Cookbook spawns from author’s love of vegetables

By Joan Brunskill
Associated Press

The kitchen in Barbara Kafka’s Manhattan brownstone has a mellow, lived-in air. It’s lined with cabinets, shelves piled with spice jars and cooking bowls, one wall with a collection of shining copper saucepans hanging — all reflecting the more than four decades she’s lived here.

Kafka, busy cooking up dishes from her new book “Vegetable Love” (Artisan, $35), has complemented the kitchen’s harvest tones with her own still lifes of vegetables.

Kafka’s 708-page book, written with Christopher Styler and including some 750 recipes, is packed with the knowledge, ideas, comments and insights of this much-respected cook, food writer and teacher, gardener and traveler. Kafka’s previous books include “Roasting” (1995) and “Microwave Gourmet” (1987), both of them home cooks’ favorites.

She would love to have written a true encyclopedia, she writes in her new book’s introduction, although most of us will think “Vegetable Love” a pretty good equivalent. She calls it “a love letter” instead, a book about pleasure.