An Onion in My Pocket My Life with Vegetables

As a groundbreaking chef and beloved cookbook author, Deborah Madison—“The Queen of Greens” (The Washington Post)—has profoundly changed the way generations of Americans think about cooking with vegetables, helping to transform “vegetarian” from a dirty word into a mainstream way of eating. But before she became a household name, Madison spent almost twenty years at the Zen Center in the midst of counterculture San Francisco. In this warm, candid, and refreshingly funny memoir, she tells the story of her life in food—and with it, the story of the vegetarian movement—for the very first time. From her childhood in Northern California’s Big Ag heartland to sitting sesshin for hours on end at the Tassajara monastery; from her work in the kitchen of the then-new Chez Panisse to the birth of food TV to the age of farmers’ markets everywhere,  An Onion in My Pocket is a deeply personal look at the rise of vegetable-forward cooking and a manifesto for how to eat (and live) well today.

Deborah Madison is the award-winning author of fourteen cookbooks, including The New Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone and Vegetable Literacy. Her books have received four James Beard Foundation Book Awards and five awards from the IACP; she was inducted into the James Beard Foundation Cookbook Hall of Fame in 2016 and the Who’s Who of Food and Beverage in 2005. She lives in New Mexico. www.deborahmadison.com