Mollie Katzen.
Where do I start.
When I was 20 years old and coming up for air from a rough, rough adolescence and really beginning to think about how to take care of myself, the very first cookbook I bought was Moosewood Restaurant Low-Fat Favorites. I believe I bought it because I was at a bookstore, in the cookbook section, for some reason vocalizing that I didn't know where to begin as a newly-minted vegetarian, and a young woman who was there with her mom buying her books her about-to-begin stint at The Culinary Institute of America just reached over, pulled it off the shelf and said "I've been a vegetarian my whole life, you want the Moosewood books". She was totally right. I also remember being absolutely shocked to realize in that moment that a person could go to trade school. And then I thought DAMMIT ALL TO HELL WHY DIDN'T ANYONE TELL ME THAT.
(Really I probably ought to have gone to Mount Holyoke as my high school English teacher rather enigmatically suggested I do, and studied English, and become a person who writes things. Why didn't I do that? Oh well.)
Anyway.
Katzen.
Mollie Katzen was a co-founder of the Moosewood Restaurant the author of a string of cookbooks geared towards a whole foods, plant-based diet, which is what I have been striving to eat for the last decade with varying degrees of success. I grew up eating possibly the worst mix of the Standard American Diet (SAD) at my dad's house (tons of meat, fluffy, buttery potatoes, snack foods, ice cream, soda...the whole nine yards) and the misguided "fat is bad" diet of the 1990s at my mom's house: margarine (hydrogenated, of course), lots of pasta, and highly processed fat-free foods. I don't mean to insult my parents, or to be ungrateful...they were busy, working people with picky children to feed and they were feeding us with the best knowledge they had at the time. Unfortunately, both the SAD and the Fat Free! craze are/were terrible.
There is a fair bit of controversy in the food-obsessed world right now that can basically be summed up as this: either a)saturated fats and red meat are bad or b)carbohydrates in the form of grain, legume and some tuber foods are bad. I won't dredge any of that up here, but fortunately ABSOLUTELY EVERYONE* agrees at this point that simple sugars and processed grains are the Antichrist, and a whole foods diet is the only way to go for long-term health. "Whole foods" means the stuff that you could quite easily go find living or growing outside: vegetables, fruits, grains, beans, cows, pigs, chickens, that kind of thing. It means not ingesting stuff that requires input from a person with an advanced degree in a hard science, or multiple-step processes in windowless factories involving large stainless steel vats and Latin names. It's really pretty simple, except for the whole Grains and Legumes v. LARD MEAT thing. (For the record I'm pretty sure Mollie Katzen is not on Team Lard Meat.)
I'm not a vegetarian anymore, having come around (and around and around) to something like "vegetable foods, plus sustainable fish and probably some poultry, no dairy", but I spent my 20s steeping myself in the whole foods, vegetarian food culture, much of my education happening at the figurative knee of Ms. Katzen. It was very much a beginner's journey. While my siblings and I were treated to a few cooking classes and encouraged to experiment in the kitchen (thanks, Mom!) I had no idea, at 20, how to cook dried beans. I suddenly found myself Not Eating Meat, scrambling to feed myself, and utterly at a loss. An early experiment in the college apartment-style housing had me tossing dried black beans in a pot and being dumbfounded when 20 minutes later they were still hard as rocks. It was the Moosewood book that corrected my folly, and, truly, taught me how to eat. I've strayed far, very far, from the mark over the years (both Coca Cola and potato chips are vegan, after all), I've often taken terrible care of my body, but all the while knowing that when I'm ready, I know exactly what I'm supposed to be doing.
And, thanks in large part to Mollie Katzen and the Moosewood Collective, despite my own issues with feeding myself right, I know how to feed my kids.
Big Kid is both a picky eater and an affirmed vegetarian. Will. Not. Eat. Animals. My husband is a firm vegetarian, it's how we raised her, and, for now, it's how she feels, so I've struggled with keeping the shitty vegetarian convenience foods out, and keeping fruits and vegetables front and center. Even after everything I've learned, I struggle to keep my family table in line with what I know to be best, not with how I grew up eating. Just because the frozen, boxed chikkin nuggets are meat-free doesn't mean they're not total crap.
I'm not sure why I hadn't thought of this earlier, but recently it occurred to me that the best way to give my kids a hand up with good eating habits is to have them cook family meals.
Enter the Katzen:
Mollie has written a series of cooking books for children: Pretend Soup, Salad People for preschoolers and up, and Honest Pretzels for ages 8 and up. They are brilliant.
I have investigated a number of cookbooks for children since realizing that my girls need, as they become old enough, to take a meaningful role in the household's eating, and often they are introductory lessons in SAD, having children don aprons and hats (cute!) to turn processed ingredients into nutritionally void garbage foods (less cute).
Katzen, on the other hand, has children cooking from scratch using real food ingredients to make meals and snacks that most parents would totally be stoked on them eating. There are hand-drawn, step-by-step pictorial instructions for each recipe that my five year-old can "read" with very little help from me. She can also tell what each recipe is, more or less, which lets her peruse and decide on her own what she wants to try her hand at.
Our first foray to the market (yes, the girls will be menu planning, budgeting and marketing with me) we brought home ingredients for the first three recipes she wanted to make for HER dinner nights (Saturday and Sunday): pizza, Zucchini Moons, and Lemon Lime Soda.
I'm a bit ashamed to admit I hadn't cooked with my girl at all before this (it's been hard for me to trust her and be patient with the process) but damned if she didn't dive right in and nail it her first time out.
The following night she wanted to make Surprise Oatmeal and (not so surprising) Lemon Lime Soda again.
She was braver than she ever has been about trying the zucchini (one whole moon down the hatch!), didn't pick too many of the vegetables that she chose to put on the pizza off, and took several large bites of her nut-enriched oatmeal (we went with walnuts instead of sunflower seeds in the oatmeal, and steel cut instead of rolled oats). This was a Good Thing (did I mention that my girl is picky?). I'm incredibly grateful to have the Katzen books for her; I'm not willing to compromise on the whole foods aspect of our eating at home (although we're not super rigid, especially when it comes to social situations; we try not to make food a huge "thing"), but I want her to have some self-determination, and to have fun. Cooking is a great delight, after all.
It's amazing how much of a difference it has already made for her to be a driver in the process of meal making. She's so proud of HER food, of HER meal...what SHE did for her family. I'm thrilled to see how this evolves for her. I'm comforted by the knowledge that I will send her out into the world with a totally solid foundation in meal planning and cooking, which are absolutely essential life skills. Does it seem so far fetched that the food-related American health crises we hear so much about may be lessened if we all knew a bit better how to cook? I don't mean heat up, I mean: cook.
We're on the right road. The next step is to get a copy of Get Cooking for my poor, dear Mr. Terrible, who is about as cooking illiterate as they come.
After eight years of marriage in which he managed to still not learn to cook, he is now on the hook for Friday night dinners.
Baby's still free to just eat.
*Except for soft drink and junk food producers. I'm guessing they will be cleaving intensely to the "eat responsibly" line in the coming years, suggesting that their foods can be enjoyed as an occasional treat in an otherwise healthy diet, never mind that their bottom line entirely depends on people not eating responsibly.
