Mollie Says...

I just discovered Mollie Katzen On-line. Oh, man, am I in heaven.

Back in 1990 - 1991, during my first year of grad school at Penn State, I discovered the original Moosewood cookbooks -- Moosewood and The Enchanted Broccoli Forest. These were the cookbooks Mollie Katzen wrote before she left the Moosewood Collective, back in the 1970s.

My friend Georgy introduced me to these books. She had just moved from LA and knew a thing or two about vegetarian cooking. I had never owned a vegetarian cookbook before, so these seemed very exotic to me. And the books were beautiful -- hand-lettered and illustrated, and full of information about unusual vegetables and other ingredients. They even had directions for how to make things like egg rolls (which I did, once). Anyway, we read them cover to cover. And I can't tell you how many times during that year one or the other of us started a sentence with, "Well, Mollie says..."

Now I own lots of vegetarian cookbooks, and I know that the recipes in these two are not particularly representative of the way most vegetarians eat today. Lots and lots of cheese and cream... of course, lots of veggies too, but way higher fat dishes than you find in most of the new vegetarian cookbooks. There are updated versions of both these cookbooks, but I have the old ones.

So I was excited to find Mollie Katzen On-line. She has a recipe archive there and a bunch of other stuff, too.

I have eaten at the Moosewood Restaurant in Ithaca, New York, twice. And I also have some of the other Moosewood cookbooks that were written by the collective after Mollie Katzen left. I use those more than the original cookbooks, now, but still those first two are old favorites.