Main thing in life is to get yourself sorted. And not just this life.
And what did the job for me was this bread pudding for the Lamas.
INGREDIENTS:
400 g stale bread
650 ml oat milk or any other
130 g sugar
4 tablespoons ground flaxseed
1.5 teaspoons cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ginger
1/2 teaspoon cardamom
1/3 teaspoon nutmeg
1/3 teaspoon ground cloves
optional: chocolate with a high cocoa content, coconut milk, fruit e.g. blueberries
METHOD:
Cut the bread into smallish cubes and put it in a bowl
Blend all the remaining ingredients together until smooth
Pour the contents of the blender into the bowl and mix it thoroughly with the bread
Leave it for an hour
Mix it again, best with your hands in gloves, squashing the pieces of bread a bit
Transfer it to a baking tin. If round, then 18 cm across and 6 cm deep. It’ll come up to the rim
Bake in the oven at 180 C, for 70 minutes
VARIANTS:
Obviously the pudding comes out a bit different if you use different kinds of bread, one thing from light white bread, another from something heavy, dark or even rye..
Worth doing a topping to go with it.
The simplest one, the one I did.
A bar of chocolate in a small pan, very low flame, warm it gently with 3 tablespoons of coconut milk, best the thick part
Once the chocolate melts, spread it over the top of the COOLED pudding and put it in the fridge so the chocolate sets properly.
You can also have a play with the spices.
The mix I used comes out of my fascination with the German Christmas flavour, that’s biscuits, chocolate, cakes with a spice blend a bit like for gingerbread
These days that flavour says Christmas to me more than any of the dishes from the Polish Wigilia, the Christmas Eve supper
That particular spice blend, used only for Christmas sweets, is for me one of the best things in German cooking
You can also do it the other way round from me, that is lay the fruit out first and then pour the chocolate over. I put the fruit on top of the chocolate because it was only after I’d spread the chocolate that I remembered I still had blueberries
NOTES:
Best to cut the pudding in the kitchen before serving, because it tends to fall apart when you cut it. A good sharp serrated knife, like for bread
If anyone’s wondering how stale, then the sort that’s dried out a bit already but you can still cut it with a knife rather than snap it.
SERVING:
Can be, for instance, a cracking thing with fruit alongside Sunday dinner, or with coffee.
It somehow went that way during that event, that nearly every day I made something extra for the Lamas.
And since I’ve been fighting a losing battle with food waste for a long time now, I made a pudding out of stale bread with a Christmas flavour, so about as fitting as it gets for a religious event
This pudding sorted me a good rebirth.
As everyone probably knows, an integral part of the Dharma, the Buddha’s Teaching, is the doctrine of rebirth. But not transmigration of souls. Because leaving the complicated theological and psychological deliberation to the learned Lamas and Teachers experienced in meditation, I can state that I don’t really understand what it is that gets reborn and travels from body to body but it’s definitely not a soul.
What’s very important is that the chance of being reborn as a human is minimal
Farmed animals alone, 90 billion of them get killed every year, and at any given moment there are around 30 billion such animals alive in the world, that’s almost 4 times more than people. And wild animals? Insects alone, there’s around 10 quintillion of them, that’s 10 billion billion, that’s 10 000 000 000 000 000 000. Which gives 1.4 billion (1 400 000 000) insects per one human.
In the lottery there are 13 983 816 possible winning combinations, so our chance of a win is 1 in 13 983 816, that’s a hundred times greater than the chance of being reborn in a human body if out of the animals we only count the insects.
And apart from animals, there are also the realms of hungry ghosts, hell beings, gods and demigods.
And in Buddhism gods are beings that die too, and their end is the more pitiful the greater the pleasures they enjoyed in the god realm.
In Buddhism we use the metaphor of a yoke floating in the ocean.
Imagine our planet is covered entirely by ocean. A horse yoke floats on the ocean. And down in the depths swims a turtle that comes up now and again for a breath. And we get reborn as humans exactly as often as that turtle, coming up, happens to put its head through the yoke.
And even rebirth in the god realm isn’t as precious as in a human body.
Because only being reborn in the human realm do we get the chance to meet a Teacher, receive teachings, practise, reach enlightenment.
To reach enlightenment, or at least not drop down into the lower realms, you have to practise hard, meditate, do mantras, pray, do prostrations and a hundred other odd things. But Buddhism is a very practical religion and not everyone can spend whole days meditating.
So there are plenty of shortcuts and skeleton keys.
Because if for instance you’ve got a strong connection with some Teacher, and a Teacher in Buddhism isn’t a representative of the Buddha, the way a priest is a representative of God, he IS a Buddha, then you’ve got a chance of being reborn near that Teacher. Whether in His human or His mythical form (in the Buddha realm)
And when you feed someone, with love and devotion, when you prepare and serve someone food, then you’ve got a very strong karmic connection with that person. And you’ll meet in the next life
But bugger it, there’s a catch. I’ve only just spotted it.
I’ll be meeting my exes too…oh for f…
The kitchen is my space for lifestyle medicine.
I'm not a dietitian or a doctor – I'm a chef, and a member of the Polish Society of Lifestyle Medicine. Nutrition is essential to a modern kitchen, and that's nothing new: working from Hippocratic dietetic principles was part of a cook's craft centuries ago. At Rude Kitchen I tie that tradition to modern science — and to lifestyle. Read more about how I bring cooking and lifestyle medicine together on the About page.