Yo Blacken This or Book of Tea

Yo, Blacken This!: Hell's Kitchen Meets the French Quarter at the Delta Grill

Author: Mary Beth Roberts

Here are 35 fully-illustrated recipes from the best Cajun restaurant in New York City. Chef Greg Tatis includes Cajun favorites with personalized interpretation such as jambalaya, crawfish etouffe and alligator sauce piquant. Also included are New York City tough-crowd favorites such as roasted pecan crab cakes with saffron cream sauce, blackened portabello mushrooms with smoked salmon, and pepper crusted duck breast in raspberry cause.

Greg Tatis worked for and studied under Chef Paul Prudhomme for eight years at K. Paul's in New Orleans before returning to New York to open the Delta Grill in 1997.

The comfortable, funky, roadhouse-style restaurant is within spitting-distance of Times Square and NYC's theater district. Patrons are likely to look up from their meals on any given night to see Greg, the starting lineup of the New York Knicks, actors, movie critics or rappers.

This is the story of the exciting little restaurant and Greg's great southern recipes with his wonderful New York twist.

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Book of Tea

Author: Kakuzo Okakura

Written in English by a Japanese scholar in 1906, The Book of Tea is an elegant attempt to explain the philosophy of the Japanese Tea Ceremony, with its Taoist and Zen Buddhist roots, to a Western audience in clear and simple terms.

Booknews

Kakuzo was a leading figure in Japanese art and culture at the end of the 19th century, and this book, first published in 1906, is a classic treatise explicating the philosophical nuances of tea and the tea ceremony in Japanese culture. This edition contains an introduction by Liza Dalby who was the first American trained as a Geisha in the 1970s, and elegant photos by Daniel Proctor. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Table of Contents:

The Cup of Humanity     1
Tea ennobled into Teaism, a religion of aestheticism, the adoration of the beautiful among everyday facts
Teaism developed among both nobles and peasants
The mutual misunderstanding of the New World and the Old
The Worship of Tea in the West
Early records of Tea in European writing
The Taoists' version of the combat between Spirit and Matter
The modern struggle for wealth and power
The Schools of Tea     17
The three stages of the evolution of Tea
The Boiled Tea, the Whipped Tea, and the Steeped Tea, representative of the Tang, the Sung, and the Ming dynasties of China
Luwuh, the first apostle of Tea
The Tea-ideals of the three dynasties
To the latter-day Chinese Tea is a delicious beverage, but not an ideal
In Japan Tea is a religion of the art of life
Taoism and Zennism     33
The connection of Zennism with Tea
Taoism, and its successor Zennism, represent the individualistic trend of the Southern Chinese mind
Taoism accepts the mundane and tries to find beauty in our world of woe and worry
Zennism emphasizes the teachings of Taoism
Through consecrated meditation may be attained supreme self-realisation
Zennism, like Taoism, is the worship of Relativity
Ideal of Teaism a result of the Zen conception of greatness in the smallest incidents of life
Taoism furnished the basis for aesthetic ideals, Zennism made them practical
The Tea-Room     51
The tea-room does not pretend to be other than a mere cottage
The simplicity and purism of the tea-room
Symbolism in the construction of thetea-room
The system of its decoration
A sanctuary from the vexations of the outer world
Art Appreciation     73
Sympathetic communion of minds necessary for art appreciation
The secret understanding between the master and ourselves
The value of suggestion
Art is of value only to the extent that it speaks to us
No real feeling in much of the apparent enthusiasm to-day
Confusion of art with archaeology
We are destroying art in destroying the beautiful in life
Flowers     87
Flowers our constant friends
The Master of Flowers
The waste of Flowers among Western communities
The art of floriculture in the East
The Tea-Masters and the Cult of Flowers
The Art of Flower Arrangement
The adoration of the Flower for its own sake
The Flower-Masters
Two main branches of the schools of Flower Arrangement, the Formalistic and the Naturalesque
Tea-Masters     107
Real appreciation of art only possible to those who make of it a living influence
Contributions of the Tea-Masters to art
Their influence on the conduct of life
The Last Tea of Rikiu