Kitchen Tricks: Tomato Paste

Sometimes I presume that everyone does all the same little tricks in the kitchen that help make our cooking lives easier and more efficient. Like laying down a dampened paper towel under a cutting board to keep it from slipping around on the counter (though my no-skid KitchenAid cutting board makes that unnecessary). Or using the [...]

A Market Basket Cook-Off

What a phenomenal Saturday morning it was yesterday. It was such an honor to be asked to judge the Ready Set Go…Cook (friendly) competition at the University District Farmers Market, an annual affair that pits two Seattle chefs against each other using their pick of items from market vendors. My cohorts on the judging panel [...]

A Love for Endive

I fell in love with endive while at cooking school in France, one of many ingredients I’d had little interaction with before embarking on that adventure. Among salad greens, endive has a bit more character and flavor than everyday lettuce, not as bitter as radicchio, and is more versatile than many other greens. As I [...]

Dinner at Home: Freestyle Portuguese

“Come over for dinner tomorrow night, why don’t you?” I asked a friend Friday. “Sure, sounds great. I’ll bring the wine, I was recently at a tasting of Portuguese wines and have a couple of bottles to share,” she tells me.
Oooh. Portuguese. That sounded like fun.
My plan for dinner had been simply to follow whatever [...]

In Praise of Fat

Once again, being a food writer–while not the most highly paid profession going–proved itself for the small perks that come along the way. Today it was a box from Ten Speed Press which held in it a copy of the new cookbook from my pal Jennifer McLagan, the Torontonian who penned the awesome (and James [...]

Dinner at Home: Grilled Whole Chicken

Great minds think alike, don’t you agree? My food-writing cohort and friend Nancy Leson spelled out a few days ago–in delicious detail–the steps she (and her husband Mac) uses to turn out perfect whole chicken roasted on the backyard grill. I’d served at home last Saturday night very much the same thing. Minus the Lawry’s Salt [...]

In My Kitchen: Tools

Not long ago, a friend emailed asking for some input on knives for his kitchen. He wasn’t happy with the last set that he’d bought and wanted to know what brand I might recommend for replacements. I suddenly felt that my “serious foodie” façade might crumble around me. I didn’t have a succinct answer, couldn’t rattle [...]

Dem’s Big Clams

This post proves that one person’s culinary curiosity is another person’s comfort food. Yesterday I was shopping for lamb shanks at the combo meat/seafood counter my (very) friendly neighborhood grocery store. (I’d tell you what I did with the shanks, but afraid it’s for a magazine article later this year, along with a bunch of other holiday [...]

Sunchokes, Part Two

As promised in a post last week, I picked up some sunchokes at the Full Circle Farm stand at the West Seattle Farmers Market Sunday. It follows in the heels of an event I attended where Andrew Stout from Full Circle joked that everyone in the room needed to develop five new recipes for sunchokes (no [...]