Reading Nook: Moosewood Restaurant Favorites

Wednesday, December 11, 2013

Back when granola was simple and cobbled together in home kitchens, before cooks learned to pronounce quinoa (KEEN-wah), there was Moosewood.

The seven friends who founded the cozy restaurant on Cayuga Street in Ithaca, N.Y., in 1973 had devoured Diet for a Small Planet, Frances Moore Lappe’s book advocating plant-based eating. But the Moosewood Collective, as they called themselves, had a vision to create more than a restaurant based on brown-rice-and-vegetable stir-fries.

It would be a community gathering place.

“It was the notion that they could do a business that would be influencing people thinking about becoming vegetarian or eating more vegetarian food because of its positive impact on the environment,” says Wynnie Stein, one of Moosewood Collective’s 19 current co-owners. “It was considered a project that would be bigger than the restaurant.”

The Moose’s influence can be credited to the restaurant, but also the collective’s dozen cookbooks.

The latest, Moosewood Restaurant Favorites: The 250 Most-Requested, Naturally Delicious Recipes From One of America’s Best-Loved Restaurants (St. Martin’s Griffin, $29.99), taps that history, offering home-style food “with fresh ingredients and plenty of seasonings and bright flavors.”

Recipes have been updated. Gluten-free diets addressed. Newly available vegetables and grains added.

“We had employees who were from Peru back in the early ’80s. They told us about quinoa,” Stein says. “We … started cooking with it way before anybody had it on their radar.”

The quinoa story reflects the Moose’s approach: embrace the roots of their families and friends and their travels to create comfort foods, using what’s fresh and what’s good, perhaps an eggplant mushroom marsala, zucchini-feta casserole or their famous brownie. There’s also a guide to ingredients and basic cooking, including how to grate tofu and chiffonade.

Vegetarians - and those who are not - should find something to savor in the new book.

Food, Pages 31 on 12/11/2013