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CHAPTER 1
Vegetarian Curious:
Deborah Madison and Cooking from Your Garden
CHAPTER 2
Medicine Man:
Seamus Mullen and Food That Heals
CHAPTER 3
Citizen Raw:
Matthew Kenney and the Art of the Uncooked
CHAPTER 4
The Conscious Rancher:
Anya Fernald and the Free Range
CHAPTER 5
California Dreaming:
Jessica Koslow and the New Old School
CHAPTER 6
Endless Summer:
Guy Turland and the Surfer’s Diet
CHAPTER 7
Modern Vegan:
Jason Wrobel and the Miracle of Plants
CHAPTER 8
The Revolutionary Fermenter:
Summer Bock and Following Your Gut
CHAPTER 9
The Porch Light:
Kevin Callaghan and Seasonal Southern Fare
CHAPTER 10
The Ayurvedic:
Meredith Klein and Nourishing the Mind, Body, and Spirit
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In college, my then girlfriend, Schuyler (now my wife), and I became vegetarians. The basis for this decision was murky. More than anything, vegetarianism seemed like a healthy and ethical choice for progressively minded youth. In reality, it looked like lots and lots of grilled cheese sandwiches. When I think of that period of my life, I picture squares of white bread sizzling in an awful chipped Teflon pan—the enduring culinary image of my college years. We had some vegetables, too, stolen from the cafeteria salad bar for our weekly stir-fry. We got a wok for Christmas. Ah, the ’80s.
I look back at photos of that time. I was puffy. I have always struggled with weight issues and harbor residual trauma from the cruel teasing I received as a chubby kid. Even now, as an adult, whether I am in a slender phase or a heavier phase, I always see that chunky kid in the mirror. When my daughter Lolli began suffering from bad skin and poor digestion, I had empathy. Three months shy of my 40th birthday, I needed a health reboot, so we jointly embarked on a gluten-free diet. Together, we cut out carbs, including alcohol (for me). We ate tons of delicious salads with nuts and cheeses, broiled carrots, and steamed broccoli with butter and sea salt. We grilled salmon fillets and chicken breasts and, occasionally, free-range sirloin.
Over time, Lolli’s acne and digestive issues cleared up. The effect on me, however, was drastic. I went from 200 pounds to 160 in 6 months. There was a bounce in my step. I had so much energy that my eyes were literally popping out of my head. My career blossomed and, in general, I began making clearer decisions. Even when I returned to having a beer or two, my body seemed better able to process it. After 40 years, I had optimized my vehicle. I had found my true fork.
Our mission at Wanderlust is to help people find their true north. Through creating experiences and recipes for living, we hope to navigate people along their path to cultivating their best selves: to living happy, healthy, and inspired lives. Finding your true north is not an end unto itself, it’s a journey of outward adventure and inward self-exploration.
Food is at the center of this journey.
Every day, on average, we devote 75 minutes to eating and another 35 minutes to preparing food. We spend precious time and money shopping for what we eat. Food can make us sick and food can heal us. It brings our families and friends together in community around a common table. Yet food can divide us, pitting agribusiness against the local farmer, offering its bounty to some and leaving others in food deserts.
There is no diet or approach to food that is right for everyone. The premise of this book is to create a guide for healthy and mindful food choices that can help you feel your best—to find your true fork! These approaches to food are expressed through the stories of exceptional chefs who have navigated their own personal journeys and have chosen a life dedicated to food and its incredible power to nourish us from the inside out.
You may not be a professional chef, but you will almost certainly see parts of your own personal journey reflected in their stories. Whether you’re a yogi like Jason Wrobel or a surfer like Guy Turland, you likely relish feeling light, strong, and present. Almost all of us have suffered from allergies, digestive issues, depression, fatigue, or weight problems. Many of the great revelations around food in this book have emerged from these conditions. In her twenties, Summer Bock suffered from poor digestion. Seamus Mullen had rheumatoid arthritis. Meredith Klein had vitamin deficiencies.
