Heidi Swanson, natural foods super star, is a cookbook author, whose writing, projects, and photographs have been featured in dozens of magazines. Her first cookbook, Super Natural Cooking, was nominated for a James Beard Award and is widely lauded as the best introduction to natural foods cooking today. Swanson’s online recipe journal, 101Cookbooks, has been the recipient of many awards, and draws a huge audience every month. Her latest mouthwatering and artful book, Super Natural Every Day, is hot off the presses and is equally inspired by whole foods and natural ingredients. I spoke with Swanson recently about the evolution of her cooking, how living in San Francisco inspires her, and where she eats when she’s not busy in her own kitchen.

What inspired you to write Super Natural Every Day?

Super Natural Cooking was an exploration of how to set up a natural foods pantry, an overview of some of the ingredients, and then lots of recipes to put those ingredients to use. At the time I was starting to think about how I could take the spirit of my local farmers’ market and have that apply to more of the cooking and eating I was doing. Push out beyond the fruits and vegetables. It didn’t entirely make sense to me to use source amazing whole fruits and vegetables, and then limit myself to white sugar and white flour. I began exploring whole grains and whole grain flours, natural sweeteners and less processed sugars, and what I discovered was a whole range of delicious, underutilized ingredients and flavor profiles. Four years have passed since that book was published, and I feel like I’ve simplified my cooking style a bit. I wanted to share my day-to-day, go-to recipes. They tend to be approachable, not full of components, with manageable ingredient lists. My hope is that they’re the sorts of things that people can prep ahead of time and work into their routines, without groaning at the thought of getting one on the table.

What are some of your favorite recipes from your new book?

I was just mentioning to someone that I regret not shooting a photo of the Shaved Fennel Salad for the book. I make that salad constantly. The Rye Soda Bread is a favorite, Baked Oatmeal, Bran Muffins…the boozy Crumble, the Chanterelle Tacos, the Farro Soup, Harissa Ravioli…the Orzo Salad tossed with broccoli pesto and avocado.

How does living in San Francisco and the Bay Area inspire your cooking?

There’s no doubt that being from San Francisco has made me the cook I am. And I think it’s because of a whole hodge-podge of things that come together in my kitchen. It’s my friends, the produce, the inspiration from restaurants I eat at, and wandering the aisles at different natural food and ethnic markets. And the weather. For better or worse, you really can’t discount the weather.

Your photography that accompanies your book is visually stunning and very modern (while being slightly retro). Tell us about the style of photos you chose for this book.

I shot the photos as I was writing the book in my house. In real time, which is a bit atypical. So what you see in the book is likely what we had for breakfast or lunch that day. I tried to keep things simple and used natural light and plates and platters from my own cupboards. I also wanted the photos to be illustrative in a sense: Where you can see how ingredients should be cut, or shaped, or how dark you should let them get.

You mention where you shop in your new book but don’t cite any specific stores. Any intel on some of your local favorites?

I love the Sunday Marin Farmers’ Market and meet my sister there whenever possible. But there is a lovely neighborhood market each week just up the street from me. Being able to buy Shelley McMahon’s eggs or produce from Happy Boy or Serendipity Farms, practically in my front yard, makes me feel very fortunate. I walk to Bi-Rite Market often and hit the bins at Rainbow Grocery and/or Whole Foods regularly. I love seeing what ingredients they’re stocking at Boulette’s Larder as well as the Nijiya Market in Japan Town.

“Natural foods” means to you that your “ingredients are straight from the plant or animal” and you note that you do your best to avoid genetically modified and chemically fertilized crops. Can you elaborate on why that’s important to you and for all for us?

I just like to know what I’m eating and where it came from. I don’t want to eat food that has had the genes of another species spliced into it. And it’s no secret that food grown with all sorts of chemicals and pesticides is often harmful to the environment and harmful to the surrounding communities and field workers. So, I try to vote with my dollars and do my best to support the farms, producers, and products that are more sustainably and environmentally minded. And to that point, I think this is possible to cook and eat this way on a wide-range of budgets. Many of the organic ingredients I use are nutrient packed and very economically priced. I find many of them in the bulk sections of natural food stores or Whole Foods Markets: Whole grains, lentils, beans, and whole grain flours for just a couple dollars a pound in many cases.

Your loyal fans probably already know that you’re a vegetarian. Can you share with us how your food choices inform your cooking?

