight person.  I was sincere, conscientious and laid back.  More than others.  When anger appeared unannounced, that wasn’t me.  That was something I couldn’t help, and I wasn’t going to have anything to do with it.

Everybody else knew how angry I could be.  One of life’s great ironies is that everybody else already knows the very thing you are trying to hide from them and all you succeed from doing is hiding it from yourself. 

Even though I wasn’t going to have anything to do with anger, I began being angry more and more often. I was angry to have to wake up , angry to have to get up and wash, angry at having to dress. Moment after moment was distasteful, disgusting, objectionable: fatigue, painful knees, tedious labor, people (too slow, too greedy, too talkative, too sullen) things (out of place, demanding attention).

In a zen parable this is the person who wakes up with a piece of shit on his nose.  Throughout the day everyone he meets “stinks” and everything he does “stinks”.  Many years may pass before he realizes the shit is on his own nose and he must “wash his face”. 

I hadn’t yet noticed the shit on my nose, but people walked up to me as thought they were looking around the corner of a building… just to check and see what mood I was in before they got close.  I guess they could smell it.

I threw fits and sometimes I threw things: spoons, spatulas and other kitchen utensils.  Things can easily get exaggerated, and there are stories that I threw knives, but, no, it was only handy lightweight objects, including my glasses.  They would get so steamed up and greasy, and impossible to see thorough.  A few fits like that, and I stopped wearing glasses: Skip it, if they don’t know how to stay clean.  I just left them behind the stove where they had dropped after hitting the wall. 

Not that my fits ever made a difference.  Expressing anger is often like unleashing a ferocious, penned-up bull: a lot of damage and precious little communication.  If I attacked the way people worked - “Can’t you pay more attention to what your are doing?” – nobody seemed to notice what I said.  All they noticed was the anger – “Gee, you’re really mad, aren’t you?”  Anger was getting in the way.  It wasn’t helping. 

At last I found myself wondering, “How am I ever going to find out what to do with anger, if I never have anything to do with it?  If I want to find out what to do with anger, I better begin studying how it works.”  Once I started observing, I noticed pretty quickly that the object of my anger was not the cause of my anger: the shit had been on my nose.  As far as I could tell anger was simply a reaction to the fact that the world did not behave the way I wanted it to, the way I thought it should.  Apparently, the universe is not set up according to my agenda.

Experiencing anger is so painful that we would rather suppress it or direct it at someone else as a way of keeping our distance from it.  Often we look for a quick fix:  “How do I get rid of  my anger without ever having to relate to it?”  Yet, deciding to get acquainted with anger is pivotal.  That begins a lengthy process akin to becoming intimate with a person and finding out how to live with them. 

Becoming companions with your anger is a way to transform it.  When you can tolerate having your anger around, it is not so intolerable.  Anger loses its grip on you. 

The recipes that follow are for an Olive Oil and Rosemary Foccacia, Cauliflower Tomato Soup with Herbes de Provence and Corn Salad with Zucchini and roasted Red Pepper.