Back from Tassajara

The Center is on summer (fall?) recess, so there were no cookies last week.  In a stroke of completely lucky timing, Andrew and I were at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center for several days last week, so I didn't have to pass the cookie job off to anyone else.

Tassajara was a wonderful, hot, relaxing experience.  However, Tassajara was in the center of the forest fires that raged around Big Sur in July, and while Tassajara itself survived (mostly) intact, all of the hills and mountains around it are charred - truly charred.  There is one point on the drive in when you can just see for miles and miles, mountains on end, and all of them are gray and burned, with the skeletal remains of blackened trees looking like so many troops of the Angel of Death marching up the mountainsides, storming the ridges.  While Tassajara has survived the fire, in the end the rains and the mudslides this fall and winter will hold a much bigger danger - while Tassajara could fend off the fire, there is much less ability to control the outcome when you are looking up at a couple of thousand feet of mountainside with nothing but dirt and ash looming above you.  So this story is still going on.  Keep chanting...

Of course, at lunchtime at Tassajara they serve cookies every day, so it is always a treat to check it out from a "professional" perspective.  (This same line permits me to buy and eat any cookie I see; probably the best part of this whole gig.)  For the four days we were there, the cookies  included:  Cappuccino Coins, Chocolate Chews, Lemon Bars and Date Bars.  We have made the Chocolate Chews before - I made them sometime last year for a Thursday night talk, and they were one of the cookies that a crew at ZCLA made to give to families for the holidays last year.  The name is apt - there are three types of chocolate in these, and they are quite intense!  This time, they were quite different because they were served as bars instead of cookies.  (According to Ed Brown, the first tenzo at Tassajara in the SFZC era, he never used to make individual cookies because it required too much work; instead he always made bars and cut them.  Since they usually have 70-80 guests, I can certainly understand that logic.)  I am not sure if they were actually the Chocolate Chews recipe or a last minute brownie substitute, but either way they were rich and delicious.  (I think I am going to make the Chocolate Chews this week to compare.)  The lemon bars were also good, but quite unusual.  Having just made lemon bars for the first time in quite a while, I was quite interested to see Tassajara's take on these.  The lemon filling was quite voluminous - a lot thicker than the usual svelte (in size, if not caloric content) lemon bars most people know, and rather challenging to eat with your fingers.  (I managed, fear not; the things I do in the name of science.)  I have a recipe from Tassajara for lemon bars, and I am going to have to check it out (not this week) to see if it gives me results like what we had there.

Yesterday was a day for cooking, rather than baking - I went to the farmer's market on Sunday and then spent Monday cooking up all the goods.  The tomatoes right now are so wonderful, plentiful and varied, it is difficult to exercise restraint.  And getting an enormous bunch of basil for $1.50 (the equivalent at Whole Foods would cost at least $25), how can I say no?  So yesterday I spent a lot of time (with the help of my wonderful fiancee Andrew) making Fresh Tomato Sauce (Greens Cookbook), pesto (Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone) and Tomato and White Bean Soup (Greens Cookbook again; Deborah Madison, I love you!).  I was going to make shortbread to have with the berries I bought, but we ended up not having anyone over for dinner and decided simply to thaw a pound cake I made and froze a while ago and had the fresh strawberries on that, drizzled with some milk.

Tonight I have a bit of planning and prep to do for this week's offerings.  I bought some lemon verbena at the farmer's market, with the thought of experimenting with it to make some sort of cookie (like the lavender cookies I have been making), but now I have my eye on something else that I may make instead.  The lemon verbena may wait.  Come on Thursday night and find out how I resolve this horrible conundrum...lemon verbena cookies or ??????

D-J