Constructing nicely balanced vegetarian meals is part of what I think about. But I also try to eat and cook with as much real, unprocessed food as possible. It all goes hand in hand for me. I happen to be vegetarian, but there are certainly a good number of other things that shape my culinary point of view: Natural foods, where I live, the seasons, etc. In my case, phasing meat out of my diet opened me up to an entirely new realm of exciting ingredients and cooking techniques. But really, anytime you phase something out of your diet—whether it is meat, or fish, or gluten, or something else—you can either look at it as losing something, or as an opportunity to explore new things to fill that void.

Your blockbuster Web site, 101Cookbooks had over a million visits last month alone. Tell us what you find the most surprising and/or interesting about having an ongoing, open dialogue with the public about food?

For me, the site has always been about sharing what I’m excited about, or what I’m inspired by. And although I eat and cook a certain way, I would never want to impose the way I go about things on others. And what I’ve found is that people pick and pull ideas, or techniques, or inspiration from my site in different ways, and then, often times, make those ideas work in their own homes. What I’m writing about just becomes a jumping-off point for other cooks. I might share a rye soda bread recipe, someone builds on that idea and tries an oat version, then another friend with celiac disease does a version that is gluten-free. The more I share, the more I learn.

Favorite current meal/snacks at some local restaurants that keep you coming back?

I like the pozolé at Gracias Madre—spicy, hot broth, shredded cabbage, avocado, thin tortilla strips. I can’t get enough sesame bread from Tartine. I get the pickled fennel, Fiore Sardo egg salad sandwich at Blue Bottle a lot. And the mung bean dumplings at Out the Door. Closer to home, Ragazza opened not far from us, and I love sampling from their antipasti menu, lots of good roasted greens, and seasonal vegetables.

Orzo Salad recipe from Super Natural Every Day

whole wheat orzo, broccoli pesto, lemon, avocado, crème fraîche

Fine-grained sea salt

1 1/2 cups / 9 oz / 255 g whole wheat orzo

5 cups / 11 oz / 310 g raw broccoli cut into small florets and stems

2 cloves garlic, peeled

2/3 cup / 3.5 oz / 100 g pine nuts, toasted (see page 219)

1/3 cup / .5 oz / 15 g freshly grated Parmesan cheese

Juice of 1 lemon

1/4 cup / 60 ml extra-virgin olive oil

1/4 cup / 2 oz / 60 g crème fraîche (see page 226)

Grated zest of 1 lemon

1 small ripe avocado, peeled, pitted, and sliced

Bring a large pot of water to boil. Salt generously, add the orzo, and cook according to the package instructions. Drain, rinse with cold water, and drain well again.

In the meantime, cook the broccoli. Bring 3/4 cup / 180 ml water to a boil in a large pot. Add a big pinch of salt and stir in the broccoli. Cover and cook for 1 minute, just long enough to take off the raw edge. Quickly drain the broccoli in a strainer and run under cold water to stop the cooking. Drain well and set aside.

To make the pesto, combine 2 cups / 7 oz / 200 g of the cooked broccoli, the garlic, most of the pine nuts, the Parmesan, 1/4 teaspoon salt, and 2 tablespoons of the lemon juice in a food processor. Drizzle in the olive oil and crème fraîche and pulse until smooth.

Just before serving, toss the orzo and remaining cooked broccoli florets with about two-thirds of the broccoli pesto and the lemon zest. Thin with a bit of warm water if you like, then taste and adjust if needed. You might want to add a bit more salt, or an added drizzle of lemon juice, or more pesto. Gently fold in the avocado. Turn out into a bowl or onto a platter and top with the remaining pine nuts.

serves 6

Photo of Heidi Swanson: Wayne Bremser

Originally published on Inside Scoop

Food news hound Kim O’Donnel is often ahead of the culinary curve.

In a longtime online gig for The Washington Post, the seasoned journalist began blogging about all things edible and conducting kitchen chats before such venues took off in gastronomical cyber circles.

She started Canning Across America before pickling and preserving D.I.Y.ers turned up in a photo spread in the New York Times Magazine.

And she was one of the first mainstream reporters to cover the meat-free Monday phenomenon.

She began writing about the subject for the Post a couple of years ago in a recipe-focused column that proved the impetus for her new cookbook, The Meat Lover’s Meatless Cookbook: Vegetarian Recipes Carnivores Will Devour (Da Capo Press, $18.95).