Through optimizing their relationships with food, these chefs have used what they eat to enhance their lives and, in some cases, heal themselves. Along the way, they’ve transformed cooking into a glorious art form, combining flavors and ingredients like a painter with a palette.
While these chefs represent a wide variety of food approaches, from Ayurveda to raw, vegetarian to paleo, over the course of compiling this book, some common themes emerged.
•Eat more plants and fewer things with labels.
•Know where your food comes from.
•Eat and cook seasonally.
•Gradualism and flexibility are favored over extreme dietary shifts.
•Those who choose to eat meat treat it as a delicacy to be consumed in moderation.
•Listen to your body and eat what makes you feel good.
There will be rigorous vegans who will ethically oppose any consumption of animals and animal products. This is a view derived from a place of empathy and environmental concern that should be respected. At the same time, strict dogmatism that pits vegans against the rest of the world is not always a productive path to the outcome we all want: a world where food is grown sustainably, organic farms and local grocers flourish, and fruits and vegetables are widely accessible, resulting in a decline in food-related diseases.
Instead, we strive to look at the greater picture, the sum of our choices. The question could be asked, “Is eating genetically modified broccoli grown with pesticides, harvested by underpaid migrant workers, and shipped across the country to a distribution center and back again to a grocery store more ethical than eating a weekly piece of locally raised free-range meat bought at the farmers’ market?”
I don’t know the answer, but there are certainly shades of gray. It may be more productive to see food choices along an ethical continuum, with a consensus that the starting point is getting as many people as possible to see that food is a conscious choice.
You might not start out making vegan ginger-sesame foam like Matthew Kenney. And that’s okay. Once you begin to think consciously about what you eat instead of just eating indiscriminately, your journey begins. The farmer-philosopher Joel Salatin once said at a Wanderlust festival, “The human condition is simply the aggregate of billions of tiny decisions.” It is in the sum of little conscious choices, like adding a basil plant to your windowsill, that we will create a healthier, more verdurous planet.
Once upon a time, to make yourself feel great and save the planet, you needed to deprive yourself of deliciousness and culinary sophistication. But that’s simply not the case with our modern food system. The amazing chefs in this book let you have your cake and eat it, too. Food can be flavorful, healthful, and sustainable—all at once. You will make salads with hazelnuts and persimmons, Anchovy-Walnut Chimichurri, Kimchi Dumplings, Almond Flour Cake, Savory Cauliflower Waffles, and Masa Broccolini Funfetti. (You’ll have to read the book to find out what that last one is!)
Their recipes show us that treating food as a celebration instead of a chore makes all the difference. It should be a joy to eat! Discovery and experimentation and refinement are all part of that process.
And in the awesome, messy flow of creation, a moment will stop you and something will click into place. Among the chopped shallots and the grated Parmigiano-Reggiano, you will get a brief glimpse of your best self—your true fork! Savor it. But not for too long. You don’t want to overcook the soba noodles.
Bon appétit!
After cooking with Alice Waters at Chez Panisse in the late 1970s, Deborah opened Greens, an acclaimed vegetarian restaurant borne out of the San Francisco Zen Center, in 1979. She launched a Slow Food chapter in Santa Fe, near where she now lives, and is the former manager of the Santa Fe Farmers Market. Her many accolades include awards from the James Beard Foundation and the International Association of Culinary Professionals.
And through it all, she’s remained impossibly grounded. Take the way she describes what she grows in her garden. What begins as a simple list quickly escalates into a catalog that mirrors the fresh produce section at your local health food store, with a side of earnest commentary: spinach, chard, okra, kale, collards, squash, turnips (“my husband’s a Southerner, so I plant turnip greens for him”), asparagus, artichokes, Jerusalem artichokes, heirloom tomatoes (up to 18 different varieties at one point, now down to 5: “that’s really enough”), rhubarb, and peas. That’s just a sampling.
