Mollie Katzen Profile
Named one of the "Five Women Who Changed the Way We Eat" by Health Magazine (June 1999), Mollie Katzen's career has been illustrious and enduring. From her debut as a co-founder of Ithaca, New York's Moosewood Restaurant and author of The Moosewood Cookbook, which with over 4 million copies in print is one of the 10 best-selling cookbooks of all time, Mollie is widely credited with moving healthful cooking from the fringes of American society onto mainstream dinner tables.

Mollie followed up The Moosewood Cookbook with more wildly successful tomes on vegetarian cooking The Enchanted Broccoli Forest, Still Life with Menu Cookbook, and Vegetable Heaven. In addition to being an excellent cook, she is a talented artist who provides beautiful watercolor illustrations and hand lettering for many of her books. Vegetable Heaven, her latest effort was the winner of the "Best Vegetarian Cookbook of the Year" in 1999 by the International Cookbook review and was a finalist for the Julia Child award.

Not content to change the eating habits of adult, Mollie also authored two delightful cookbooks for children: Pretend Soup and Other Real Recipes, geared toward pre-schoolers and Honest Pretzels and 64 Other Amazing Recipes for Cooks Ages 8 & Up. With colorful step-by-step illustrations, kids can now fix wholesome vegetarian favorites while learning a host of skills that will come in handy throughout their lives. Both children's books have won awards and Honest Pretzels was recently honored by its selection as an American Library Association Notable Book. Mollie is also a columnist for Children's Television Workshop On-Line and for Sesame Street Parents Magazine.

Aside from her writing career, since 1996 Mollie has been the star of the Mollie Katzen Cooking Show, which has been appearing on public television stations nationwide. The shows are based largely on recipes from her classic books The Moosewood Cookbook and The Enchanted Broccoli Forest, both which have been revised by Mollie and the original publisher to reflect today's lighter, healthier ways of eating.

As if all that weren't enough, Mollie truly is further her impact on the way the world eats by serving as a charter member of the Harvard School of Public Health Nutrition Roundtable. She is also a judge for both the James Beard Cookbook Awards and the Julia Child/IACP Awards of Excellence.

Cheri Sicard: Thanks for talking with us today Mollie.
Mollie Katzen: Thanks for inviting me.

Cheri Sicard: There are so many things we want to ask you. Since you are most known as being an author of vegetarian cookbooks, let's start with, how long have you been a vegetarian and was your family vegetarian growing up?
Mollie Katzen: No, my family was not vegetarian growing up, but I came from a Jewish family that was, although not strictly Kosher, had a lot of awareness when it came to eating meat. What that taught me was that it's not bad or wrong to eat meat. But it's very important that if you are eating meat to eat it with compassionate awareness and with an eye towards its cleanliness in a food safety kind of mind.

Cheri Sicard: That's a great attitude.
Mollie Katzen: That is my attitude. I actually am not a strict vegetarian. I eat vegetarian food, that's the mainstay of my diet. That IS my diet. But, I don't believe that eating meat is wrong at all. If someone serves me meat I will eat it. What is a concern of mine, stemming from my upbringing and now it's very big in the news, is food safety and food cleanliness. Organic, when possible in a balanced diet, is also a big concern.

"What got me really serious about promoting organic is learning that very bad, very harmful pesticides that have for decades been banned in this country and were legal in countries like Mexico and possibly South America, were starting to be imported into this country again because the trade barriers came down. And we didn't even have a right to know."

Cheri Sicard: Actually, the subject of organic food was one of the questions I had prepared for you.
Mollie Katzen: Oh goodie! That's my favorite subject these days.

Cheri Sicard: Let's talk about it. How imp[ortant is eating organic foods?
Mollie Katzen: It's extremely important. At this point I'm uncomfortable eating things - fruits and vegetables that are not organic. I will eat them if I'm hungry. I travel quite a bit for my work and I don't have that option as much as I'd like, but it has become so important. I've done very few bandwagons ever. I've had a long career of writing about food and my food is always categorized as healthy or niche. That's fine, although I would like to go mainstream. But in the course of that, even though I have written some of the most basic vegetarian cookbooks, I have never been on a bandwagon about it. But with all the organics legislation that's being discussed, with the free trade, the loosening up of standards around pesticides, I have become very opinionated about organics. I am becoming more of an activist about it.