The unapologetically omniverous O’Donnel, who thoroughly enjoys roast chicken, pork shoulder, and a juicy burger, earned her chef chops from the Institute of Culinary Education (on a James Beard Foundation scholarship no less). O’Donnel, who has written for Real Simple, The Huffington Post, True/Slant, and Civil Eats, says her book isn’t intended for devout vegetarians.

There are already plenty of classic tomes geared to that group, she notes, though herbivores will likely find dishes that make them happy in her book’s pages.

Rather, she wants to bring confirmed carnivores into the fold with satisfying recipes that won’t earn her the rabbit food rap. Flesh eaters take note: There’s no lentil-nut loaf among the offerings here. No sprouts or faux meat either. We’re talking hearty fare.

Every recipe had to pass the Kim O’Donnel test: This is a gal who includes a photo of herself as a toddler happily going to town on a T-bone on the back of her business card. (Nowadays, she wants to know where meat she eats comes from and how it was raised.)

So she knows her audience. “I want people who can’t imagine going a day without eating meat to give this a try and see if it doesn’t expand their horizons,” says O’Donnel, in an interview last summer at her home in Alki Beach in Seattle, where egrets and seals are frequent visitors.

“I’m not into food rules and I’m not asking people to learn a whole new language or set of skills in the kitchen,” adds the host of Table Talk, a weekly cooking chat on Culinate. “I’m just suggesting that they make an incremental change to diversify their diet and include less meat in the mix.”

O’Donnel is optimistic, despite the fact that recent research reveals that many Americans rarely let a veggie pass their lips. The Centers for Disease Control, for instance, found that less than a third of American adults eat three or more vegetables a day.

Still, she’s hoping that if the steak-loving set come along for the ride, they’ll see, as she did, that there’s a world of flavors in veg-centric cuisine that can take the rut out of any cook’s recipe repertoire.

The guide is arranged a little differently from your typical cookbook. There’s 52 menus, one for each week of the year, organized by season, rather than chapters on different courses. The 95 recipes are, where appropriate, designated gluten-free, vegan, dairy-optional, kid-friendly, and leftover bonus, so you can tailor what you cook to your needs and those of others joining you at the table.

As for many, O’Donnel, 44, decided to try life with less meat for health, personal, and environmental reasons. She’s battled high cholesterol since her teens. Her dad died young from heart disease.

And she was struck by a comment made by Nobel Peace Prize winner and UN climate expert Rajendra Pachauri that one of the most important things you can do to help the planet is not trade in your gas guzzler for a Prius, but go meat-free once a week.

These days, she goes meatless, on average, about three times a week. That means there are a lot more legumes, grains, and produce on her plate now. “I don’t think in terms of looking for a stand-in for meat,” she says. “I’m just looking for a good mix of protein, complex carbs, veg and fruit.”

She’s a big fan of beans of all kinds and sees nothing wrong with eating eggs for supper (a concept whole-heartedly endorsed by this writer). From her cookbook selection she counts Potpie with Cheddar Biscuit Crust and Sweet Potato Black Bean Chili as two meals likely to win over meat lovers in a heart beat.

O’Donnel is in good company on the cut-back-on-meat bandwagon. Launched in 2003, Meatless Monday is an initiative of New York-based nonprofit Healthy Monday, in partnership with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The day-off-from-meat campaign is an attempt to help Americans cut their saturated fat intake by 15 percent. (Mondays, at the start of the week, are considered a good day to set intentions.)

Vegetarian cookbook scribes Mollie Katzen and Deborah Madison are among a growing group of chefs who champion using meat as a flavor accent to a meal, if at all. Even hardcore carnivores like restauranteur Mario Batali have embraced Meatless Monday.

But O’Donnel, a recent West Coast transplant looking for more balance in her life,  has a touch of the zen about her. She’s not aggressively trying to convert carnivores.

Going meatless simply makes her feel better, she says, and she thinks other eaters might like to discover that too. Since she made the switch to a more plant-based way of eating O’Donnel pays more attention to what she cooks and turns out more flavorful food that costs less than a meal with meat. Who can argue against that?

Next month, this cookbook author begins a bimonthly column for USA Today called “The Family Kitchen.” It’s a safe bet that O’Donnel will bring meat-free meals, sans heavy-handed sermonizing or dietary dogma, to this middle American audience, simply making her case for cooking vegetarian recipes without sacrificing sustenance, taste, or texture.

