Queen of greens: best-selling cookbook author and vegetarian chef Deborah Madison shares tips for preparing plant-based foods.(FAVORITE THINGS: INTERVIEW)(Interview)

Even the most die-hard meat eater would leave Deborah Madison's table satisfied. That's because this celebrated vegetarian chef and best-selling cookbook author's food isn't for vegetarians only. Her seminal book, Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, now available in its 10th anniversary edition, actually serves as a sort of primer on plant-based foods and how to work with them. "I really saw it more as Vegetables (and other plant foods) for Everyone rather than Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone," says Madison, "but that didn't make a very good title." Madison's acclaim is well-deserved: she got her start as a macrobiotic cook at the San Francisco Zen Center in the 1970s, cooked at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, and later became the founding chef at the famous San Francisco vegetarian restaurant The Greens. Besides her best-selling Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, Madison has gone on to pen such titles as Vegetable Soups from Deborah Madison's Kitchen, Vegetarian Suppers from Deborah Madison's Kitchen, and Local Flavors: Cooking and Eating from America's Farmers' Markets.

What inspired you to write Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone?

After teaching a class that covered everything vegetarian, I found myself wishing there was a vegetarian Joy of Cooking, where everything was under one cover. When I realized there wasn't such a book, I knew I'd have to write it.

In Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, you write about intuitive cooking. How would you define this?

Once you know the flavors of foods and how they behave in the kitchen, you can start to cook without a recipe, or you can work easily around one but not follow it specifically. Maybe a dish calls for Brussels sprouts, but you don't have them. But if you know that cabbage and broccoli share some of the same characteristics that Brussels sprouts do, you can just go boldly ahead and intuit something that will work.

How can people get more nutritional foods into their diets, but still savor and enjoy their dining experience?

The nutritional foods that people are encouraged to eat are unprocessed, fresh, and preferably local and seasonal in the case of vegetables and ...