Lynn Alley - Gourmet Vegetarian Slow Cooker

Many streams of thought, many recipes, many meals, and many people converge within the pages of a book.

So acknowledging everyone is a daunting thought. Let me start where I can and wend my way along until Ive covered those who seem to have played a most important role in the book.

To begin with, let me send warm thank yous out to Aunt Sarah and Aunt Mae, my mothers aunts, who showed me how wonderful vegetables straight from the garden could be. To France, spiritual home to good cooks everywhere, where at one time visitors would be hard-pressed to find a bad meal, and weekly markets were a joy to behold.

To some of the chefs and authors who have inspired me: India-born chefs Neela Paniz and Suvir Saran for their dedication to the cooking of their homeland. To Laurel Robertson for lighting the way and inspiring so many of my generation to kick the meat habit back in the 70s. To Alice Waters for skillfully drawing my attention to the excitement of vegetables. To Deborah Madison for her pioneering role in elevating vegetarian cooking to an art form. To Julia Child for being the light that she was in the world, both personally and professionally.

To my editors at Ten Speed, Melissa Moore and Dawn Yanagihara, for their guidance and hard work. To Phil Wood, now publisher emeritus at Ten Speed, for always supporting my manuscripts and encouraging my work. To the very kind Aaron Wehner, who has taken over the helm at Ten Speed, one of the few publishers willing to work well and directly with their authors. To Kristin Casemore, Ten Speeds hardworking cookbook publicist. To Chloe Rawlins, Leo Gong, and Karen Shinto for creating such a lovely book.

On the very practical side, Id like to thank Valerie Gleason of the EdgeCraft Corporation for making the most wonderful knife sharpener available to the home cook. To Melissa Palmer at the All-Clad Corporation.

To Chibi, Jai, and the many animal friends who have provided unconditional love, warmth, support, friendship, and grounding. They all deserve better than being eaten.

To my dear friend Kathy Fleming, of Accomplishment Coaching, the worlds clearest and most astute friend and coach.

To Beth Hensperger, an inspired cook and a hardworking author, who has taught me some invaluable lessons.

To my mom, Margaret Zink, for being a good friend and helper.

As I wrote in the introduction to The Gourmet Slow Cooker, my first experiments with a slow cooker involved beans.

I was living in a mobile home on a farm in Davis, California, for several months, and the only equipment in the old kitchen was a vintage 1970s slow cooker and a very clunky, battle-scarred frying pan. The drive in to town was more than just the hop down the road I was used to at home, so I tried to buy up at the beginning of the week and keep it really simple.

The solution to the problem seemed to be beans. I went to the Davis Co-op and bought as many different kinds of beans as they had. Each day, Id put a different kind of bean on to cook in the slow cooker. When the beans were tender, Id add some good salt and choose an herb or two from the small herb garden outside the double-wide. A dash of olive oil gave my beans a bit of staying power.

And that was how I learned to appreciate the fact that not all beans taste the same. And not all beans have the same color or texture, for that matter.

This was a terrific experiment for me. It enabled me to experience something that country folk throughout the world have long known: how to take what youve got in the back forty and turn it into something that will keep you happy and well nourished.

In Italy, such cooking has been dubbed la cucina povera, roughly translated as the cooking of the poor, or, more graciously, country cooking. It doesnt entail using exotic and expensive ingredients from around the world. It involves the artful combining and preparing of what is at hand.

, which juxtaposes apricots from the region of their birth with the humble lentil.

Although I am a food and wine writer, and have partaken of many very elegant meals prepared by professional kitchen artists and craftspeople, I admit that some of my favorite meals have been the simplest. Fried okra, just picked from a friends garden and piping hot on a paper towel. Warm, fresh-picked tomatoes that have never seen the inside of the refrigerator, dusted with a pinch of salt. Bread fresh from a Spanish oven with a cooling gazpacho of tomatoes, cucumbers, and onions.

Those wonderful slow-cooked beans, too, remain in my heart and in my pantry. (Nowadays, I often slow-cook a pot full of beans, salt them, then freeze them in individual portions so that I have something on hand either to eat unembellished or to use as a base for a soup, stew, or salad when the need arises.)

It is my hope that the recipes in this book will honor the traditions of those people who have used what they had in their kitchens, pantries, and gardens in countries around the world.

Some of the dishes (such as the Italian and French recipes) come from cultures where bare bones basic works. Some (like the Indian and Mexican recipes) come from cultures that have traditionally drawn upon a more complex mlange of ingredients and cooking techniques.

All the dishes, however, are vegetable-based and reflective of the cultures from which they are drawn, and hence timely for the modern American kitchen, in terms of both health interests and economic considerations, in a world where many of us are realizing that we can live well and happily on a lot less than what weve been conditioned to believe.