the UNVEGETARIAN : The restaurant she started, Greens, and her two cookbooks have made meatless cooking chic. But don’t use the V-word around Deborah Madison; she thinks vegetarians are cranky.

Deborah Madison has a great time in the kitchen. She flits around like an eager child, showing off spices and bottled oils like treasures. You wouldn’t expect this from her publicity photos, which make her look fiercely intense, like a fanatical vegetarian.

The founding chef of the San Francisco vegetarian restaurant Greens and co-author of “The Greens Cookbook” actually hates being called a vegetarian. “Vegetarians are so cranky,” she says in dismay. She refused to allow the word “vegetarian”--even the word “vegetable”--on the cover of her new book, “The Savory Way,” even though the contents are, let’s say, strictly meatless.

“Do you like safflower?” she asks confidentially, as she sprinkles the reddish herb into a pot of corn and squash cooking in half and half with fresh herbs, a jalapeno and a cinnamon stick. Safflower, otherwise known as false saffron, is rarely used in cooking except to give a saffron-like color. “It’s so mild, it has practically no flavor, but I sort of like it,” she adds, as if confessing a minor vice.

She chops up a head of napa cabbage and dresses it with a sort of Chinese vinaigrette: rice vinegar, peanut and sesame oils, fresh ginger, Sichuan peppercorns, orange zest. It’s delicate and, at the same time, full of strong flavors.

“Isn’t it nice?” she says. “But one time I served it to a Chinese friend, and he was totally taken aback, he’d never heard of eating cabbage raw.” She shakes her head with wonder and amusement. Those Chinese, with all their wonderful ingredients--how could they have failed to come up with napa cabbage salad?

Her view of food is infectious. She makes the world seem overflowing with fascinating ingredients, each with a vivid and distinctive flavor, color and texture, practically a personality. There’s no reason why meat couldn’t be one of them--in fact, Madison eats meat occasionally--but in this profusion of possibilities, meat somehow seems the most prosaic choice.

How could beef compete in sheer sexiness with lettuces, as Madison describes them? In the introduction to her new book’s chapter on salads she writes, “Handling the tender, delicate leaves with all their varied colors and shapes is one of the keenest pleasures in the kitchen I know.” Keen pleasures in a salad bowl!

How could a pork chop match the tender, philosophical performance of a pot of soup vegetables? “When the vegetables first begin to cook,” she writes, “their colors are astonishingly pure and brilliant; then this luminescent beauty fades as its vitality is transformed into broth and sustenance. Each time I see this phenomenon I think that it’s one of the privileges of cooking.” One of the privileges !

Her enthusiasms are much better informed than is usual among vegetarian writers, as a glance at the wide-ranging bibliography in her new book will show. Many of her dishes have a Mediterranean, Mexican or Far Eastern quality, and in a few cases they are basically the flavoring elements that would usually accompany meat--stew with everything but the meat. She describes one dish as “a failed fisherman’s soup”: not a failed soup, but the soup of an unlucky fisherman.

But other dishes are homier, like a Waldorf salad she juiced up by replacing the stodgy mayonnaise with a walnut oil vinaigrette. Others seem plain uninhibited aesthetic revelry, like her nasturtium sandwiches.

Now comes the puzzle. “The Savory Way” was not written in California, this vegetable-lover’s paradise of ours, but in Flagstaff, Ariz., where only the most mundane supermarket produce is available. It’s a Madison cookbook that you can (mostly) use even if all you have at your disposal is supermarket ingredients.

This is a noble endeavor, certainly; a boon to everyone who doesn’t have access to the sort of ingredients Madison took for granted when she was working at Chez Panisse or Greens. The book gives sensible substitutions for unavailable ingredients. It suggests practical uses for the underripe tomatoes that supermarket shoppers have to put up with, particularly outside California.

But Flagstaff? What was she doing in Flagstaff? It’s a semi-long story.

She grew up mostly in Davis, where her father taught botany at the University of California. “My father was the one in the family who was interested in food,” she says. “Plain Midwestern food, basically, pies and roasts, but he also maintained a garden and he used to eat flowers.” He was the one who taught her to eat nasturtiums.

