Heading into month twenty bajillion of cooking at home, I’m sure many of us are forging into new areas of creativity, whether by desire or simply forced into it by the realities of our pantry circumstances. If not a bit of both. I’d say the latter’s true for me. I’m [...]
It was a simple tossed salad that put me over the edge. Not the salad itself, mind you. But where the salad showed up in the recipe I was skimming in a cookbook whose name I don't even recall. The lettuces and vinaigrette were tossed together in a bowl, as [...]
This post comes with a hat-tip to Instagram, which is where I first caught wind of the recipe. For most of my life, I didn’t care for (if not actively avoided) buckwheat. Something shifted 8 or 10 years ago and now I’m an avid fan of its distinctive, nutty [...]
Long gone are the days when--in an average week--we went out to dinner 4 or 5 times. As food editor of Seattle magazine and editor the Seattle Zagat guide, I had to keep up on every new opening, restaurant trends, what all the hot chefs were up to. Now I [...]
My first stab at making tarte tatin came back in high school and was a terrible flop. I'd never had tarte tatin before, and even without an existing point of reference I knew something wasn't right. Having just pulled that recipe out of my decades-old collection of recipe cards, clippings [...]
A friend and fellow food writer/cookbook author posted this a day or two ago: "For the next 2 weeks, I'm going to cook whatever I want and I'm not going to write it down, save the receipts, or set a timer. So there!" Which, to the average reader, might not [...]
I know it's not an original consideration, that music and cooking share some common threads. Improvisation, playing around, just making stuff up. Being free with the art form. There's a lot of that in both camps. And both also rely on building blocks, foundational skills that you need to master [...]
So many peaches! I was gifted a flat of the luxuriant organic peaches from Frog Hollow Farm a couple of weeks ago. The farm's east of San Francisco, but their peaches are--thankfully--made available at Metropolitan Markets in the Seattle area each summer. When that box landed in my kitchen, 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 [...]
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 [...]