Cooking at Home

It's a funny thing, coming home with a suitcase full of treasures from a delightful adventure abroad. The less common the destination and the more distinctive the treats acquired, the more nerve-wracking it can be to decide when will be the ideal/perfect/best moment to enjoy them. From this fall's explorations in Portugal and the northwest corner of Spain, I came home with a couple dozen tins of exquisite seafood (sardines, tuna, octopus), for instance, much of it from this amazing ...

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 my 2014 would wrap up fully engrossed in oysters, but that's how it played out. By complete coincidence, two Seattle publishers reached out to me about oyster-related projects. The first, an article for Seattle Magazine, appeared in the December issue and covers both the current boom in oyster bars ...

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 a sweet tooth. And ...

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 the swallows back to Capistrano, an event that signifies the general launch of key commercial salmon fishing season ...

Seattleites may not know it, but right in our backyard is one of the country's (actually, the world's) top purveyors of that darling of the kitchen: gourmet salts. SaltWorks up in Woodinville has been in this business since 2001. Its earliest inception is one of those classic entrepreneurial stories of a one-time hobby taking over someone's life to the point that there was little choice but to open a business given the hobby's growing demand for space. The entrepreneurs in this case are ...

Authors aren't supposed to have favorite book projects, or so I've heard, just as a mother's expected to not profess having a favorite kid. And of course I do have a special affection for all the books I've worked on over the years. But just between you and me, Salty Snacks was a particular favorite. Not ...

Right after the new year, I headed back to Denver, the home of Craftsy, to shoot another class for this fun, dynamic platform for those who love to get creative with anything from cake decorating to quilting. And cooking is certainly a most delicious way to get creative! This new class reflects my lifelong love of all things salty -- the focus of the lessons in Homemade Salty Snacks (this link ...

It doesn't matter where we were. It wasn't the restaurant or the server or the menu that was at fault. The calendar did it. February 14 to be exact. It was a decade or so ago and my husband and I had gone out to a restaurant we'd been to many times in the past, and have been back to since. Not a fancy place; a casual, popular spot with very good food. But there's something charged about that evening, ...

You may have heard this reflection before: that stocks are so integral to cooking, the French use the word fond, meaning "foundation," for most stocks used in the kitchen. Fond de veau (veal), fond de volaille (poultry), fond de boeuf (beef). They're the base for countless recipes, including soups, stews, sauces and that old-school showpiece, the aspic (or, more elegantly, gelée in French). Which explains why various stocks were among the first things we were taught to perfect in the ...

My new class has been up on Craftsy for just a couple of weeks, which you can check out here (bonus: that link includes a 25% discount for you if you opt to buy the class, though you can check out a preview there and may find some other things of creative interest on the site). It was so great to have a ...