Bay Area readers: O’Donnel will appear at 18 Reasons for a Meatless Monday dinner and talk tonight. She’ll also be talking up the merits of an eat-less-meat life at Kitchen Table Talks the following evening. Click here to find out about other upcoming events and appearances.

Originally published on Lettuce Eat Kale

Photo: Myra Kohn

It’s a schizophrenic time for food in America. On the one hand, everywhere I go I meet a canner, jammer, fermenter, or forager obsessed with perfecting these age-old crafts and sharing them with other urban homesteaders or selling their wares at farmers’ markets, pop-up stores, or underground dinners.

On the other hand, as Michael Pollan observed in a New York Times Magazine piece last year, people are cooking less but watching more.  Cooking shows, that is. Food preparation has become a spectator sport, a form of entertainment, but not something you actually do in the privacy of your own home. This sorry state of affairs was lamented by some of the biggest names in food writing, including Saveur founder Dorothy Kalins, at the recent Symposium for Professional Food Writers.

Guilty as charged: We make modest meals in my house and we’re addicted to MasterChef.

Some say the rise of celebrity chefs, the Food Network, indeed cooking programs on all the TV channels, have made Americans feel more intimidated and less at home behind a stove. Millions are disconnected from where and how their food is grown, and they have no idea what to do with raw, unprocessed ingredients or how to fix something good to eat.

Surely the time is ripe for a cookbook (or two) designed to entice people back into the kitchen. Enter D.I.Y. Delicious: Recipes and Ideas for Simple Foods from Scratch (Chronicle, $24.95) by Vanessa Barrington, a chef, food writer, and recipe tester from Oakland, California. Her book, which has the stamp of shooter Sara Remington all over it, boasts some 75 recipes for making salsas, sauces, and salad dressings, as well as step-by-step illustrated guides to culturing, brewing, fermenting, and baking.

Barrington’s dedication sums up her thinking behind this atypical food tome: This book is dedicated to every eater and cook who has ever asked the question ‘Why can’t I make this myself?’ Who among us hasn’t flirted with that notion?

Cooking for ourselves is cheaper and healthier for people and the planet, cuts down on waste, engages us with food in a way that take-out or dining out never will, and, when done well, tastes good too.

Barrington, who blogs about food policy and healthy cooking here on Civil Eats and at EcoSalon, has a manifesto few would quibble with: The world would be a better place if more people cooked real food more often.

It also takes time to make a decent meal. Barrington recently penned a guide, born out of this book, to help people figure out how to add “cook” to their to-do lists. She suggests folks follow the three Ps: With a well-stocked pantry, the right paraphernalia, and advance planning, figuring out “what’s for dinner?” need not be an onerous undertaking.

She comes to such sentiment honestly. The coauthor of Heirloom Beans, Barrington was inspired to write D.I.Y. Delicious after a family reunion at the home in a small town near Salt Lake City where her mother grew up. The house, which her aunt still calls home, has a kitchen pantry that boasts shelves lined with jars of pickles, preserves, jams, jellies, and canned vegetables from the garden.

Barrington says these put-up goods looked foreign to her. She grew up with a working mom who saw cooking as a chore and relied heavily on convenience foods to get dinner on the table. After the reunion, this self-taught chef started questioning why she was buying everyday staples  — granola, bread, butter, jam, yogurt, tortillas, and pickles — that are easy to make. Through trial and error she set out to learn how to make her own basics. Lucky for us that project forms the foundation of this cookbook.

Along the way she discovered that the food she made at home herself with ingredients she knew tasted better than their store-bought equivalents. Barrington got hooked on a homemade kitchen and she hopes others will too. “I sometimes felt like I was drowning in plastic containers from my yogurt habit, or I’d lament the loss of all that fruit from a family member’s plum tree falling to the ground and rotting,” she recalls. “After I started making my own yogurt and jam I felt a great sense of accomplishment and deep satisfaction that comes with making food with your own hands.”

Her mantra: If she has food in her kitchen that she’s made, then she always has the makings of a meal on hand. I thought of her this morning, while I made pesto with freshly picked basil and roasted beets and butternut squash before the heat of the day makes cooking in my kitchen unbearable. The squash I’ll use to make soup or fill potstickers, beet chunks star as the main feature in a salad with feta, mint, and red onion tonight. The pesto found a home on pasta and as a spread for sandwiches for school.

