Authors: Charlie Cascio
Esalen Cookbook (3 page)
The Esalen kitchen serves 750 meals a day. We are open 360 days each year and provide organic, wholesome, world-class food to our staff, to our community, and to people who come each week to experience our workshops and participate in other activities. Fifty percent of the vegetables served by the Esalen kitchen are grown on the Esalen organic farm and are fresh-picked hours before they are consumed.
The Esalen kitchen is comprised of a small full-time staff, with the balance of the kitchen family made up of both short- and longer-term “work scholars,” who come here to participate in a 28-day workshop. In return, they work in our unique kitchen environment to pay for their tuition. The Esalen kitchen is, indeed, unique: it is a professional commercial kitchen just by the volume it serves, and it is a teaching kitchen due to the fact that three-fourths of the staff is comprised of nonprofessional, transient employees. The Esalen kitchen is also a personal growth kitchen, where workers can express their own uniqueness. Each day, time is taken in the flow of preparing 750 meals to listen to each other’s thoughts, questions, points of view, and personal feelings and emotions. This builds compassion, understanding, dedication, and caring between the kitchen workers. Employees care profoundly about giving their best when they are acknowledged as humans. All of these traits are kneaded into the meals we serve our guests and staff.
Many chefs are amazed at how we accomplish such a feat. We at Esalen developed a method of management I call the “compassionate kitchen.” It empowers all employees who come through the kitchen doors with confidence to produce their best, go beyond their boundaries, and express any and all of their culinary dreams. After thirty-five years of culinary experience—traversing many different aspects of the art of preparing, cooking, and serving food—I’ve realized how not to run a kitchen. Most kitchens are not very friendly places and run in a very military fashion. Employees are told to do as ordered in an “all work and no fun” environment. These kitchens are boiling over with high stress as thoughts of anger, fear, and apathy fill the employees and marinate into the food that they prepare at breakneck speed to meet a never-ending stream of deadlines (for breakfast, lunch, and dinner), with no time to honor the individual employee. At Esalen, we transformed the hard work and turned it into fun. We also put a value on clear communication, honoring each individual’s uniqueness, taking risks by believing in people, giving them positive feedback when they do a good job, and having an understanding ear when mistakes are made. Employee morale and creativity are high in this type of environment and the end result is found in the food.
Food makes it possible for us to do everything we do; it gives us energy for physical activities as well as non-physical activities such as talking, thinking, and feeling. Food can be for some of us the only contact we have with nature. A relationship exists between what we eat and the way we feel, yet many people see no connection between what they consume in the way of food and the state of their mental, physical, and spiritual health. Food preparation is the art of transforming many levels of energy into a form that the body and soul can digest and assimilate. Beautifully prepared food is one of the most basic and satisfying pleasures of life.
The most important and most overlooked ingredient in any recipe is the preparer of that recipe. Yes, that’s right—the cook. Concrete ingredients such as the freshest fruits, herbs, and vegetables are important in any recipe, of course; but the attitude of the cook, the subtle messages and energies that are incorporated into the recipe in the process of preparation, is never given any credible thought, though it should be. A certain positive awareness in the cook’s attitude will almost secure success in the kitchen. A stressful, insecure, angry, or fearful attitude on the part of the cook will impart these feelings into the food and ultimately be absorbed by whoever eats it. Those of you who were fortunate to have a mother who is a great cook know what I’m talking about when I say that every dish that mamma made was great—great because of the incredible effort and care, the loving tenderness that she had when she prepared food for her family. Preparing food with a warm heart is a direct expression of love.
When I took over the Esalen kitchen eight years ago, I had a strong commitment to the belief that the individual can help to change the world by action. I was eager to create the idea of a “compassionate kitchens.” I wanted to bring the humane view into the realm of kitchen management, to create a kitchen culture that would reflect a good morale, mentally and physically healthy employees, flowing creativity, high productivity, great food, and fun in preparing that food. I used the philosophy of Dick Price, Esalen cofounder, for my recipe to this new approach to kitchen management. This was to allow people to express themselves and to witness that expression without judgment. Taking risks, believing in people, and empowering them with confidence to believe in themselves is the key to the magical success of the Esalen kitchen.
By empowering these untrained, unprofessional students with confidence that they could produce healthy, world-class food, by giving them a guiding hand with culinary technique, and by allowing them the chance to express their creativity, the Esalen kitchen became not just a place to prepare food but a loose-fitted family with high values, caring feelings, concern, and understanding for each other. We blossomed into an interdependent kitchen working with one goal: to present the best meals from our hearts to our guests and our community.