Cheri Sicard: And that was your inspiration, a loosening of the standards?
Mollie Katzen: My inspiration originally was the free trade agreement. I do keep up on politics. I was following that very closely about twelve years ago when the big NAFTA thing was passed. There was a lot of discussion about that among chefs and food writers. The Chef's Collaborative, which is a big national group, found ourselves discussing it at meetings. It was making everybody more political. What was coming up was the loosening of all sorts of regulations surrounding the use of chemicals in order to take out what they call unfair competition in the world of food trade from one country to the next.

So, if we are importing something from Chile or something from Mexico, even something down from Canada where we get a lot of canola oil, we are advertising that this is pesticide free and it isn't necessarily so. But to label it otherwise is considered an unfair trade practice.

Cheri Sicard: Really?
Mollie Katzen: Oh yeah. As a result of this free trade, the leveling of the economic playing field became the most driving regulating force to the corporations and not the safety of the food and not the cleanliness of the food. It's all about trade and it's all about equal opportunity for the food corporations to make a profit. So, food safety and consumer concerns went out the window because it is so NOT about the consumer anymore.

Cheri Sicard: Those are important things for people to be aware of.
Mollie Katzen: Right. So, what got me really serious about promoting organic is learning that very bad, very harmful pesticides that have for decades been banned in this country and were legal in countries like Mexico and possibly South America, were starting to be imported into this country again because the trade barriers came down. And we didn't even have a right to know. So that any bunch of broccoli that you would buy that didn't say where it came from could well be from another country who cares which isn't bad in and of itself. But it could also be laced with DDT, which is illegal in this country, and because they didn't want to make this trade practice 'unfair,' they didn't have to tell us. With that in mind, I said 'oh great, who knows what we are eating unless it's organic?'

Then the next question was, if it's organic, what does that even mean? What can you rely upon it to be or not be if the label says its organic? That's the battle that's going on now. The USDA has been trying to pass standards of what it even means to have organic on there. I have become an activist about that because they are trying to include all sorts of things like radioactive sludge and bio-engineered products. So the first thing is to make sure that there is an organic standard to begin with. The second thing is what is it? I care very much about that. I suspect very strongly that I'm not alone. I also suspect stongly that pesticides are responsible for people getting a lot of cancer and things like that. Yes, I am going to be out there more as an organic proponent.

Cheri Sicard: That's great. Do you have any resources where people can find more information?
Mollie Katzen: A really good place for that is http://www.purefood.org.

Cheri Sicard: Great, we'll include the URL so our readers can go there for more information.
Mollie Katzen: Great, I would love to send people there.

Cheri Sicard: Your cooking style has really evolved a lot from the early days of The New Moosewood Cookbook
Mollie Katzen: You noticed! I'd love to talk about that.

I started out writing recipes when I was teen. My earliest recipes were for all for desserts. When I started working on what became The Moosewood Cookbook, I really had several different purposes in mind. One of them was a little restaurant that I was a co-owner of. It's still there actually, but I don't own it anymore, I haven't for years. It's in Ithica, New York. We were trying to standardized the cooking in that restaurant because there was no standardized cooking there. I was the only person of the original staff who had ever cooked in a restaurant. I was trying to help to evolve it from sort of homestyle cooking to homestyle restaurant cooking and I needed to get some standardized recipes going. I was also doing recipes for the customers who were part of our community. And, I was also writing them down for my friends and my friends' mothers. When they went home to visit their mothers, the mothers didn't know what the hell to cook for their hippie kids. They were very concerned that they served them something nutritious and substantial.

"My cooking has done a 180 degree turn from the complicated-is-better to the simpler-is-better. I can't take complete credit for that. The produce is better. If it's tastes so good alone, you have to do very little to it to make it taste good."

