Breakfast as the New Cure-All By ALEX WITCHEL

IF you prefer NestlŽ's Crunch to kale crunch and think a potato salad is no
place for a sunflower seed, you've probably never heard of Mollie Katzen.
You wouldn't have responded to the singles ad, recently placed in a San
Francisco weekly, in which a woman described herself as "working out like
Jane Fonda, looking like Holly Hunter and cooking like Mollie Katzen." But
if you're on the Atkins diet, her recipe for green and white beans under
garlic mashed potatoes would most certainly be your fever dream.



Ms. Katzen is the author of seven vegetarian cookbooks, most notably the
homespun hippie classic "Moosewood Cookbook" (Ten Speed Press), which
celebrated its 25th year in print last month and has sold more than three
million copies. Ms. Katzen has updated it twice, she said, streamlining the
preparation times and excess dairy while heightening the spices. She did
the same for her second cookbook, "The Enchanted Broccoli Forest" (Ten
Speed Press), originally published in 1982, which has sold 1.5 million
copies. Add in her other books, which include "Mollie Katzen's Sunlight
CafŽ," a collection of breakfast recipes just published by Hyperion, and
Ms. Katzen has more than five million books in print.

That's a lot of vegetables, even though she herself is not a vegetarian.
While she was in New York two weeks ago to promote her new book, she had
dinner at Picholine, where she Ñ brace yourselves Ñ ate foie gras.

"I'm not a health nut," she declared, sitting at a table at the Cellar
Grill in Macy's, before giving a cooking demonstration in its De Gustibus
series. "People go to dinner with me and apologize for what they're
ordering. And they get so concerned over what I eat and don't eat. If you
cook vegetarian, people assume you're a crusader for vegetarianism. I just
care that people eat well. There is so much variety in the food world.
Where we get our protein is our business."

Ms. Katzen, 51, has the wholesome, healthy look of someone who lives in
California (in Berkeley), hikes and lifts weights regularly, and slips
protein powder into her muffins. She wore a form-fitting sleeveless dress,
and unlike most women past 40, who know better than to beat eggs in mixed
company, later stood in front of her class chopping an enormous pile of
lemon zest with nary a jiggle in either arm. It was almost enough to make a
non-breakfast-eater re-think the nut-crusted mushroom fritters. Almost.

"If food really turns you off in the morning, I'm not going to change
that," Ms. Katzen said. "I just want people to eat as well as they can as
early as they can. There's a real difference in energy level and focus if
you get good food into you early. But I'm not going to change people's
lifestyles. I'm just trying to make the high-carb thing they're eating on
the run into a high-protein thing."

This means adding that protein powder, or cooked or ground whole grains,
like quinoa, to the breads. And while homemade protein bars might not
appeal to everyone, there are plenty of recipes in the book that can just
as easily be made as side dishes for other meals, like Indian home fries or
creamed spinach.

"People always tell me, 'I love breakfast, but I don't eat it,' " Ms.
Katzen said, sipping grapefruit juice and being an exceptionally good sport
about sitting in the restaurant's smoking section, at the last available
table. "Breakfast is the Camelot of foods: it's illusory. People love it,
and it's not really there."

She changed her own eating habits, she said, in 1995, when she started
taping "Mollie Katzen's Cooking Show" for public television and found
herself exhausted. "I was eating what I call remorse food," she recalled.
"Brown rice with steamed broccoli and tofu. And I found that I was wilting,
energy-wise. I realized I needed some fat and protein, and I needed them
more frequently. And I maybe needed to cheer up. Healthy eating is joyful
eating. It doesn't have to be about deprivation."

Ms. Katzen is equally adamant that the cooking be joyful as well. In all of
her books she urges readers to experiment and feel free to bend the rules.
If you want to add chicken, add it. "It's important to know when to fret
your cooking," she said, "and when not to."

Her low-key style has contributed to the success of the 65 shows she has
already taped in four different series. She plans to begin a new one based
on "Sunlight CafŽ" next spring, though she's not crazy about the extra
recognition television brings. "I like to just run into the store wearing a
shmatte," she said. "But around me, culinary celebrity has mushroomed. When
I did 'Moosewood' originally, there was no promotion. Now, chefs are like
Disney characters. You know how you see them in cartoons, always a weirdo
with an accent, some whacked-out eccentric? Now it's like a lot of those
have come to life." She shrugged. "I don't aspire to the celebrity thing."