D.I.Y Delicious consists of what Barrington calls building-block recipes and it includes techniques and skills — like culturing yogurt, pickling vegetables, or making fresh pasta — necessary to help home cooks construct a kitchen repertoire. She begins her book with a recipe for grainy mustard and then includes dishes like Maple and Mustard-Glazed Root Vegetables that call for the homemade condiment. A blueprint for making fresh, whole-milk soft cheese is followed by a recipe for Savory Spinach-Cheese Pie with Olive Oil Crust. Sourdough Starter is used in bread, pancake, and pizza recipes. Spicy Pickled Green Beans are paired with Potato Salad and Hard-Cooked Eggs. Freaked by fermentation? Try your hand at Ginger Beer. You get the idea.

“I hadn’t made butter since the first grade,” says food writer Molly Watson, who served as a recipe tester for Barrington’s book. “I made the Cultured Butter for my dad, who eats about half a loaf of bread for breakfast,” Watson explains. “When I asked him how it was he said: ‘Of course, it’s so much better than store-bought butter.’ I was kind of shocked by how good it was. I started spreading it on crackers like cheese.” I know what she means. After I began making tortillas, my son turned up his nose at the kinds that come in bags. He prefers the size (small), texture, and taste of the made-from-scratch variety.

Barrington is not surprised by our findings. After all, she wrote a book on the subject.

Originally published on Lettuce Eat Kale

Food photos & cover shot: Sara Remington, author photo: Susan Fleming

Mark Bittman has been cooking and writing about food for four decades, including creating simple recipes for his weekly column at the New York Times, The Minimalist. Simple, because they don’t require difficult-to-find ingredients (and if they do, he gives alternatives) or an elaborate process to get a delicious and often impressive meal on the table. He has challenged his readers to travel across cultures, try things they thought were really difficult to prepare, and to rethink the tools in their kitchen repertoire (last week’s Minimalist, for example, breathed new life into the food processor).

Bittman has also emerged as a sane voice in the discussion around food policy, penning excellent reporting on industrial meat production, sustainable fish, and organics, to name a few stories. In addition, he digests news on the food system, writes about his cooking exploits and publishes the work of other food writers (full disclosure: I’m one of them) on his site, markbittman.com. In his recent book, Food Matters, he discussed why we should cut out the junk food and cut down on the amount of meat we eat for our own health and for the well-being of the planet. Building on the success of that work comes the Food Matters Cookbook, with 500 recipes for inspired “less-meatarians.” I spoke with him this week about his new cookbook and the state of the discussion around food politics.

Civil Eats: Many of our readers might be familiar with your “vegan before six” diet. Why did you start eating this way?

Mark Bittman: I wrote How to Cook Everything Vegetarian in the mid-aughts because I saw the handwriting on the wall, that eventually we are all going to be eating way more plants than we are now. And it seemed like a good idea for me to get familiar with whole grains, legumes, vegetables, etc. more than I was. In the course of writing that, it became clear that animal products in general, and meat in particular, as well as processed foods and junk foods, were really doing us in. And at the same time it became evident that industrial livestock production was a big contributor, not only to bad health, but to global warming. So I decided to write Food Matters. I realized at the same time that my own health was suffering at age 57 after years of eating like an American. So while I was writing that book, I decided to put this whole thing into practice. I was unwilling to become a vegan, I didn’t think it really made sense for me, but I thought that a seriously modified diet would. So I decided to eat as a very strict vegan, that is no processed food–not even white rice, pasta or bread–no animal products of any kind, until dinnertime. But then at dinnertime I would do pretty much whatever I wanted to do, although I try to stay more moderate. That’s pretty much the diet I’ve followed for about four years, and I can certainly say that I am healthier than I was four years ago. It turns out it was a pretty smart thing for me to do.

CE: People often think that eating ecologically and healthfully is a sacrifice. How do you respond to that?

MB: People think that way because they think that [a diet] has to be extreme. To be completely principled about this, I think you’d be a vegan. But I think to suggest that people become vegans really alienates them immediately. I think some compromise is necessary, but I don’t think that it means that you have to start eating in a way you don’t want to eat. I think it means that you consciously start eating in a saner way, and if that means that you start with two salads a week–you know that is very significant for a lot of Americans.

CE: There are no sections in the Food Matters Cookbook dedicated to meat, poultry, fish, etc., and yet this is not a vegetarian cookbook. Can you talk a bit about the layout?

