Ann Gentry - The Real Food Daily Cookbook: Really Fresh, Really Good, Really Vegetarian

Much appreciation to my agent Bob Silverstein at Quicksilver Books for his encouragement and patience.

Thanks to all the folks at Ten Speed Press for their interest and enthusiasm about the book. My gratitude to Lorena Jones who put me in the hands of Meghan Keeffe and Toni Tajima. Thank you ladies for shaping the book and making it something I am proud of. Also, thanks to Jessica Boone for capturing the spirit of Real Food Daily in her photographs.

A warm thanks to Rochelle Palermo, who has a great sense of humor, a true love for food, and an unfaltering willingness to keep trying until its right. Also thanks to her husband and grandmother who tasted many of the recipes and always loved them.

To Anthony Head, your steady calmness kept me sane when I started to feel uncertain about my ideas. You took my memories, ramblings, and streams of consciousness and made sense out of them. Youve shaped my words to hopefully inspire and educate others.

Thank you to Karen Claffey, Miquel Martinez, Tom Hartwell, David Anderson, Jose Aramayo, Britt Hawley, and all the other talented and energetic culinary people who have made creative contributions to the menu and the success of Real Food Daily.

Thank you to my staff whose hard work and dedication make it happen daily.

Many thanks to John Kaufman who has supported my vision and helped me raise the standards of excellence in my restaurants. Its been an amazing journey.

I am especially grateful to my husband, Robert Jacobs, for his passion and steadfast belief in what I do. His direction and input have been invaluable to my growth as a restaurateur. What a process this has been!

My gratitude to my shareholders who put their money where their mouths are.

And finally, a loving thank-you to my family of loyal customers who have been coming to Real Food Daily since the beginning, and to the thousands of other people who have walked through the doors. Your support and patronage has allowed me to present real food to the world. It has been an honor to serve you.

W hen I opened Real Food Daily (RFD) twelve years ago, I made a commitment to serve a menu free of animal products and featuring certified organic produce. Im proud that Ive stuck to that commitment through the opening of two additional restaurants. When I started out, so many people told me that I couldnt do it. Who would come to a restaurant, they asked, that only served plant-based cuisine? You should at least put a little fish and chicken on the menu was the well-intentioned advice I got most often. (I wont even tell you what was said when they found out I wasnt going to use white sugar or dairy fats in my baked goods.)

Deep down inside of me, I knew I could prove them wrongalthough that wasnt my motivation at that time, and its still not what drives me today. I just knew that people were looking for this kind of food but didnt know where to get it. I also knew that the type of food RFD served would nurture people on so many important levels that they would want to come back again and again. They didand they still do.

My restaurants have surpassed my wildest dreams, and not just in the double-digit sales growth every year but, more important, in the variety of people dining with us. Id comfortably say that over half of our guests are not vegetarian or vegan. Instead, theyre simply educated consumers who want high-quality ingredients prepared in creative and innovative ways. They want food that is delicious and satisfying. They want real food.

This cookbook continues Real Food Dailys culinary journey. Its for vegetarians, vegans, and everyone else. The recipes are perfect for beginning an expedition into healthful eating, or just for finding something delicious for dinner. And whether for health or ethical reasons, philosophical or environmental concerns, more people are turning toward a plant-based diet. My team and I continue to dedicate ourselves to raising the standards and expectations for this style of cooking, incorporating exciting flavors from around the world to create meals that are incomparable in taste, texture, and satisfaction.

You dont have to be vegan or vegetarian to love this type of cooking. Simply put, this book is for everyone who loves good food.

Others in my business will tell you they were wowed by food from an early age and spent their formative years cooking in the kitchen with Mom. Maybe they sold their homemade brownies for a dime in grammar school before moving on to be classically trained in the culinary arts at Le Cordon Bleu or the Culinary Institute of America. For them, food has been front and center nearly all their lives.

But thats just not the case with me.

My interest in food developed much later in life and was a natural outgrowth of who I was at the time and where I was heading. But thats not to say I didnt grow up surrounded by good food. As a girl in Memphis, Tennessee, I always enjoyed plenty of freshly baked biscuits, home-cooked vegetables, and, yes, even peach pies cooling on the windowsill.

But the era of the late 1950s and 1960s was a unique time in American kitchen history because the advances in food technology really began squeezing out the made-from-scratch style of cooking. My mother, who was raising two kids by herself, worked a lot and increasingly had less time to put together such elaborate meals. That meant we shopped at gargantuan new supermarkets loaded with frozen, processed, and canned foods. We also ate our fair share of restaurant meals. Like most kids, I loved places like Shoneys Big Boy, but I remember that Mom really enjoyed taking us to the local cafeterias, like Morrisons and Picadilly, where it was much easier to eat standard meat-and-three meals (a meat entre plus three vegetable side dishes). Wed get our fried chicken or Salisbury steak, and then macaroni and cheese (I liked mine with ketchup), white rice (topped with sugar), and maybe an overly steamed green of some sort. And dessert. Always dessert.