From The Meal Plan To Planning Meals

What the Quincy House dining hall lacks in actual fresh and delicious vegetables it makes up for in concern for the freshness of its produce. At least it did the week of May 20th when bestselling cookbook author and vegetarian cuisine pioneer Mollie Katzen, of Moosewood Cookbook fame, surveyed the dining hall crowd, listening intently as Quincy residents described occasionally still-frozen broccoli florets and the frustrating abundance of white grains.

Many seniors bid farewell to Harvard University Dining Services (HUDS) in the Quincy House dining hall, one of two houses that kept its kitchen open during senior week.

It’s a fitting farewell to institutional dining in that the kitchen is the last (of two) to be redone for HUDS’ updated look. So it’s pretty much as institutional as Harvard gets. This does not faze Katzen, who is serving in an advisory capacity to HUDS on recipe development.

At lunch in Quincy Katzen herself does not have any vegetables on her plate. There is only a binder and a packed itinerary. This was her third visit to Cambridge, so she knew her way around the sneeze-guarded salad bar by now. “I’m getting some clues as to what the whole system is like,” she says. “I’m interested in what students are choosing and why.”

For lunch in the dining hall Katzen choses the tofu walnut stir-fry, complimenting head HUDS chef Martin Breslin on the tenderness of the tofu which was well infused. “I actually had seconds,” Katzen says. “Almost every kid had it on their plates.”

Katzen is quick to enumerate the strengths of Harvard’s residential dining (and head HUDS chef Martin Breslin was quick to nod in agreement across the table from her). With this expert understanding of the culinary hand-holding of the dining hall environment, she is well equipped to offer gentle guidance for graduates fending for themselves in the kitchen for the first time.

She can’t exactly relate to kitchen-panic, however, because she started cooking in restaurants while still in high school. This personal history is a disclaimer of sorts—she doesn’t exactly feel the pain of novice stove-fright, but she has some good advice nonetheless. First, she recommends a cookbook called Help! My Apartment Has A Kitchen. Other tips from Katzen’s kitchen to yours:

—Buy yourself a pot that you really like, a deep dish wok, non stick, something you really like the feel of. It should be heavy, but comfortable.

—Find a knife that you really love, keep it nice and sharp. Make a relationship that’s all your own between the knife and the cutting board.

—Find a cooking buddy. For some people that’s a tall order, but find someone with an equally curious attitude.

—Find yourself a cookbook that makes sense

Katzen is too modest to explicitly recommend Moosewood, but FM does make that recommendation.

The bestselling vegetarian bible, first published in 1972, was completely revised in 1992 and 2000 to incorporate a less dairy dependent vegetarian diet, Katzen writes in the introduction to the most recent edition. In addition to the encouraging tone of her easy-to-follow recipes, Katzen’s own path to the kitchen is useful for the novice chef to note.

“I came to cooking because I was a painting student,” she says. “I never saw it as a career.” And even now Katzen says she is “not a real genuine food person. I’m a painter and a writer.”

From Moosewood itself she suggests that the polenta pie recipe (featured here) is a good place to start and that mastering a few basic dishes is an importance confidence builder. “Start with soups, the Moosewood soups,” she says. “It’s really easy to disguise mistakes with soup.”

For the novice chef, Katzen also warns against blindly venturing into restaurant cooking classes. “Be very careful that the class is not elitist and gourmet,” she says. “You don’t want to listen to two hours of wine pairings.” Katzen herself says that, from the vantage point of a prolific cookbook author (she now has over five million books in print), her cooking gets more simplified.

Her ideal meal, she says, is a “very big salad with a lot of vegetables” and some protein source. “I put a lot of olive oil and toss with just oil and then add kosher salt and a little bit of vinegar. I’m not shy with the oil,” Katzen says.

This de-mystification of the salad dressing process is an important part of coaxing kitchen neophytes near the cutting board. “Many people have a mental block about salad dressing,” Katzen says. “There are five thing people get mental blocks about. Pie crust. bread dough. salad dressing, cutting anything with a knife and putting together dry ingredients.” This dry ingredient hang up, Katzen solemnly notes, is why the short cut of cake mixes are so popular. But cooking is easy, Katzen seems to implore. It’s not even necessary to rely on Duncan Hines.

Cooking isn’t hard. Even ramen noodle packages—a generally economical source of lots of sodium and not much else that fits neatly into the collegiate and post-collegiate budget—can be redeemed in her mind. “Steam some vegetables and add them to the ramen base,” Katzen advises, offering easily the most half-hearted yet kind cooking tip for newly-dining-hall-free graduates.

It’s not the cooking that’s hard, then. It’s the talking about cooking. “It’s really hard not to use food metaphors,” Katzen says, remembering public television fundraisers where she implored viewers to “fork over their dough.” The message then, of Katzen’s dining-hall-to-home-cooked-meal transition advice, with apologies made for literally using a figurative phrase, is that any graduating senior can stand the heat and should get into the kitchen. Polenta pie awaits.