MB: There are two ways to eat less meat: you can eliminate it from a given meal, day, or your life if that’s your choice, or you can reduce the amount in a given dish. The Food Matters Cookbook is often about reducing the amount in a given dish. So, because we’re not putting meat in the center of the plate–as in “here’s a big piece of meat and a couple of things to go with it”–it didn’t seem appropriate to have meat chapters. It’s more a book that says “here’s a smart way of eating.” And a smart way of eating can include meat, but it isn’t about meat.

CE: In the intro you write that you are “confident that as your diet changes, so will the sorts of foods you crave.” Is this what happened to you?

MB: What I can tell you is that there isn’t a week that goes by that I don’t cook a pot of beans and eat it through the course of a week, there isn’t a week that goes by that I don’t cook a pot of grains, and/or make a whole grain bread–and these are things that I’ve come to enjoy and rely on more and more. When I go out for lunch and am confronted with sort of standard lunch fare at this point it really turns me off. Which has sort of led me to bring my lunch places more often than I used to.

CE: You have been writing more on food policy in the last couple of years. How do you think the media is doing in covering food policy stories?

MB: It depends on what you call the media. I find plenty of interesting stuff every week, in the New York Times, Time Magazine, the Guardian in the UK. There are plenty of publications that do a good job, and I think you see the occasional decent story on television on things like Nightline. But I think the brunt of [this reporting] is on the web, on good sites like yours and in blogs. So is this stuff being discussed openly? Absolutely. Is it being covered as widely as it might be? No, I don’t think so. Even the people who are covering it I think are missing a lot of the picture–of how scary this is and how terrifying it might become.

CE: There has been a shift happening over the last couple of years in the way people are thinking about food. Would you call it a movement?

MB: I’m reluctant to call it a movement until I see some kind of leadership and some kind of purposeful direction. I think there are a lot of people doing a lot of great work, and I hope to count myself among those. I think most people, who are a part of what I guess I would call a nascent movement, are against the same things. But I’m not sure we’re for the same things, and I’m pretty sure we haven’t articulated it right if we are. What ever “it” is, it is moving in the right direction. But we need leadership in terms of publications, in terms of spokespeople, in terms of guiding principles. I don’t think we really yet have that.

CE: You don’t call yourself a chef, but instead a home cook. Why is the distinction important?

MB: Few things annoy me more than being called a chef. A chef is a person who runs a restaurant. I don’t think there is such a thing as a “home chef.” There are cooks, and cooks cook at home, and there are chefs, and chefs cook in restaurants. And there are a lot of differences between those two styles of cooking, and I think it’s important to maintain those distinctions. Aspiring to be a chef is something young people can do, they can go to school or apprentice themselves, but home cooking is really the most honorable tradition, and we should all aspire to be home cooks.

CE: What inspired you to learn to cook?

MB: I grew up in New York, and we had pretty good food at home, and we had pretty good food on the street, and then I went to college in Massachusetts and the food everywhere was so disgusting that I was forced to learn how to cook. I wouldn’t say it was inspiration, it seemed like life or death at the time. So I started to cook and I really, really liked it. And when it came time to earn a living, I tried to write about a variety of things but no one was interested. But when I started writing about food, people were interested.

CE: Do you think people are more interested in cooking now than when you started?

MB: Its hard to say, because when I started cooking, which was forty years ago, there were still pretty normal mothers, for lack of a better term, cooking dinner for their families. And there weren’t young people who were interested in cooking the way there are now. There was obviously no food television–there was Julia Child and Graham Kerr, but there was really nothing beyond that–and people didn’t say “I’m really into cooking.” On the other hand, there were probably 50 million people in the United States that regularly cooked dinner and I don’t think we’ve returned to that number yet. I think that people are really into cooking, but if you are into cooking as a hobby that’s swell, but the goal is to have most people cooking on most days, and then we’ll be approaching something that ought to be considered normal.

So the First Family’s pulled up a patch of green turf and rolled out the red carpet for that dynamic dietary duo, fruits and veggies. Finally, fresh produce has a friend in the White House (except for beets, which, sad to say, the President declines to eat.)

But where is the Beltway ballyhoo for the third crucial ally in the Axis of Eat Well? It takes three pillars to form the plant-based diet we’re supposed to adopt if we want to save ourselves and the planet: fruits, vegetables, and whole grains. With all the publicity that the Grow Your Own movement has been getting, it’s high time to shine a light on America’s Grainy Day Woman, Lorna Sass, whose last book, Whole Grains Every Day, Every Way won a well-deserved James Beard award.

