As many friends have requested, our community has had the intention to make a Plum Village booklet. The purpose of this booklet is to show you how to cook vegetarian food in the Plum Village style, a healthy and tasty cuisine with ingredients easy to get at the supermarket or Chinese shops in Europe or in the United States. We would like to invite you to come to Plum Village in order to see how the Sisters (in the New Hamlet or Lower Hamlet) or the Brothers (in the Upper Hamlet or in the Foot of the Mountain Hamlet) cook vegetarian mindfully, joyfully and calmly, which might be an inspiration for you.

Knowing that we still have a lot to learn in the art of cooking, we take the courage to publish this booklet because of a great demand from so many of our retreatant friends from the last twenty years. Also, we simply want to respond to your wish to make good vegetarian dishes like in Plum Village in order to show to your family that vegetarian food is not less delicious, or maybe, it is even tastier than dishes made with meat or fish; so that your family members who do not eat vegetarian cuisine before may change their mind. That is what we would like to contribute to the ‘healthy consumption civilization’: we do not need to eat cow, pork, chicken or fish meat. Those animals want to live and are afraid of death like us. They suffer and also get angry when human beings kill them to get meat.

This booklet needs much improvement in increasing the quantity of recipes as well as in their presentation, etc. Most of us have just began to learn how to cook in our monastic life. We really hope that you give us support by sharing with us your opinions, remarks, and suggestions. This way, we will have more experience and inspiration for the second edition or even the third ☺, in order to improve this cook book with more delicious recipes and to spread the desire to eat vegetarian.

A person who makes the vow to stop consuming meat can bring a great deal of happiness to so many beings. This is a bodhisattva’s great love. Let us close our eyes and visualize baby calves nursing and mother cows calmly chewing grass to nourish their babies. Some are freely walking in a green prairie, others are quietly lying on fresh grass to ‘take a sunbath’ with their innocent eyes... What a peaceful scenery! It is true, a vegetarian person offers life to so many living beings. He or she has lots of merits.

We sincerely thank you for spending your time reading this very simple cook book in order to learn to cook vegetarian.

• We will offer some of the dishes that can be found in the "plum village cook book"... if you would like a complete set of menu, please refer to the "plum village cook book".  As we will not publish everything on this site.

Courtesy of: "Plum Village Cook Book" printed in 2008