A Beginner’s Mind
I remember reading these words from Shunryu Suzuki. He said, “in the beginner’s mind
there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few.” I remember these words when I am cooking because they keep me humble in the kitchen. It doesn’t matter how often I have made a dish. I strive to remember to open to the newness of the dish when I am making it. When I fall in the habit of there being one way to make the dish then I miss all the possible ways of making it.
Moving to a plant-based diet, has helped me stay in that beginner’s mindset. There are dishes I loved making for my family before. Now I need to keep experimenting and trying new techniques and ingredients or using tools in new ways. For example, I used to use the Pampered Chef Mix n Chop to break up my ground beef and Italian sausage when making lasagna and the Mix n Chop is amazing for that. I no longer need to worry about that, but I found the Mix n Chop to be so useful in chopping up my tofu and mixing it with the vegan cream cheese, basil, spinach and other spices I added to my mixture to make it taste like the ricotta cheese I remember eating.
The first time I made the ricotta from tofu there were some things I did not like about the texture, so I began looking at what other people were doing and then started trusting my taste buds and my creativity. I wanted something that would give it that creamier texture, but not to creamy that resembles ricotta. So to my two pounds of chopped up tofu, I added a container of vegan cream cheese. I used to add basil to my ricotta, so I added some here as well and I have always thought there was a slightly nutty taste to ricotta, so I added a little freshly ground nutmeg. I had seen someone add some spinach to theirs and thought it added color and more iron, to the dish. Making my ricotta was the most time consuming, but most fun part of making this dish. Well that and layering it.
While there seem to be certain rules of layering when it comes to making lasagna, there really are not. You can layer your noodles, sauce, filling, and cheese however, you want. So I have made Mexican lasagnas with corn tortillas instead of lasagna noodles. I have made them with layers of butternut squash puree for the sauce and roasted veggies and my tofu ricotta. It may not look like the standard lasagna, but it has all the layers of a lasagna and it forces me to return to my beginner’s mind and get creative.
It makes me think about how I can do X or make Y without any of the things you use to make X and Y. I am sure that is where the idea for lasagna rolls came from. I can imagine someone saying, make lasagna without a lasagna pan. Whoever said the layers have to be flat? Who said what the noodles need to be? Or the sauce? Or the filling? Or the cheese?
At the end of the day what matters is that the people I served thought dinner was delicious. It came out so amazing that one of my non vegan friends said it was the best lasagna she had ever had and that she could not tell there was no dairy based cheese in it. Had I not been willing to empty myself of what I thought I knew, I might not have been open to experience all the possibilities of lasagna and of my Mix and Chop.
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