Sass’s new book, Whole Grains For Busy People, may be an innocently titled paperback with a cheery, wholesome-looking cover, but don’t be fooled; the recipes inside are out to subvert the way Americans eat.

And not a minute too soon, because while “white bread” has become synonymous with “bland,” it’s really not so benign as that; eating all those processed foods high in refined flour contributes to diabetes, obesity, heart disease and cancer.

The thing is, though, we’ve all grown so accustomed to white flour (and white rice) that many of us don’t know how to bake with whole wheat flour and have no clue what to do with whole grains like rye, barley, corn meal, and spelt. We think millet is for the birds, and associate brown rice with seitan worshippers.

Sass comes to the rescue with Whole Grains For Busy People, making it easy for folks to prepare quick, simple meals built around whole grains that you can cook up in half an hour. These grains may be foreign to your pantry, but they’re the staples that have sustained mankind for centuries. And they offer a wide range of tastes and textures infinitely more interesting than their pale, over processed cousins.

As Sass explains, refined flour only became the norm after manufacturers discovered that flour would keep indefinitely if you removed the bran and germ. Unfortunately, this process also removes “50 to 90 percent of the nutrients and phytochemicals” contained in whole grains. Whose shelf life would you rather shorten–your own, or your flour’s? Whole grains are not only high in nutrients, antioxidants and fiber, but because our bodies absorb them more slowly than refined grains, your body is spared the kind of spikes in sugar and insulin that can lead to diabetes and metabolic syndrome.

Whole Grains For Busy People is, like all of Sass’s books, crammed with useful information and tips as well as easy-to-make recipes. For all those folks who’ve tried whole wheat pastas and pastries in the past and found their texture lacking, Sass highlights culinary breakthroughs such as King Arthur’s white whole wheat flour, and provides a chart rating the new whole grain pastas that constitute a dramatic improvement over the “gummy, gritty or mushy” varieties you may have encountered in the past.

Sass is especially enamored of the brown rice pastas that have been a boon to the gluten-intolerant. Adapting a technique from Cook’s Illustrated called “skillet pasta,” she offers a whole series of super quick dishes featuring brown rice pastas that can be cooked in a single skillet along with their sauce, eliminating the need to boil a pot of water and pre-cook the pasta.

Many of the recipes featured in Whole Grains For Busy People are clever whole-grain enhanced variations of familiar dishes. The quinoa-creamed spinach, for example, achieves its cream-free creaminess through the use of quinoa flakes–a product I had spotted at my local health food store but had no clue what to do with till I found Sass’s recipe.

Sass includes a number of vegetarian dishes, and even the meat, poultry and fish-based recipes play down the protein in favor of grains and veggies. Plus, Sass offers plenty of variations that make it easy to adapt her recipes to suit your own dietary preferences, whether you’re vegan, vegetarian, or “flexitarian.”

You may know that “quinoa” is pronounced “KEEN-wah,” not “Kwi-NO-ah,” but do you know what to do with it? Whole Grains For Busy People offers ten different dishes featuring quinoa, from soups and stews to a stir-fry, a paella, and even a pudding.

You know you’re supposed to be eating more whole grains. You hear it from everyone: Michael Pollan, Marion Nestle, Mark Bittman–and, of course, the USDA, which tells us to eat more whole grains even though its agricultural policies continue to encourage over processed, highly refined foods (how passive aggressive can you get?)

Whole Grains For Busy People takes obscure, fringe-y grains like quinoa and farro–along with neglected pre-agribiz staples like barley and buckwheat–and incorporates them into classic comfort foods using simple ingredients that are widely available. It’s a stealthy way to bring these whole grains back from the culinary wilderness where they’ve languished too long. Here’s to the end of white flour power, and a resurgence in fiber–whether it’s moral or dietary. We could use more of both, these days.

Cross-posted from The Green Fork.

I was so excited when I received Bryant Terry’s newest cookbook, Vegan Soul Kitchen: Fresh, Healthy and Creative African-American Cuisine.  First, because I grew up on southern delights like baked beans, corn bread, grits and coleslaw, but have been hard-pressed to find tasty recipes that don’t call for industrially canned and/or processed ingredients.  Second, the recipes in Terry’s book are vegan — which I see as an added bonus (though I’m not a vegan, I love eating that way), allowing the eater to get back to the core of what makes soul food good: Terry shows us that it’s the fresh, simple ingredients that bring the most flavor.

