Gesshin Claire Greenwood, author of Just Enough: Vegan recipes and stories from Japan’s Buddhist temples and the popular blog , That’s So Zen, has put together a tantalizing book of practice disguised as a cookbook. Taking a page out of her blog post, How to Hack an Academic Book, I will admit I stayed close to the tasty parts of each chapter and tended the file the recipes away for a kitchen test in the future.

Greenwood writes with a delicious style, never pushing the components of her experience or expecting them to zap us with insight and release from suffering. But maybe they do because I did have several moments about broth, bamboo, and ramen noodles.

SIDEBAR: My Grandestdaughter called me on the “last evening I will be 5, Pika,” to explain that being six the next day would involve “rum and noodles!” I understand my daughter has taken her cooking skills to enviable heights but this modern parenting seems excessively licentious.

Greenwood was an ordained nun in a Japanese temple and writes with an ease and flow that speaks well of her embodied practice. To my joy, she begins with oryoki – likely my favourite part of a sesshin and the most challenging for someone with an approach-avoidance relationship to food. In her hands, the ritual of eating from three (or five) bowls becomes a practice of experiencing “just enough” and an art of finding freedom in ritual. In Broth, she walks us through the very potent sense of the “stink of Zen”; I emerged too afraid to check the miso paste in my fridge. Still, it is a powerful truth that if your Zen practice dominates the landscape of your life, it’s likely not your life anymore. And, much of Just Enough – as with any cooking – is about reclaiming our life slice by slice.

So, we “practice in secret, like a fool, like an idiot”, freeing ourselves of the chaotic circumstances of mind and environment. Then, as she instructs the cooks in Bamboo, we learn how to transform the ingredients of our life that are by nature poisonous into nourishing delicacies. Relationships are prominent in Greenwood’s book. Naturally. After all, what is Zen if not relational. What is any practice if not relational. How else can we adapt without an irritation, a bruise, a graze of whatever will scrape the peel off, soften the tough shell of Self.

Just Enough Lust is delightful if only for the deep truth that “life is too short to eat plain cabbage dumplings.” No, seriously. It’s not long enough to wash out the bland of spiceless, limp, dough boiled to imperfection. (Try some harissa or Korean red peppers, btw!) And it’s about balance. Circling back to Broth, Greenwood teaches the value of using ingredients in a way that they are almost “too much but not too much.” Now that’s a lifetime practice.

SIDEBAR: My mother eventually became an amazing cook. None of us could replicate her dishes no matter how much time she spent showing us what to do. Her instructions were always “just put a teaspoon” of (whatever spice) into the (whatever dish it was). She used a plastic spoon from some picnic we must have gone to, clearly a magic spoon, and coveted by all the generations. When I decided to calibrate it – yes, I’m that obsessive – everyone laughed, until we discovered the “teaspoon” actually held a tablespoon of spices.

Greenwood’s point is not to make us terrific Japanese vegan cooks. That would be lovely but perhaps an unrealistic expectation. In Ramen, she argues* for a “throwing away” of our preconceptions of how a dish should turn out or how our life should turn out. It touches on that sense of entitlement we all have about our right to have X-Y-Z because we did U-V-W. As if life is ever that linear and compliant.

Life, like practice and cooking, is best approached with abandon, spiced with an apprentice-mind and a willingness also to let go of incompatible ingredients. When Zen, recipes, and personality become a protective gear against being vulnerable and open to that one continuous mistake, it’s time to find fire the the stove and cooking.

*In How to Hack an Academic Book, Greenwood writes: “2. Hunt for the phrase “I argue” in the introduction.” I didn’t put this in the Introduction.