And then there are the herbs. She grows lovage, chervil, cilantro (“hard to grow because it bolts fast”), tarragon, oregano, basil, sage, rosemary, salad burnet, thyme, sorrel, parsley, and chives. Many gardeners will grumble and tell you that mint has taken over their gardens, springing up anywhere there’s space and a trickle of water. But Deborah will tell you with a laugh, “I have a hard time growing mint!” Summer is her favorite time to experiment. “This year I planted corn and sorghum. I always like to try something I’ve never done before,” she says. Past experiments include growing cumin, caraway, and anise. What she doesn’t grow herself, she happily picks up at her local farmers’ market. “It always seems like magic.”
So while the Deborah Madison of today still loves her vegetables, another factor has influenced what she eats and cooks lately: Her husband, Patrick, was diagnosed with cancer. In all her years of cooking, never before has it been so clearly in the name of nourishment. “I’m just trying to give him strength,” she says. It has been the ultimate lesson in listening to what the body wants, and not being too rigid in our food rules.
“Everything has changed since my husband has had cancer,” she says. He used to steer clear of sauces; now he loves them (try the tomato sauce). He really likes black cod, so now she makes that once a week. When a friend gave her a bunch of chicken broth, they tried the broth for nutrition’s sake, even though Patrick isn’t a chicken fan.
“Everyone has to figure out for themselves what works, and not be afraid to see that change,” she says. “Changes happen in life. So you look to somebody for inspiration and to pep up your own cooking.”
You can’t talk about the origins of the farm-to-table movement and not talk about Deborah Madison. When she opened Greens Restaurant in San Francisco in 1979, it had one of the very first farm-driven menus in the United States. Greens is also considered one of the first, if not the first, high-end vegetarian restaurants in the country. As the movement to cook with local, seasonal foods has gone mainstream, Deborah still adheres to many of the same principles as those early days. “Our tastes really come alive when we eat seasonally,” she says. And depending on where you live, eating seasonally might mean eating a lot of sweet potatoes in the winter, or asparagus in the spring, or tomatoes in the summer. But don’t think of that as limiting, Deborah says. “Repetition is really okay!” Because that’s how you get the best ingredients, which yield the best dishes. “That’s the prime stuff,” says Deborah.
DEBORAH MADISON
PANTRY STAPLES
Always olive oil and lots of different vinegars. Sea salts. Things I pick up from farmers’ markets when I travel, like apple jelly from Vermont and wild mushroom salt from Maine. I like my cupboard to be simple.
FOREVER MEAL
Avocados. They don’t even grow here! I love them. I taught a class in Goleta, California, and they set a table in the avocado orchard. Just lovely.
FOOD RITUAL
If I go to the farmers’ market and buy a bunch of beets, immediately I wash them off and steam them; then they’re ready to use. Lettuce is the same. I wash it, dry it really well, and keep it in a towel in a bag in the refrigerator. Then I know we’ll have salad. Unless you set aside the time to pick it and wash it, it just won’t happen. I want to eat a good salad. I try to do things that make that happen.
HEALTHY-EATING TIP
You cannot be too strict about things. You have no idea what’s going to change.
