Nosh Pit

What You Missed When You Missed Last Night’s Cookbook Author Roundtable

Aphrodisiacs, doughnuts, and the saddest oyster tale ever.

Posted by: James Ross Gardner on Oct 21, 2010 at 02:15PM 1 Comments

Non-chef Raymond Carver

An event that takes its name from a short story in which a fatal car crash sends a steering wheel into the sternum of a drunk teenager sets the drama bar pretty high. Based on premise alone, though, the bi-annual Kim Ricketts Book Events panel discussion with local cookbook authors, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Food,” doesn’t seem likely to plunge any deeper than a nick from a potato peeler.

Not so. Last spring’s iteration had nearly the entire audience salting its chardonnay with tears after an author read a tribute to her ailing father. Time before that, the crowd went fetal laughing at a writer’s description of a bodily fluid that, as a man, I didn’t even know existed.

The events have something else in common with Raymond Carver’s gorgeous, gin-soaked story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love:” People sitting around a table, drinking and recounting tales.

Last night, the impossible-not-to-like Amy Pennington (author of Urban Pantry) led a discussion with five cookbook scribes: Shauna Ahern (co-author of Gluten Free Girl and the Chef), chef/author Ethan Stowell (Ethan Stowell’s New Italian Kitchen), Greg Atkinson (Northwest Essentials), Kim O’Donnel (The Meatlover’s Meatless Cookbook), and Lara Ferroni ( Doughnuts ).

The highlights: Stowell’s secret seduction recipe (it involves a sea urchin); the origin of Ferroni’s lifelong love affair with doughnuts (family road trip, cramped VW Karmann Ghia, Dunkin Donuts pit stop, bliss); Ahern’s burnt-garlic-as-metaphor; the O’Donnel clan’s flirt with fate via high cholesterol and steak.

But it was the author of Northwest Essentials—which first hit shelves a decade ago and has re-emerged for a new audience to devour—who lifted the evening to literary heights worthy of the event’s name. In a chapter ostensibly about oysters, Greg Atkinson recounted the moment he learned that his brother had died. The prose sent the audience on Atkinson’s grief-stricken walk along a Bainbridge Island beach and back to a table where tears and oysters and memory melted into one.

And that, after the panel disassembled and disappeared into the mingling crowd—and we all shouldered out onto the sidewalk and pointed our cars home—is what we talked about.

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Tags: Cookbooks, Review, Food Events and Festivals, Ethan Stowell, Kim Ricketts

Taste Restaurant Holds Olive Oil Event

Including dinner, with olive oil cocktails.

Posted by: Kathryn Robinson on Sep 15, 2010 at 09:00AM 0 Comments

Taste at the Seattle Art Museum is holding a cool event to promote California olive oil.

Fran Gage, San Francisco author of The New American Olive Oil: Profiles of Artisan Producers and 75 Recipes, will lead a seminar on olive oil-making techniques and discuss food and olive oil pairings.

Then her dishes will be featured in a 4-course meal prepared by exec Craig Hetherington and ace pastry chef Lucy Damkoehler.

Dinner will be paired with an olive oil cocktail created by Taste mixologist, Duncan Chase.

The whole thing happens Saturday, Oct 2, starting at 3pm, with dinner at 6pm. Seminar plus tasting is $45; dinner $85. To reserve, call 206-903-5291.

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Tags: Cookbooks, Culinary Events, Taste Restaurant, Olive Oil

See Which Local Scribes Landed on Eater National’s Most Anticipated Cookbook List

Familiar names crop up in the blog’s must-buy roundup.

Posted by: Christopher Werner on Sep 08, 2010 at 11:36AM 0 Comments

Kim O’Donnel’s Meat Lover’s Meatless Cookbook comes out September 14.

Last week the editors at Eater National, a five-city-aggregate monster of a food blog, churned out a catalog of hot-ticket cookbooks soon to hit the shelves. The list runs 11 categories deep, each led by one (or in some cases, a couple) pubs the site’s “particularly excited about,” then several more honorable mentions. Yay for us, called out are several homegrown gastronomes:

Kim O’Donnel’s Meat Lover’s Meatless Cookbook is the first of the tomes you’ll see this fall. The September 14 release gets a mention in the “single subject” subhead for its vindication of vegetables and other animal-free meals. O’Donnel, a Canning Across America wonk, serves up 52 such menus in the book.

