On Vegetables
“Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.”
This is how American Food Writer Michael Pollan sums up everything he has learned about food and health, and it is difficult to disagree with him.
Cooking with vegetables is easy and rewarding. What I usually end up with is something simple that tastes good.
Making gourmet food with veggies only, that I cannot do. Enter Jeremy Fox.
Jeremy Fox made his name at the Michelin-starred restaurant Ubuntu in Napa Valley, California. On Vegetables is his first book and just like the restaurant during its days, the book is focused on elevated vegetarian cooking.
In the kitchen of Jeremy Fox, vegetables are approached with the same attention and appreciation as fish and meat. This is not a completely new idea in the cooking world yet still quite rare.
While the recipes of the book are designed for the home cook, methods and ingredient combinations are high above my everyday soups and roasts.
Fox begins with a clarifying statement: “Well for starters, I am not a vegetarian”, and continues:
“This is not a book about vegetarians. It is a book about vegetables. Or to be more specific, plants. In much of the world, there is often a mentality of either liking meat or vegetables.
I still eat steak. I cook pig trotters on a regular basis. I obsess over the many things you can do with the head of a humanely raised hog. But I also believe that a carrot deserves the same attention. Yes you can sprinkle salt over a ripe avocado and it will taste wonderful. But what else can you do? Plants, I dare say, deserve you full attention.”