Acclaimed chef Deborah Madison on her new food memoir
Deborah Madison put vegetarian gourmet cooking on the map—and yet she’s not a vegetarian. She learned to cook at the San Francisco Zen Center and the restaurant Chez Panisse, and then co-founded Greens Restaurant in San Francisco in 1979. She’s a chef and is author of over a dozen books on food and cooking; her latest is a memoir called, An Onion in My Pocket: My Life with Vegetables.
Show Notes:
2’42 Deborah Madison’s path into food
3’37 connection to Zen and the culture and food of Japan
5’09 influence of Japanese food on her own cooking
6’26 “beggars can’t be choosers” — the tradition of begging for food in Buddhist tradition
7’49 why do so many people have dietary restrictions these days, anyway?
9’21 the late ’60s and early ’70s as a time of incredible creativity in the development of vegetarian food
10’46 creating recipes on the basis of the smell of the ingredients
14’28 discovering the difference between good, fresh food and tasteless food–you can’t tell by looking
16’05 eating local and seasonal food
17’27 not using “meat substitutes” but being inspired by meat-based recipes
19’06 gourmet vegetarian cooking — in the early days vegetarian cooking was not very good, and she wanted to change that
20’17 title of the book — yes she really carried around an onion in her pocket
22’19 regenerative agriculture and her work with the Southwest Grassfed Livestock Alliance
23’06 we’re a very meat-based country
24’18 getting people to buy larger quantities of meat from ranchers
26’32 eating regeneratively produced meat
27’08 a true omnivore (but is a little tired of daikon)
27’58 the availability of so many new foods in the last 50 years
29’38 what she eats in the winter
30’59 why she doesn’t like the word “vegetarian”
32’25 prejudice in the food world against vegetarians
34’16 the importance of kindness and caring and sharing food
35’26 the chapter on nourishment—in the broadest sense
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