Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 When I worked at Organic Gardening during the 1970s, the company had a lunchroom in a house on Main Street in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, called Fitness House. Clients and special guests were taken there to sample real organic food and healthy cooking. I remember it served the most unpleasant food imaginable: unsalted buckwheat groats, sweet potatoes without butter, potatoes boiled in milk, musty-tasting sprouts. At that time, organic food was thought of as good for you, good for the environment, clean and pure, and nutritious, but not much on the scrumptious side. (I usually passed Fitness House by and went to Richard’s Market for a really delicious Italian hoagie or one of Richard’s hot ham sandwiches on a sesame bun with horseradish sauce and melted cheese.) Granola and groats became synonymous with organic food in many places in the 1970s. I ate many an unpleasurable meal at back-to-the-land communes from Maine to California. Thank goodness that era is long gone. Nowadays organic food has also come to be appreciated for its richness of flavor, its freshness, and its purity. But as the years passed, I wondered if a special “organic cuisine” would develop, something that could truly be called organic cooking. And I wondered what it might be.

Would it be the gourmet style of organic cooking found at some trendy restaurants? Writing in The New Yorker in 2003, Dana Goodyear described the fare at Counter, an organic restaurant in the East Village in New York City:

This is a meat-and-potatoes kind of joint, if by meat you mean “meat loaf” made of portobello mushrooms ground up with almonds, macadamia nuts, and cashews in a porcini-mushroom-nd-cabernet gravy—and by potatoes you mean cauliflower and pine nuts whipped into a fluffy cumulus and seasoned with parsley and a few shards of uncooked garlic.…The menu attracts a loyal crowd of long-haired sirens so eerily happy-looking and outgoing they might be mistaken for members of a West Coast religion.

While these creative dishes can certainly be tasty, connecting such fabrications with organic food is limiting—this isn’t how most people cook everyday at home, and it hardly reflects the range of organic cooking.

Organic cooking is real food for real people—good, solid, everyday food made with organic ingredients. It’s no longer about faux potatoes made from whipped cauliflower and pine nuts or faux meatloaf made from portobello mushrooms, and you won’t find recipes like these in this book. Good organic cooking can mean cooking in any style, if only because we live in an age where ingredients once found only in ethnic enclaves in America, or in the homelands of ethnic groups, are available to us fresh, seasonally, and often in organic form. In fact, organic cooking is most interesting when it is inclusive.

To understand how organic food can enhance any sort or style of cuisine, the organic cook needs to take a good look into the heart of the organic method of growing food, because it’s there that the secret of its quality lies. So, please, bear with me as I condense the knowledge I’ve gained over thirty years of writing and gardening into a few paragraphs that I hope will be enlightening.