Though Davis provided the pleasures of living in a walnut grove (“I try to tell people there’s nothing like a fresh walnut, but they just don’t know”), culinarily it was a narrow meat-and-potatoes environment. Her mother did insist that she learn to bake bread, though, and she was fascinated by the hallah her Jewish neighbors baked once a week and worked for a year getting it down.

Then her parents got a year’s sabbatical in Europe, and as fate would have it, she stayed that year with a sophisticated Davis couple who had traveled extensively in Europe. With them she fell in love with cooking. “Souffles!” she recalls. “It was like magic. I’d cut school to go home and cook.”

More influences cropped up throughout the following years. “One night in Berkeley,” she remembers, “a young woman knocked on my door in a heavy storm, looking like a drowned rat, and introduced herself as a friend of a friend of a friend. I put her up--of course, I couldn’t have sent her out in the storm. She was French, a pied noir (colonial) from North Africa who cooked French and Moroccan food.” She stayed on as a roommate for some time.

Things began to jell in the late ‘70s, by which time Madison had acquired a husband and become a prominent member of the Zen Center, an austere and high-minded Buddhist community in the San Francisco area. She worked at Green Gulch, the Zen Center’s farm in Marin County. One day it was announced that there would soon be a Zen Center vegetarian restaurant, Greens. Were there any volunteers? Heedless of what she was getting into, Madison raised her hand.

She was getting into more than Greens. Around that time, Alice Waters and Lindsey Shere visited Green Gulch and invited her to come dine at their restaurant, Chez Panisse. “I’d been told I should visit Chez Panisse,” she recalls, “but I was afraid it would be French Continental with lots of intimidating dishes. But after meeting them, I was encouraged and went and fell in love with it. I went back the next day and offered my services in any capacity at all.

“And I started spending all my time there. It was more interesting than the Zen Center, which should have told me something right there. I essentially lost interest in all that (Zen Center activity). And I was an ordained priest, I wasn’t supposed to be doing other things, but there I was at Chez Panisse, chopping onions and garlic.” She still seems a little startled by this.

During the time she was working at Chez Panisse, she also ran Greens from 1978 to 1982, “a period of four very long years.” Her memories from that time are about Chez Panisse, rather than Greens: “1978 and 1979 were the best time for Chez Panisse. It was still a neighborhood place with regular customers. My only restaurant experience was Chez Panisse, I thought that’s what all restaurants were like: people out in the back yard shelling peas, liking the people you worked with.”

In the end she and her husband, Dan Welch, moved to Flagstaff, where his cousin James Turrell has been working for some years on a vast artwork/environment called the Roden Crater. She describes it as an enclosed space that has been worked on so that the horizon is oval and smooth and the sky no longer seems flat and formless but domed.

“I was ready for a change,” she says. “I wanted something different, I wanted cowboys and Indians.” She also had the idea of doing the book that became “The Savory Way.” She describes Flagstaff as a challenging environment. Apart from the narrow selection of produce available in the supermarkets, the winters are too harsh to raise many kinds of vegetables in a home garden.

She put in a garden anyhow and learned where the resources were. She got to know local gardeners, found out about the farmers’ market in Santa Fe, where the climate is milder, heard of the farmers who could produce some fresh tomatoes if you called ahead.

But before the book was written, her culinary path took one more turn. She and her husband spent a whole night meditating in the Roden Crater, and in the morning each had independently decided not to be involved with the Zen Center any longer. They went into Flagstaff that day, somewhat at loose ends, and ran into a friend who was going to Rome to head the American Academy.

He mentioned to them he wanted to take a chef because the Academy’s cook was terrible. Would they like to come? “What’s Rome like?” they answered.

“It was a great deal for us,” says Madison. “We cooked one big banquet a week, and the rest of the time we read and checked the place out. We fell in love with Italian food, of course. The bread. And the vegetables. We found little cookbooks just about a single vegetable.”

Italy reinforced her taste for rough foods, such as her Wild Green Salad. The best salad she ever ate, she says, was a rough bunch of weeds she was served in Florence with a cruet of green Tuscan oil and a wedge of lemon. Earlier that day she’d noticed older people walking in the fields poking with long sticks in the clods of earth for the same weeds. If you haven’t gone weed-gathering, or if it’s late summer and the wild weeds are tough and bitter, she recommends supermarket greens.