I loaded my early recipes with a lot of dairy products. It was kind of a comfort food vegetarian cuisine --a lot of cheese and a lot of eggs, not a lot of seasonings. It was a lot of councesy stuff. Also at that time there wasn't as much fresh produce available as there is now. Even though I have always, of course, had a lot of vegetables in my cooking, my cooking wasn't so much about vegetables. Vegetables were an ingredient. The seasoning wasn't as intense. Sometimes the ingredient list was extremely long. I had a notion that it showed off the cleverness and the knowledge of the cook: the more ingredients, the better, the more knowledgeable and clever the cookbook would seem. It was a show-offy way of cooking. It made things really complicated, to go through your cupboards and put in as much as you could. It was very fashionable among my hippie friends.

Time was not an issue at all in the early days. The trend now is that vegetables are much more featured, fruit is much more featured. Better and bigger varieties of produce are available now more of the time.

My cooking has done a 180 degree turn from the complicated-is-better to the simpler-is-better. I can't take complete credit for that. The produce is better. If it's tastes so good alone, you have to do very little to it to make it taste good.

Now my cooking is much simpler, much more focused on seasoning, and texture, and stove top cooking rather than putting something in the oven like a casserole and cutting it into squares. There's a lot more fresh preparation, very short, last-minute stove top to the table type of dishes.

Cheri Sicard: I have several of your books and it's great to have all the varieties available.
Mollie Katzen: Do you have Vegetable Heaven? That represents my most current style. That's basically how my cooking has changed. Also I went through a phase, but I never got deeply into the low fat thing. I got slightly into it in that some of my early recipes really had way too much and they were greasier than they needed to be.

I also went through a phase, but I never got deeply into the low fat thing. I got slightly into it in that some of my early recipes really had way too much and they were greasier than they needed to be... I'm going to be very rude because I don't know if you did this or not, but I'm going to be outspoken and say I don't like a numerical nutritional analysis at the end of a recipe. I feel that that's a fad and I think a lot of people don't really know how to interpret it.

Cheri Sicard: That's a good point. And you're not rude. We only give nutritional breakdowns in our diabetic recipes.
Mollie Katzen: Well, that is absolutely right. Anyone with a medical concern, yes. Everybody else needs to just calm down and move away from it. Get some therapy and go out and feed the hungry. Stop counting your little grams of this and that. If you're a normal weight person without a heart condition, without diabetes, just calm down.

Cheri Sicard: (laughing) Well, I live in Los Angles. It's the law here to count fat grams. But I couldn't agree more.
Mollie Katzen: You know, I have had very little flack for not getting on that bandwagon. I could count on one hand the number of people who have asked me to do it. Isn't that interesting? You see people don't know how to interpret those numbers. It changes from day to day for a given person, depending on your level of activity. The other thing that I'm so against now, and I will tell you why -- I told you would need to tape this. I'm against counting total fat. I think it's a huge uninformed fad.

"Anyone with a medical concern, should count fat grams. Everybody else needs to just calm down and move away from it. Get some therapy and go out and feed the hungry. Stop counting your little grams of this and that. If you're a normal weight person without a heart condition, without diabetes, just calm down."

Cheri Sicard: Oh sure, because there's such a difference between...
Mollie Katzen: There are qualities of fat and it implies that fat is bad. Fat is not bad, it is critically important to your health. Counting total calories from fat is so dangerous. I don't like to see people counting that. I am backed up by the Harvard School of Public Health on this, the Nutrition Department. I am on their nutrition roundtable committee. Which means that as a lay person I am privy to their findings when they are first presented and I am privy to the meetings where the findings are presented and where they are explained. They are hoping that people like me, who have a very large audience of very ordinary people who want to be healthier, can help translate it into some language that ordinary people can translate use. Straight from them, it's do not count total fat! Make sure you have some good fats in your diet every day. Try to stay away from the trans fats. A little bit of saturated fat is not going to kill you. Just balance your diet and keep moving, keep active. But don't count total fat.

Cheri Sicard: That's really great advice.
Mollie Katzen: So, I got a little bit more into a low fat realm just because I thought my recipes were over the top in some cases, but I don't do low-fat stuff. I do offer, once in a while, a fat free this or that, like a dressing. Some people really do need it, people with heart conditions who follow the Ornish diet need that. But I try to play it down.

Cheri Sicard: Changing subjects, what's your favorite ingredient to cook with?
Mollie Katzen: Single ingredient? Well, fresh vegetables or hand me a basket of fruit that you just got from the farmer's market and I'll hand it back to you as a plate of just sliced fruit, very unadorned.