Vegan Soul Kitchen is first an ode to reclaiming African-American cuisine.  Collards (with orange and raisins, tried successfully over at La Vida Locavore), Gumbo Z, and Black-Eyed Pea Fritters mash up the old thinking on Caribbean, Cajun, African American and even Native American cuisines, reminding us that dishes don’t have to be heavy or greasy to be delicious.

Terry is an eco-chef, meaning that he takes note of his impact on the planet and avoids waste while cooking, reserving vegetable trimmings for stock, collard stems for his “Collard Confetti”, and squash seeds for toasting.  My favorite eco-recipes, though, are his many offerings for the humble watermelon, including salting it, which we always did at my house (his version throws in basil, too), a recipe for a Double Watermelon-Strawberry Slushee, a tantalizing Balsamic Syrup-Sweetened Watermelon Sorbet and also for Citrus and Spice Pickled Watermelon Rind, all of which I can’t wait to try this summer.

When I got my copy a few weeks ago, I was participating in Kim O’Donnel’s Eat Down the Fridge challenge on her blog A Mighty Appetite.  The goal was to eat what you have on hand, clearing out the fridge and pantry.  As I flipped through Vegan Soul Kitchen’s pages, my mouth started to water. Sure, I’d eaten a sort of boring buttered kasha with caramelized onions for lunch, which hadn’t quite filled me up, and was still hungry.  But now I was armed with inspiration — and a cabinet full of beans and grains — and I was ready to improvise.

My eyes alighted on the Johnny Blaze Cakes, as I scanned the ingredients, stone-ground cornmeal, wheat flour, baking powder, sea salt, cayenne, rice milk, jalapeno and olive oil, I realized I had every one aside from the jalapeno. No matter, some extra cayenne would do.  The recipe that I felt would compliment the cakes was the Baked BBQ Black-Eyed Peas, for which I substituted black beans (it was what I had on hand).  The result was a bold play on traditional baked beans and corn bread, which I’ve since made again with equal success.

Terry’s enthusiasm for inspiring people to eat better with easy-to-make, delicious recipes is present throughout his cookbook.  He empowers cooks by tying cooking to culture — a powerful tool for change. His recipes are more like oeuvres.  Like those from his previous book, Grub: Ideas for an Urban Organic Kitchen (written with Anna Lappe), each recipe here has an accompanying song, even a piece of art is conjured, and sometimes a story from Terry’s own life is there in the mix, too.  The effect is to show that food is more than just gas for our tank, it is instead an engaging process, an art form, something that binds us and brings us together, meanwhile giving us traditions to share.

I cant wait to try the Whole-Grain Mustard and Cornmeal Crusted Seitan next, as well as the Fried Green Tomatoes with Creamy Celeriac Sauce and the Succotash Soup with Garlicky Cornbread Croutons.  Get yourself a copy, tie on your apron, and get cookin’!

Chef Jamie Oliver was on The Leonard Lopate Show today to talk about his new book and Food Network show called Jamie at Home.  The premise of the book is to encourage home gardening, and interspersed within the tantalizing recipes are tips anyone can follow for growing tomatoes, zucchini, rhubarb, strawberries, potatoes and more.  The recipes follow the seasons, and focus on the specific ingredients you learn to grow in the pages.

During the interview, Oliver talked about some of his food policy interests, including his recent campaign to bring public awareness to the realities of factory egg farming.  His efforts, shown in the film Jamie’s Fowl Dinners, is said to have singlehandedly increased the consumption of cage-free eggs in England.  He also spoke about his next project, The Ministry of Food, based on the 1940s program in England that helped individuals be more self-sufficient at home at a time when the country was literally starving.  He says the goal is to get England in the kitchen again, focusing on really easy recipes anybody can cook.

At one point in the interview, he compared McDonald’s in America with the same chain in Britain, giving the company higher marks abroad for selling organic milk, cage-free eggs and higher grade meat.  While I have strong feelings against supporting any fast food restaurants, if only because they have had such a bad record and continue to do next to nothing in most countries, it goes to show you what happens when regulations go into effect: they are followed, and not necessarily to the detriment of McDonald’s bottom line.

Listen to the full interview here:

Photo: Matthew Armstrong