I hesitate to call the books that surround me on my home office a collection, exactly. I have no organized plan or focus around acquiring books, which I tend to associate with the idea of collecting things--stamps, wine, antiques. As a random assemblage of books, however, it ideally suits me [...]
The book has been on who-knows-how-many different bookshelves of mine over the course of many years. I glance quickly past its spine now and then when scanning for a different title on my current office shelves. But it took a recent potluck to make me take down my copy of [...]
I’ve had this rice pudding recipe on my brain since a September trip to France, during which dinner one night in Paris included a dessert of riz au lait with a salted caramel sauce. Egad, it was amazingly delicious and reminded me of a recipe from many cookbooks ago: Jim [...]
A couple weeks ago I had one of those better-than-average work days, which had me hanging out with other food writers at Tom Douglas' cool cooking school Hot Stove Society. Our host was the Washington Beef Commission, and our task to get some hands-on time with various preparation techniques for [...]
This article posted on Bon Appétit's website yesterday sheds some interesting light on the job of ghost-writing and co-authoring books with chefs and other celebs. It was fun to see a number of friends included in the piece! I've never ghosted a cookbook--contributing to the book's content without direct attribution--but [...]
In honor of the season and the slew of wild mushrooms beginning to hit markets now, how about a little recipe from my Wild Mushrooms ebook in my Northwest Cookbooks series? I've long loved marinated mushrooms, even those pretty basic types that come in little jars from the grocery store. [...]
It's a funny sensation, that moment in an author's life (at least this author's life) when you realize the book manuscript you've been working on for months is now finished and leaving your grasp for good: off to the printer in whatever form that last round of edits produced. The [...]
Once upon a time there was this book: It was, for many years, among the kit of references and tools that students and stagiaires were given upon arrival at La Varenne cooking school in France. In it are the foundational basic recipes that we would be drawing from over the [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]