Eventually she had to move back to Flagstaff and wrote “The Savory Way.” The question is what to do next. She’s toyed with doing something to improve the quality of ingredients, or writing about children’s cooking, beverages and their place in the meal, or perhaps writing more about the sort of “limited localism” she essayed in Flagstaff, working with fresh local ingredients so far as practical. Having divorced her husband and fallen in love with an artist who lives in Arkansas may weigh the scales in that direction.

In any case, she’s thinking seriously of moving out of Flagstaff. “It’s not really my kind of town,” she says. “All it really has is the wide-open spaces I love. There are hardly any vegetables, it’s hard to garden there. It gets me down. I can just feel my spirits sink when I go into a market and the choices are so small, the vegetables are so tired.”

But she has made friends there. One is an 80-year-old cowboy who helps her with horse-handling and goes riding with her. He lives with his older sister and raises big solid chickens that have lived through the summer and have a strong chicken flavor. One reason why she doesn’t eat meat very often, she says, is how sad market meat is: “Pathetic little chickens.”

One time her cowboy friend and his sister invited her over for a meal, not at all a Deborah Madison sort of meal. “It was a huge steak, floured and cooked in lard, white bread that he bakes, potatoes and zucchini cooked for 45 minutes.

“But you know, it was all good. And the zucchini was very good, it had that real squashy flavor you smell in restaurants. A lot of people these days just barely cook zucchini, and it doesn’t have much flavor, just a crisp texture. I’ve started overcooking zucchini now.”

WILD GREEN SALAD, SUPERMARKET APPROXIMATION

4 cups escarole or inner white curly endive leaves, small spinach leaves, hearts of romaine or mixture

4 cups mixed greens such as mustard greens, radish leaves, arugula, watercress, nasturtium leaves, tender dandelion leaves, dill greens or fennel greens

20 mint leaves

12 sorrel leaves, torn or sliced

4 green onions, chopped

1/4 cup sunflower seeds, toasted

2 tablespoons plain or herb vinegar, such as tarragon

4 to 5 tablespoons sunflower seed oil, extra-virgin olive oil or walnut oil

Wash and dry all greens, tear or cut into serving size pieces. Toss in large bowl with onions and sunflower seeds. Combine vinegar and oil and toss with salad. Makes 4 servings.

NAPA CABBAGE SALAD

1 pound napa cabbage, about

1 tablespoon finely slivered orange zest

1 tablespoon black sesame seeds

1 tablespoon white sesame seeds

2 tablespoons finely chopped chives or green onions

2 tablespoons chopped cilantro, about

Oriental Vinaigrette

Cilantro sprigs

Cut cabbage into quarters or eighths, then cut each piece into 1/2 inch strips, cutting narrower near core. (May use more cabbage, if desired.) Wash, dry and place cabbage in refrigerator.

Blanch orange zest in boiling water about 10 seconds to remove any bitterness. Toast black and white sesame seeds until white seeds begin to color.

Combine cabbage, chives and chopped cilantro to taste with Oriental Vinaigrette. Garnish with cilantro sprigs. Makes 4 to 6 servings.

Oriental Vinaigrette

1 teaspoon Sichuan peppercorns

4 teaspoons finely chopped ginger root

1 tablespoon light soy sauce

1 tablespoon rice wine vinegar

1 teaspoon red chile oil

2 tablespoons sesame oil

2 tablespoons peanut oil

2 tablespoons orange juice

Lightly toast Sichuan peppercorns in dry skillet until aroma is released, about 10 to 20 seconds. (Use less, if mild flavor is desired.) Grind toasted peppercorns using mortar and pestle or electric spice mill.

Combine peppercorns, ginger, soy sauce, vinegar, chile, sesame and peanut oils and orange juice in bowl. Whisk to thoroughly mix. Taste and adjust seasonings, if necessary.

