The Zen of Cooking: Creative Cooking With and Without Recipes [Hardcover]

Lucille Naimer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 1, 1995

Cooking can be one of the most sensual and transcendent activities we experience-every combination of ingredients yields a new feast for our senses-of taste, touch, smell, sight, and even hearing-to enjoy. The Zen of Cooking means entering a creative "flow" and gaining a complete focus on the activity of cooking. This is the perfect cookbook for anyone who has ever yearned to cook more creatively-adapting a recipe to suit perfectly the requirements of his or her senses-but wasn't quite sure how to go about it without making a mess of things.

The Zen of Cooking provides base recipes for appetizers, pastas, main dishes, vegetarian dishes, soups, salads, sauces, marinades, salad dressings, and desserts. These base recipes and the variations presented by the authors-130 in all-are delicious on their own; they are also the starting points for personal and creative cooking. By learning to separate elective from core ingredients, the home chef can personalize Wolfgang Puck's luscious Lobster with Sweet Ginger, or the signature recipe of any other great chef. The author shows how to learn to cook while traveling, adapting various ethnic cuisines to suit one's personal taste as well as how to follow the inspiration of what's best and freshest at the market on any given day. Spiced throughout with Zen wisdom, this special cookbook will help all cooks raise the level of their creativity in the kitchen. To paraphrase a Zen precept-recipes open the door, but you must enter by yourself.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Naimer's stated goal of teaching cooks to be less dependent on recipes gets a real workout here. She combines her own Zen philosophy with the creative impulses of a Wolfgang Puck to encourage her pupils to think for themselves and create dishes that go beyond slavish repetition of mere lists of commands and fixed inventories of ingredients. Sometimes, like in a stir-fry, this approach has a lot to recommend it. But when it comes to pastry and the like, precision is often the key to success. Naimer devotes the final chapter of her book to variations on lasagna, clearly a favorite food of hers, and one particularly adapted to inventive variations. For large cookery collections. Mark Knoblauch

Review

Plenty of cookbooks create recipes which, when followed exactly, produce pleasing results - but too few tell how to adapt recipes to suit individual tastes; or how to be creative without disastrous results. If ever a book could teach creativity, this makes a solid attempt, providing dishes which can be easily 'converted' into variations and including plenty of practical tips on how to achieve balance and success. -- Midwest Book Review

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 234 pages
• Publisher: Overlook Hardcover; 1ST edition (December 1, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0879515945
• ISBN-13: 978-0879515942
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #860,787 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Zen brings out the creativity in every aspiring chef., December 27, 1996

By A Customer

This review is from: The Zen of Cooking: Creative Cooking With and Without Recipes (Hardcover)

Some cookbooks talk about the ingredients used in various dishes. And others provide great detail about the recipes themselves. The Zen of Cooking goes ones step beyond. Claire and Lucille present, in a very conversational-like fashion, an understanding of the very essence of cooking. Their approach is to bring out the creativity in all of us by changing the very way we think about cooking. Simpkly, if one understands the core elements of a dish, that dish can not only be replicated with precesion but also personalized and enhanced by one's own preferences. As a result, I who understand that the core of cole slaw is a stiff green like lettuce and a dressing, can take this very American staple and turn it into something ethnic. Simply by varying the vinaigrette to perhaps include a rice wine vinegar and a bit of sesame oil and tossing in some spicier greens like anaheim peppers, I have transformed this US classic into something distinctly Asian! The Zen of Cooking is a must for anyone who enjoys cooking and entertaining and likes to be creative.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Delicious, nutritious, and elegant dining, September 8, 2002

By 

Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Zen of Cooking: Creative Cooking with and without Recipes (Paperback)

In The Zen Of Cooking: How Recipes Can Teach Us To Cook Without Them, self-taught chef Lucille Naimer provides the aspiring and adventurous kitchen cook with an impressive collection of 130 base recipes (including their variations) for appetizers, pastas, main dishes, vegetarian dishes, soups, salads, sauces, marinades, salad dressings, and desserts. From Whole Wheat Peanut Butter Cookies; Tarragon Sour Cream Marinade For Poultry; and Turkey in Chocolate and Chili Sauce; to Cauliflower with Mustard Sauce and Vegetarian Meat Loaf; Wild Rice and Black Bean Soup; Polenta with Sausage Ragout; and Veal Rollette with Roasted Pepper Sauce, The Zen Of Cooking offers a highly recommended compendium of delicious, nutritious, and elegant dining.