Nach Waxman, the owner of Kitchen Arts & Letters, the premier bookstore for
cooking enthusiasts in New York, stocks all of Ms. Katzen's books and has
had her there six or seven times. "She always arrives without a flurry or
an entourage," he said, "and she has no expectation that people will
respond to her instead of to her books. In this business you don't see that
very often. It's very refreshing."

Mr. Waxman added that in addition to the demand for the revised Moosewood
books, there is also a steady market for the out-of-print original, with
none of the fat or salt removed. "People want the feel and flavor and
details they remember," he said. "They don't want to give up what they're
attached to."

Ms. Katzen wrote that cookbook while she worked at the Moosewood Restaurant
in Ithaca, N.Y., which opened in 1973. Along with her brother Joshua, now a
real estate developer in Boston, she was one of its seven founding owners.
She went out on her own in 1978. So whenever you see "Moosewood Cookbook,"
that means it is hers. Whenever you see Moosewood Restaurant or Moosewood
Collective, which was formed in 1979, that means the recipes are coming
from those two entities, which continue to publish their own work.

Does she miss her hippie days? She smiled. "I was always in conflict with
the counterculture, and I never fit into a collective," she said. "My heart
was in the idea of sharing, but I found that a creative impulse was best.
And that's a very autocratic impulse, which is not about sharing."

Ms. Katzen was born in Rochester, where her parents, Betty and Leon, still
live. Her mother always favored frozen vegetables. "She would unwrap the
package," Ms. Katzen recalled, "put it in water, and when it was no longer
square, serve." Her mother's mother, Minnie, was Ms. Katzen's role model in
the kitchen.

"She was a wonderful, intuitive cook who never measured a thing," she said.
"She made her own phyllo dough, and beautiful challahs. And she loved
breakfast foods. It was magical stuff when Grandma came to baby-sit on a
Saturday night. As soon as the coast was clear we would have oatmeal for
dinner. We were really getting away with something." She beamed and looked
about 10 years old.

Ms. Katzen entered Cornell University in 1968 as an art major, but
frustrated by the consistent political upheavals on campus, she transferred
to the San Francisco Art Institute, where she supported herself by cooking
at Shandygaff, a well-known vegetarian restaurant of its day. "It was very
rock star," she recalled, "with very colorful, ethnic food. No hippies
sitting in the corner chewing brown rice 50 times."

The fall after she graduated she returned to Ithaca to help her brother
figure out the menu and kitchen layout for the Moosewood Restaurant. During
that trip, a close friend with whom she had planned on living when she
returned to San Francisco for her master's degree was killed in a car
crash. "I couldn't go back," Ms. Katzen said. "I had planned on staying in
Ithaca three months and I stayed five years."

After briefly flirting with a career as a concert pianist (another brother,
Daniel, plays French horn with the Boston Symphony; Ezra is a lawyer in
Israel) she moved back to the Bay Area in 1981, where she has been writing
and illustrating her cookbooks ever since. She has a son, Sam, 18, from a
first marriage, and a daughter, Eve, 11, with her husband, Carl Shames, a
psychologist who gave up seeing patients to become her business and
research partner. They are currently researching nutrition issues as they
apply to pediatric obesity, for Ms. Katzen's next book (One of the cures?
Eat breakfast) to be written with Dr. David Ludwig, an expert in the
subject at Harvard Medical School. Ms. Katzen has written two children's
cookbooks, "Pretend Soup" and "Honest Pretzels."

"When I was cooking with the children I would ask, `How do you explain to
someone what it means to cut something in thirds?' " she recalled,
laughing. "Berkeley kids. They would say, `Peace symbol.' "

All of which sounds like more fun than being part of the Harvard School of
Public Health Nutrition Roundtable, which she joined in 1998. It is a group
that educates people about the connection between diet and health. Talk
about remorse food Ñ a block of tofu in every pot.

"Not at all," she said, smiling, as she gathered her bags up to teach her
class. "I'm like the digestive enzyme for their information. I just take
their dry research and put it into plain English. And basically, the
message is this: `Here's the healthy stuff. So get a life and enjoy it.' "