SUMMER SQUASH AND CORN STEW

4 whole cloves

6 peppercorns

6 coriander seeds

1 cup half and half or mixture of cream and milk

1/2 teaspoon dried safflower stamens, optional

1 (2- to 3-inch) piece cinnamon stick

5 cilantro sprigs, coarsely chopped

5 mint leaves, coarsely chopped

6 cinnamon-basil leaves, optional

1 jalapeno chile, seeded and sliced into sixths

Salt

1 1/4 pounds summer squash

1 tablespoon peanut or safflower oil

1/2 onion, diced

Kernels from 2 ears yellow corn or 1 cup frozen corn

1 large tomato, peeled, seeded and chopped

2 tablespoons coarsely chopped cilantro leaves

Bruise cloves, peppercorns and coriander seeds with mortar and pestle. Combine with half and half, safflower stamens, cinnamon stick, chopped cilantro sprigs, mint and basil leaves and 1/2 of jalapeno. Gradually bring to boil, then turn off heat and let mixture steep.

Meanwhile, cut squash lengthwise into quarters, then cut quarters into chunks.

Heat oil in wide skillet or saute pan and add onion. Saute about 1 minute, then add squash, corn and remaining jalapeno pieces. Season to taste with salt.

Continue to saute over medium-high heat about 5 minutes longer. Squash and onion may color slightly.

Pour cream mixture into pan through strainer. Add tomato and simmer until sauce is slightly reduced and squash is tender. Season to taste with salt. Garnish with chopped cilantro leaves. Makes 2 main course or 4 side dish servings.

Note: Mixture of summer squash varieties may be used, if desired. Safflower is widely available in supermarkets; the “saffron” or “azafran” sold in cellophane packets is actually safflower.

ZUCCHINI-TOMATO TIAN WITH OLIVES

2 tablespoons virgin olive oil

1 large onion, quartered and thinly sliced

2 cloves garlic, thinly sliced

2 teaspoons finely chopped fresh rosemary

2 sage leaves, thinly sliced

1 teaspoon fresh thyme leaves

Salt

Freshly ground black pepper

1 1/4 pounds zucchini, sliced in 1/4-inch rounds

6 to 8 ounces Roma or large cherry tomatoes, sliced in rounds

4 kalamata olives, pitted and quartered

Lemon wedges or red wine vinegar, optional

Heat 2 or 3 teaspoons olive oil in large pan. Add onion, garlic, 1 teaspoon rosemary, 1 sage leaf, 1/2 teaspoon thyme and season to taste with salt. Saute gently 5 minutes. Spread mixture evenly over bottom of gratin dish. Sprinkle with pepper.

Heat another 2 to 3 teaspoons oil in same skillet. Increase heat to medium-high. Add zucchini, salt to taste and remaining 1 teaspoon rosemary, 1 sage leaf and 1/2 teaspoon thyme. Saute 10 minutes, stirring frequently, until mixture just begins to color.

Distribute zucchini over onions, then tuck in tomato slices here and there along with olives. Drizzle small amount of oil over top. Cover with foil.

Bake at 375 degrees 25 minutes. Remove foil and bake 10 minutes longer or until juices evaporate. Serve warm or tepid, with lemon wedges or vinegar on side. Makes 4 servings.

Note: 1 1/2 teaspoons herbes de Provence may be substituted if fresh herbs are not available.

GREEN BEANS WITH ONIONS, TOMATOES AND DILL

1 pound green beans or mixture of green and yellow wax beans

8 boiling onions, about 1 1/2-inches in diameter

2 tablespoons virgin olive oil

1 large clove garlic, thinly sliced

Salt

2 large tomatoes, peeled, seeded and chopped

1 tablespoon chopped fresh dill or basil

1 tablespoon chopped parsley

Juice from tomatoes or water

Wash beans well, trim and cut into 1 1/2-inch pieces. Slice onions into thin rounds.

Heat oil in pan. Add onions and garlic and cook over low heat several minutes until onions begin to soften. Salt lightly, then add beans, tomatoes, dill and parsley along with several tablespoons tomato juice.

Cover pan tightly and cook over medium heat 15 minutes or until beans are tender. Makes 4 servings.

Note: Choose bright green, firm beans. Smaller beans are less fibrous.