RECIPES BY DEBORAH MADISON
This is the kind of dish that can go in any number of directions. The roasted Brussels sprouts with the shallots are delicious on their own, but they can take other additions, such as pistachios or pine nuts, cheeses from a good blue to ricotta salata to goat cheese, or roasted red peppers. Alternatively, you can add the rice and vinaigrette to make a heartier dish that might just work as a main for 2 or 3 people or a side dish for more. Either way, it’s a handsome dish. Start with the rice, then go on to the Brussels sprouts, and finally make the vinaigrette while they’re roasting. Choose the smallest sprouts—they’re the sweetest. SERVES 2 TO 4
½ cup black rice
Sea salt
1½ cups water
14 ounces small (about the size of a hazelnut) Brussels sprouts
5 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, divided
1 very large shallot, cut lengthwise into ½"-wide slices
¼ teaspoon caraway seeds or 1 heaping teaspoon fresh or dried oregano
1 tablespoon large capers, rinsed and squeezed dry
Finely grated zest of 1 Eureka lemon (not a Meyer—you’ll want the acid)
1 tablespoon freshly squeezed lemon juice, plus more to finish
1 clove garlic, minced or pounded until creamy
1 heaping teaspoon prepared mustard
Rinse the rice in a fine-mesh sieve under cold running water until the water runs clear. Put the rice in a small pot with a few pinches of salt and the water. Bring to a boil, then lower the heat and simmer, covered, until the rice is tender but still a bit chewy, about 35 minutes. This may be enough water exactly, but if there’s excess, pour it off. If it’s not enough and the rice isn’t yet done, add a few tablespoons more and cook for 5 minutes longer.
Preheat the oven to 400°F.
Slice the smaller Brussels sprouts in half lengthwise. Any larger ones should be sliced into thirds. Rinse well, drain, then put in a bowl and toss with 2 tablespoons of the oil, the shallot, caraway seeds or oregano, capers, and a few pinches of salt. Spread the vegetables on a baking sheet, turning the Brussels sprouts so that the cut sides are facing down; this will help them brown evenly. Roast for 12 minutes, turn the vegetables with a wide spatula, then roast for another 10 minutes. (The vegetables are delicious just like this, so if you want a simple meal, you can stop right here and serve them hot and juicy.)
In a bowl, combine the lemon zest, lemon juice, garlic, mustard, and ¼ teaspoon salt.
Whisk in the remaining 3 tablespoons oil. It’s okay if the vinaigrette is on the tart side.
When the Brussels sprouts are done roasting, transfer them to a serving bowl and fold in the cooked rice and the vinaigrette. Taste and add additional lemon juice, if desired.
I think of cauliflower as a good fall and winter vegetable, in part because that’s when I want the oven on, as opposed to in the summer, and roasting is a good way to bring out the flavor of this mild vegetable. Since cauliflower can be rather bland, I tend to pair it with other elements that are more zingy. Here it’s a tomato sauce seasoned with capers, honey, and a bit of cinnamon, plus a garnish of pungent, salty feta cheese and a shower of parsley for its clean flavor and lively color. SERVES 4
6 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, divided
½ yellow onion, finely diced
1 teaspoon dried oregano
¼ teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 can (15 ounces) pureed tomatoes
2 teaspoons honey
1 heaping tablespoon salt-packed capers, rinsed
Sea salt
Freshly ground black pepper
1 large head cauliflower (about 1½ pounds)
Chunk of feta cheese
Chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley
Start by making the tomato sauce: Warm 3 tablespoons of the oil in a small saucepan. Add the onion and cook over medium heat, stirring occasionally, until softened, about 10 minutes, adding the oregano and cinnamon after the first few minutes. When the onion is soft, add the tomatoes, honey, and capers and simmer for 20 minutes. Season with salt and pepper to taste.
Preheat the oven to 400°F.
Cut the cauliflower into small florets, dice the core, and combine the two in a bowl. Toss with the remaining 3 tablespoons oil and a few pinches of salt. Spread the cauliflower on a baking sheet and roast for 10 minutes. Turn using a wide spatula and roast for 15 minutes, or longer if needed, until golden brown and tender.
Spoon the tomato sauce in the center of a warm serving platter or divide among 4 plates. Place the roasted cauliflower over the sauce, then crumble the cheese and scatter the parsley over the top. Serve warm.
I always have a lot of arugula in my yard because it self-sows like crazy. It’s hot and spicy and stands up well to the robust einkorn spaghetti and the slowly cooked onions. Depending on how much arugula you add and whether you let it cook down or not, this dish can end up being something of a cross between a pasta salad and a regular hot pasta dish.
SERVES 4 TO 6