If you hang out at the temple or if you are friends with me on facebook, you’ll know that I love to cook.  I usually get recipes off the internet or take cooking classes in Bangkok when I’m on vacation.  Once I know how to cook a dish, I would bring it to the Wat and offer it to the monks or share with friends there.  Lately, I have been teaching some of the members of the Wat.  What’s interesting is the attachment I have with my recipes.  When people ask me if I can share it with them my first thought (not what I say) is “This is MY recipe.”  Since practicing dhamma, I have been thinking a lot about attachment and belongings.  I have also been thinking about identity and ego.  Because I paid to learn certain recipes, the are mine.  They belong to me.  Because I am the one who can cook a dish or pastry a certain way, it makes me unique and makes me feel good because only I can prepare the dish or pastry this way.  People complement me on my cooking and sometimes ask me to prepare dishes or pastries.

But I knew these feelings were wrong.  After thinking about it.  I came to the following conclusions:

• Reality is there is nothing special about it.  Anyone can travel to Bangkok pay a fee, get the recipe and learn the technique.  Yes I’m the only one who can prepare it this way AT THE WAT, until someone else from the Wat takes the class.
• Reality is not everyone likes my dish.  Some people like it, some people don’t.  I spend a long time finding the right Pad Thai recipe.  I went to four or five different cooking schools in Bangkok before I found a recipe which reminded me of the Pad Thai I would get at Suan Lum Night market.  This is the taste/flavor I like and it may not be what other’s like.

I saw the impermanence in my thoughts because if it is what I like, it doesn’t mean that others will like it.  It’s an authentic dish, but it doesn’t mean that others will like it.  I made some for a friend and he shared it with his children.  My friend and one of his sons like it, the other son said he preferred it more sweet.  In the past I would have thought he had bad taste or was just a kid and didn’t appreciate it, but understanding impermanence I know that he just preferred Pad Thai that was sweet.  And what I thought of him was probably what he thought of me (my dad’s friend doesn’t know how to cook Pad Thai, it’s not sweet enough).

Another reason why I didn’t want to share the recipe was that the person I would teach it to would use it to start a business and make money!  At first I thought it was silly, the people I were going to teach weren’t in the food business.  I wanted to teach them because I thought it could be another type of kanom the Wat could sell in the Karma Lunchbox.  After I brushed that silly thought aside, I had to think about how I would feel if someone wanted to start a business with “my” recipe.  I got rid of the thought easily because I’m not in the food business and I don’t plan to be.  The next thing I thought about was what would happen to me if I didn’t share the recipe or technique of making the kanom?  It meant that every week, I would have to make the kanom for the Wat because nobody else could.  In keeping a readily-available recipe secret, I could potentially create a lot of work for me.  Also people would think that I’m a selfish person.  And If I was the only one making it, I couldn’t just go into the temple and use the kitchen, I would have to work around the temple’s schedule.  All of this would cause me great suffering.

In the end, I shared the kanom piat recipe and the salabao recipe I learned at UFM baking/cooking school in Bangkok.  And one thing that didn’t happen was that I didn’t lose my uniqueness or identity.  I still am who I am.  In sharing  the recipes, I have bonded with people who share my same tastes which makes me feel great.  I have also exchanged ideas about how to change the recipe and ideas about new fillings.

Luck for me I decided not to keep a “secret”