One of countless beauties that have passed through my kitchen in recent weeks. Testing, testing, testing those recipes. So, first some news. Things have gotten pretty briny around my house, and that's not just because the Puget Sound is a brief stroll from here. I hadn't anticipated that [...]
If hotel prices in Portland this weekend are any indication, this year's Feast Portland is a pretty big draw. Taking over the city, maybe. I'm going to be doing some hotel-hopping, chasing around the best deals I could find. I was on the phone with a fellow at one of [...]
I'm definitely one of those types who learn best by doing. Oh, I did well with book and classroom learning when it really counted through my school years. Since then, though, I've learned far more by just diving into things and developing skills and absorbing knowledge along the way. My [...]
It's one of those photo-ops-missed that I've thought about more than a few times in the past year -- arriving in Portland on a Sunday afternoon, looking down on the sidewalk and seeing a "Feast Portland" wristband that clearly had gotten a lot of good use over the previous few [...]
I've found myself more deeply engaged in the digital world these past six months or so, with classes for Craftsy (French Home Cooking and Homemade Salty Snacks) and my Northwest ebooks self-published via Kindle. After so many years producing print publications and teaching in-person classes, it's pretty fascinating to learn [...]
When my beloved 1992 Jetta was hit with some minor but worthy-of-being-deemed-'totaled' damage a couple of years ago, I got myself a new VW that invariably came with tons more automatic doodads and general smarts than my old car had. Even just getting a cup-holder and no longer hand-cranking the [...]
I've come to accept that I'm a bit of an oddball regarding the degree to which I have an anti-sweet tooth. I played up that fact in the introduction to Salty Snacks, noting that I've long had what I thought of as a salty-tooth where everyone else seemed to have [...]
Between gin, snacks and salmon, it's kind of hard to know which of those favorite topics I touch on more often here. But with the traditional mid May launch of Copper River salmon season just passed, it's little surprise salmon is on top of mind right now. It's something like [...]
What a terrible state of affairs: a gin backlog! To clarify, it's a backlog of reflections on gin rather than bottles of the stuff itself. I wish the latter were true too. I've been a fan of gin for a good while now and went through a peak gin phase [...]
It's great when life confirms for you now and then that you are, indeed, hanging out with the right people: folks with similar outlooks on life, priorities in line with your own. I've had some recent examples of that this past week based on conversations about the weather. In someone [...]