Paul Atkinson was born in York, England, and emigrated with his family to the sunnier climes of South Africa when he was two years old. An extensive tour of Europe enabled them to experience the tastes of that continent's rich variety of foods. A chance meeting over a loaf of bread at a local caf, enabled him to take on his first cooking role, working under the guidance of a highly accomplished chef, Steve Holding. The learning curve was steep, but it stood him in good stead for a promising future in cooking. Angela Shaw works on selective photographic product-design projects from her base in Durban, KZN, where she manages the KZNA Gallery for the KwaZulu-Natal Society of Arts. She contributed the photographs for the BRC's previous cookbooks: Quiet Food and The Cake the Buddha Ate , and so enjoyed rekindling her contact with Lungi, Dudu and Lindiwe, the stalwarts of the kitchen, and working with Paul on the third book. Fifteen years and three cookbooks later, the Buddhist Retreat Centre remains one of her favorite places on earth, where she feels nourished by the slow pace and beauty of the place, the excellent food and the meditation. Chrisi van Loon is a senior English teacher by profession.

A vegetable enthusiast and cat lover, she was the editor and coordinator of this recipe book - as she was with its predecessors, Quiet Food and The Cake the Buddha Ate . Louis van Loon is an architect and structural engineer by profession who runs his own consulting practice in Durban. Shortly after his arrival in South Africa from Holland in 1955, he developed an intense interest in Buddhist philosophy, which led him to study and travel widely in the Buddhist East. He developed the property on which the BRC is established during the 1970s on a piece of wasteland that had to be cleared of acres of wild wattle, bramble and other alien vegetation and made it into the indigenous jewel it has become.