Michael Pollan Says: Occupy Your Kitchen!

Why bother cooking? The reasons to skip it are stacked as high as the microwavable meals in a Costco freezer case. You don’t have time, of course (or you think you don’t); that’s the big one. But you also don’t do it as well as the professionals, so it’s tempting to let them handle it for you. Or at least let them give you a head start in the form of meal-assembly shops, cake mixes, and canned, frozen and pre-chopped ingredients.

Michael Pollan thinks you should bother, and not just as a fashionable exercise in hipsterdom. His latest book,“Cooked,” is a powerful argument for a return to home cooking of the sort that doesn’t begin with an attempt to find the perforated opening.

Pollan is not the first person to issue this clarion call. Scores of food writers and editors, myself included, have long bemoaned the increasing influence of corporations on the public’s diet. We have seen the slow retreat from the kitchen — even while interest in TV food shows has grown — as a primary contributor to America’s (and increasingly, the world’s) obesity epidemic and other health and environmental ills. But perhaps only Pollan can so effectively pick up the threads of so many food movements, philosophies and research papers and knit them into a compelling narrative with a crystal-clear message. “My wager in ‘Cooked,’?” he writes, “is that the best way to recover the reality of food, to return it to its proper place in our lives, is by attempting to master the physical processes by which it has traditionally been made.”

Don’t bet against him. Because of the power of his prose and his reasoning, “Cooked” may prove to be just as influential as Pollan’s seminal book, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” possibly the single most-cited text by those who profess concern with how our eating choices affect the planet.

Continue reading here.

With Deborah Madison's Help, Working Toward 'Vegetable Literacy'

Who’s your favorite expert on cooking vegetables? For so many of us, it has long been Deborah Madison, she of “The Greens Cookbook,” “Local Flavors,” the landmark “Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone” and more. As a gardener, former farmers market manager and chef (with cooking chops honed at Chez Panisse and Greens), Madison knows her produce and what to do with it. In her latest book, “Vegetable Literacy” (Ten Speed Press; $40), she aims to bring us closer to her level of knowledge by helping us think about the subject in a new way. It’s a must-have book for anyone interested in plant-based cooking.

The book’s subtitle is “Cooking and Gardening With Twelve Families From the Edible Plant Kingdom, With Over 300 Deliciously Simple Recipes.” Indeed, her mission is to illuminate the connections among vegetables from the same family, to show how they can be treated in similar ways in the kitchen, used interchangeably and sometimes together. Mustard and horseradish make natural companions for kale and cabbage because, well, they’re all part of the brassica family — or, using an older term, they’re all crucifers.

Virtually every page of “Vegetable Literacy” contains a nugget of helpful or just plain interesting information. (I’d call it trivia, except in Madison’s lyrical telling, nothing seems trivial.) Examples: Crucifers are called that because of their cross-shaped flowers. Some European brassicas are referred to as cole crops, which helps explain the terms coleslaw, colcannon, collard and kohlrabi. (Kale, too, perhaps?) Birds can’t feel the heat from chili peppers. One reason to scrub, not peel, carrots is that you’ll rob them of some flavor, not to mention nutrition. Gathering places for farmers were called grange halls because farmers originally were known as grangers, or grain growers. Groats are the whole berries of grains, and grits are their cut-up versions, and that includes not just corn grits but even steel-cut oats.

Madison paves the path to literacy with delicious recipes, illustrated by “Canal House” queens Christopher Hirsheimer and Melissa Hamilton and their trademark style of luscious-meets-rustic photography. Plenty of cooks will skip all the botanical and gardening information, as fascinating as it is, and merely get to work envisioning and making their next meal.

Success awaits. To spoon into Peas With Baked Ricotta and Bread Crumbs is to marvel at a match made in heaven. To bite into Carrot Almond Cake is to wonder: Why didn’t I think of that?

Because you’re not vegetable-literate yet, that’s why. But you’re getting there.

Read on for a selection of recipes.

Microwaving Office Mugs on NPR's Morning Edition

Is there something other than coffee, tea
or cocoa in your office mug?
Share your recipes in the comments.
(iStockPhoto)

When NPR Morning Edition producer Arnie Seipel emailed me recently, I perked up as quickly as if I had just downed a mug of coffee. What cookbook author doesn't fantasize about being interviewed by Steve Inskeep, or Renee Montagne, or David Greene?

It turns out that they had a very specific -- and very fun -- idea in mind. And speaking of coffee mugs, they feature very heavily into the concept. Arnie had recently turned David onto one of his favorite breakfast recipes, scrambled eggs in an office mug, and David had latched onto it with gusto. Given the early hour he has been getting to the office, he needed quick and hearty sustenance. But Arnie wanted to take things further than simple scrambled eggs, so he laid down a challenge: What other recipes could I show them how to make by microwaving a mug?

I don't exactly want to go down in history as the nuke-it-in-a-mug guy, but the fact is, I've had experience "cooking" at work. I wrote a piece about it a few years back, which is what got Arnie's attention in the first place. And I'm certainly no stranger to the microwave. But the office mug? That was new territory, and since I love a challenge -- and am a Morning Edition listener -- I set to work. I pretty much knew I'd do something with pasta, since I already had worked out making angel-hair pasta using water hot from a teakettle. But I quickly turned to mac and cheese, since it has that undeniable comfort-food appeal, and I knew it could come together -- in stages, at least -- in the microwave. And I had seen countless recipes for a brownie-in-a-mug strategy using Swiss Miss, so the dessert idea was pretty obvious.

But I couldn't be satisfied with just any old mac and cheese, nor would I stoop to using a cocoa mix for the "brownie." So I stripped them both down, then tarted them back up. The resulting recipes may not use the contents of just any old office pantry (does anybody really store flour at work?), but the fact is, I'd eat either or both of these any day for lunch and be plenty happy. 

I don't want to issue any spoilers, though. You should listen for yourselves to hear what happened when David, Arnie, and producer Rachel Ward let me have my way with their mugs, their microwave, and my ingredients. The segment is planned for 6:50 and 8:50 a.m. today, on Morning Edition. In DC, that's on WAMU, 88.5. 

In the meantime, feel free to weigh in and answer: What else should I try nuking in an office mug? Share your recipes in the comments below.

The Next Big Thing: Vegetables!

My friend Cheryl Tan roped me into something fun. It's a little like a chain letter, except without that creepy don't-break-the-chain hex pressure, and with a much different goal: to give people an excuse to talk about their next project. It's the Next Big Thing Blog Hop. Cheryl answered questions about her next book, tagged me, and now here I go. At the end of the post I'll tag some of my favorite cookbook authors who have projects in various stages, and then soon you can read what they say about them, and so on. Read, rinse, repeat. 

What's the title (or working title) of your next book?

It's "Eat Your Vegetables: Bold Recipes for the Single Cook."

Where did the idea for it come from? 

When promoting my previous book, "Serve Yourself," one of the most common questions I got at events was a variation on, "How much of it is vegetarian?" I counted up, and the answer was almost two-thirds, which made me realize that I was moving in that direction, particularly in my home cooking. I also realized that vegetarians might be more interested in single-serving recipes even if they don't live alone, because they might be the only vegetarian in the house.

What genre does it fall under?

It's a cookbook, silly! Seriously, within cooking, I'd say the larger genre is quick home cooking, but there has been a mini-genre of cooking-for-one books building over the years, and it certainly falls under that.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition of the book?