Cheri Sicard: Do you have a favorite kitchen tool that you can't live without?
Mollie Katzen: A little knife. My sharp knife. I've got to have a sharp knife.

Cheri Sicard: How about an extra gadget that you may not need, but you sure like it a lot?
Mollie Katzen: I use my good grip vegetable peeler constantly. I use it for shaving cheese. I also eat a lot of carrots and I shave broccoli with it. I just love my good grip vegetable peeler.

Cheri Sicard: A lot of people have a 'Fear of Tofu.' Can you put this fear to rest? What's a good introduction to this wonderful ingredient?
Mollie Katzen: I just came from visiting my parents who are pretty conservative eaters. My father wanted tofu lessons, it was so cute. I gave him a tofu lesson and it was a big success. I think most people's issue with tofu is the texture. There is no flavor to tofu, so it will absorb any flavor that it's marinated in or it comes in contact with. You are limited to what you can do with the texture.

Cheri Sicard: I think freezing it changes the texture.
Mollie Katzen: Freezing it can make it chewy. The other thing I do is I boil it. I cut it into the size I want and I boil it in water for a good ten minutes and drain it. It pulls some of the water out of the tofu and it consolidates the proteins.

Cheri Sicard: That's a good tip.
Mollie Katzen: After I cut it into the size I want and boil it up and drain it, then I sauté it in a very hot pan of very hot oil and it gives it a nice texture. I sauté it nice and long on each side of the piece. Throw some onions in the pan while you're sautéing it, salt and pepper and it's very nice that way.

Cheri Sicard: Do you have any other advice for cooks who might want to transform traditional favorites that might have meat into a vegetarian dish?
Mollie Katzen: If you prepare tofu in the way that I've just described, where you get a firm kind of tofu, cut it into the pieces you want, boil it and then sauté it, you've got the basis of substituting it for any meat, chicken or even beef dish. Again, I use the wok, I didn't say that before, I use the wok a lot.

For people who eat meat, I also recommend the wok because it helps if you're cooking a stir fry and adding some meat to it, to keep the proportion of meat and vegetables nice and balanced, instead of the hunk of meat being too dominant. That was the way of cooking a basic stir fry where you put the sautéing vegetables over high heat quickly and then add a little bit of protein, maybe an equal amount of protein and some sauce. That kind of cooking you can just basically substitute the tofu for the meat anytime.

Cheri Sicard: Great. Mollie, what's next for you?
Mollie Katzen: I am very focused on cooking with children. I have two children's cookbooks out now, very much geared towards the children themselves using the books, geared toward their reading leves. Cooking with children is a big thing for me and I'm developing a children's show for television about food. Not just a cooking show, you know I cook on TV now, but it wouldn't just be me cooking the way I do for adults. It would be adventures in food for kids. We are going to animate some of the characters. We are going to have puppets, we're going to have music and we're going to have a garden. I have production partners and some animation partners. We are so excited about it. That's my big thing.

Cheri Sicard: When might we see this?
Mollie Katzen: Oh gosh, I don't know. I'm hoping we will be fixing the show up and making it about a year from now. The other thing that's my big focus is start-of-the-day eating. I'm writing a breakfast book with Hyperion Publishing -- I have two publishers. I'm writing a very comprehensive breakfast book. I'm getting input from the nutrition department at Harvard about glycemic load. I'm coming up with a bunch of recipes for busy people to eat in the morning, whether it's first thing in the morning or mid-morning, to keep their blood sugar really stable, to keep their energy high. It has a lot of good implications for weight control and eating early in the day. I'm going for a big breakfast book, it's called Sunlight Cafe.

Cheri Sicard: Oh, that sounds great.
Mollie Katzen: It's coming out in the fall of 2001, if I ever write the damn thing. I'm having trouble getting it written. I'm going to illustrate it, of course. I love the subject of breakfast and start-of-the-day eating. A lot of people do, but most don't eat it anyway. They love it but they don't do it. I'm trying to help people strategize that.

Cheri Sicard: Thank you for taking the time to talk with us. It's been a delight. And good luck with the new ventures. Please keep us posted.