So, welcome to the Esalen kitchen. This cookbook is a collection of recipes from the past forty years that this kitchen has served to its guests and community. It is imbued with the creativity that has passed through the kitchen doors during that time. All of the recipes have one magic ingredient in common. It’s one you can’t find on the shelf of your local supermarket. It’s the compassionate, warm heart of the people that make up the Esalen kitchen, their sincere caring about the food they prepare. The people—cooks, bakers, salad makers, and dishwashers—and the organic, compassionate love they put into the food they prepare is the magical ingredient of the Esalen kitchen and is what this book is about.
THE GUIDED TOUR
Esalen is very much like a small village, with about 250 people on its property at any given moment. The Esalen dining lodge and kitchen is the center of this village, somewhat like the village square or the town meeting hall. It is without a doubt the main source of physical and social nutrition at Esalen. The dining lodge is filled with long redwood tables, seating about twenty people to a table. Everyone eats with one another at Esalen. The buffet-style meals can be exciting because you never know who will be sitting next to you at mealtime. It could be a billionaire or someone who has saved up for two years to be able to participate in a weeklong seminar. An artist, massage therapist, corporate CEO, organic farmer, spiritual teacher, or a homemaker—people from Germany to India to Cleveland, Ohio—they all break bread and sip soup side-by-side. This eclectic mix of diners create a wonderful stew of conversation in the shadow of the Pacific Ocean. The dining lodge is open twenty-three hours a day, closing for one hour of cleaning at 7:00 a.m.
Outside of mealtimes, organic breads (fresh from our bakery) and hot and cold drinks are available in the dining lodge. At anytime of the night or day you may find small groups of people in deep conversation, someone writing a letter or reading a book, or two people who have just met and are starting up a lifelong friendship. The dining lodge is the hub of social activity, and in one corner of this lodge is a pair of swinging doors that open into a world of a constantly moving energy. It’s here where the hearth of Esalen is hidden. Here in the Esalen kitchen, where the transformation of raw ingredients into delicious-tasting, healthy nourishment takes place, for me is the heart and soul of Esalen itself.
As you walk through the big swinging doors in the corner of the dining lodge, you enter a world of constant activity. This kitchen, like many commercial kitchens, is brimming with sights and sounds that fill the space with activity. We have three deadlines in the Esalen kitchen—breakfast, lunch, and dinner—seven days a week. Because of these deadlines, we are constantly in motion from 7:00 in the morning to 10:00 at night.
The Esalen kitchen has a physical resemblance to many commercial high-volume kitchens. There is a large wooden worktable in the middle of the kitchen that can accommodate up to ten people preparing food. There is also a chef worktable that is beside the row of stoves, convection ovens, griddle, char broiler, pressure steamer, and wok burner. Racks of stainless steel pots and wooden cutting boards are neatly stacked at the end of this table. A salad-chef worktable and a dishwashing area round out the workspace; the walls are lined with more work-tables and large sinks. Doors lead off this room into large walk-in refrigerators, freezers, food pantry, and bakery.
This ordinary-looking workspace enables us to prepare hundreds of meals at a time and is also a cauldron for personal transformation. It’s where raw, organic nourishment is transformed into flavorful meals by people who care about the quality of this transformation. The alchemy of transformation is the secret ingredient that fuels the magic of the Esalen kitchen. The fire that supports this change springs forth from the heat of the ovens, the steam of the pressure steamer, the flames of the char broiler, and the passionate hearts of the cooks who fill this commercial kitchen with their creativity and their compassion. And this is all simmered together with acceptance.
The Esalen kitchen’s approach to food is accepting all of the food; we leave the skin on the potatoes and cook with unrefined ingredients. And we also accept the whole person in our employees—their anger and sadness as well as their joy and love. The kitchen celebrates the tears of its workers; whether they be tears of joy or tears of sadness, it’s all “salt for the soup.”
Esalen’s kitchen has been, and still is, a great crossroads. It has offered, and will continue to offer, life-changing transformations to those who enter its space. It’s a space where those who have always dreamed of being the best chef or baker in the world can live their dream. Where those who have lost themselves in the ever-involved world can become free of the prison of living the image of what others think they should be. I’ve seen in my tenure here United Nation directors become great dishwashers, heart surgeons become sourdough bread bakers, corporate consultants become pastry chefs, and federal prosecutors create new recipes for 250 people. People transforming themselves in the act of transforming food is the workshop of the Esalen kitchen. The meal is the physical transformation of the workers and their work. There is a sign over the door of the Esalen kitchen that proclaims: “Work Is Love Made Visible.” Welcome to the Esalen kitchen.
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