In a pretty, bucolic North Georgia pasture, where old mine shafts lay hidden (but still accessible, as my crew of bored Gen X teenagers would discover) under the hills, lived a cow I once loved.
I met her through my boyfriend at the time, Paul. Most days after school, I’d help Paul feed the 30 or so cows under his father’s care. (Her tag read #47, but eventually I started calling her Stephanie — Stef the Heif for short.)
I had been a vegetarian for the greater part of two years, but if I hadn’t already made that choice, Stef’s sweet eyes and lackadaisical nature — much less seeing her be toted down the mile-long country driveway to meet her fate one day — certainly would have made the decision for me.
Babies, let me tell you: The early ’90s were bleak for young vegetarians without many resources. Back then, most of my “recipes” included frozen foods, canned vegetables and easy casseroles. A favorite dish? Vegetarian Bush’s baked beans right out of the can and Saltine crackers.
Recipe: Pozole Verde
Eventually I would find trusted guides in used bookstores and libraries, and cookbooks from places like Vermont and upstate New York, which may as well have been the moon from my perch in the Appalachian foothills. The power of cookbooks was real in this era, showing you worlds and ideas (and kitchens) you might not have access to otherwise.
One night after a remarkable eggplant Parmesan — my first-ever eggplant — my mom’s friend Heidi, a painter and worldly woman, handed me her copy of “Laurel’s Kitchen,” the first book that talked to me about nutrition and the power of food. I would carry this perfectly sized paperback, basic but revolutionary, through nearly 20 years of vegetarianism. From there, I discovered Ginny Callan’s “Horn of the Moon” and Mollie Katzen’s legendary “Moosewood Cookbook,” each an education in flavor and hospitality, in equal measure, eventually joined by Deborah Madison’s 1997 tome, “Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone.”
“Horn of the Moon,” Callan’s reflection on the Montpelier, Vt., restaurant by the same name, imparted seasonality and comfort. And I’m pretty sure Katzen’s hand-drawn pages and handwritten recipes taught me everything I needed to know about warmth and generosity. It was all heart. It was spirited. It was all love, delicately sketched into pages, with zero embarrassment for how sweet, and gonzo delicious, cooking can be. My copies of these books are now dog-eared to death and as appropriately stained as favorite kitchen tools.
But more important, even as a no-longer vegetarian (working in restaurants can really ruin a girl), they would inform how I cook to this day: Get as many vegetables as possible into a dish and make them delicious.
This pozole verde, packed with all the vegetables as I can find in the winter down South, roasted and used from seed to stem, is a perfect example of that, even as it changes often. But beyond that, it serves as testament to those early years as the daughter of a mother raised on her own mother’s menudo and pozole, as a vegetarian finding her way in the world, as a young cook who didn’t know how to do a darned thing with a vegetable but who wanted to shape new traditions full of warmth and hospitality, especially toward the people she loved.
When I think how I learned about flavor, comfort and why I cook, these identities are all at the beginning — and the heart — of the journey. This simple soup, combined with my family’s Southwestern and Mexican ties, is the sum of all of their many parts.