More flattery for Ethan Stowell: he lands on the “chefs, restaurants, and other famous food folk” list for his New Italian Kitchen, due out September 21. Stowell penned the ode to the Boot along with Leslie Miller.

Taking the top spot in the “professional and reference” category is the mammoth Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking, authored in part by Food Lovers’ fave Chris Young. He and Nathan Myhrvold and Maxime Bilet are compiling the insanely ambitious anthology (it’s 2,200 pages—zoiks!), which Young has described as “part cookbook, part reference work, part textbook, part philosophical statement.” Look for it in early December.

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Tags: Celebrity Chefs, Cookbooks

Coming Soon to a Bookshelf Near You: Meat Lover’s Meatless Cookbook

Kim O’Donnel’s tome releases in mid-September.

Posted by: Christopher Werner on Aug 03, 2010 at 03:12PM 0 Comments

Local scribe Kim O’Donnel tweeted the news her Meat Lover’s Meatless Cookbook is due out September 14, just a few days before she heads east to tout the instructional tome. In it, find 52 menus supplanting veggie viands for meat.

So far O’Donnel, the Canning Across America pioneer, has plans to hit the Seattle circuit in late October.

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Tags: Cookbooks

The Cookbooks of Our Lives: Fourth of July Edition

Martha Stewart’s pants inspire an indecisive cook to recreate the mac and cheese of her youth.

Posted by: Ariana Donalds on Jul 01, 2010 at 07:48AM 0 Comments

Baked macaroni and cheese.

Not everybody cooks, but everybody has a cookbook: The one you hid from your mom so she wouldn’t make that dreaded carrotloaf for supper, the one your sister splattered with flapjack batter the first time she was old enough to babysit.

In this series, Seattle Met staff share the cookbooks that have shaped their lives. First Betty Crocker helped arts editor Laura Dannen keep her relationship balanced. Then style editor Laura Cassidy shared some rare finds and senior editor James Ross Gardner saw his future in a single saucepan. Last time, restaurant critic Kathryn Robinson paid tribute to her mother with an inedible lasagne.

This week, just in time for the Fourth of July, nostalgia sends managing editor Ariana Donalds into the kitchen for homemade macaroni and cheese.

My relationship with cooking and food is fraught with indecision; it can take me longer to decide what to eat than to make the dish. And so cooking from scratch is something I am only occasionally inspired to do.

Most recently, I was inspired by the from-scratch queen Martha Stewart, who attended Good Housekeeping magazine’s 125th anniversary celebration last spring in shimmery lamé pants as though giving the world a sneak preview of her “Dancing with the Stars” audition. Those pants brought me back to the days of disco, when Hearst came out with the 1973 edition of the Good Housekeeping cookbook. The tome was, and still is, touted as a resource for beginning cooks. On special occasions such as Fourth of July barbecues and Thanksgiving dinners, my older sister and I would break out GH to help our mother cook. Mac and cheese was ALWAYS on the menu on holidays. And that was what Martha’s magic pants inspired me to make.

This is no ordinary macaroni and cheese. There is no squeezing of creamy cheese product or flicking of cheese powder remnants from a foil packet onto these semolina elbows. This is your mom’s mac and cheese, which takes hours to prepare because you’re making the rich béchamel cheese sauce with, that’s right, real honest to goodness cheese.

The nostalgia of preparing the dish is a huge part of the satisfaction I feel when I revisit this recipe. As a small child, I was trusted to take the caps off all of the seasonings and hand them to my mother to be added to the sauce. When I got a little older, and more coordinated, I started shredding the cheddar. As a preteen, I could fill the pot and boil the pasta; I could melt butter and toast seasoned breadcrumbs in a saucepan for the crunchy topping. (Tip: We mixed in half of the breadcrumbs with the drained pasta to keep it from sticking to itself, so the béchamel could more uniformly penetrate every pasta elbow nook and cranny.)

By high school, I chopped onions and garlic and could be trusted to slooooowly add milk to the béchamel. I was strong enough to drain the pasta and pour the cheese sauce from the heavy six-quart stock pot into the largest Corningware dish from our pantry. And by the time I graduated college, I was making the dish on my own. Now that I’m gainfully employed, I make it maybe once a year—and with as much butter and delicious, delicious cheese as are contained in this delightful dish, that’s probably just as well.

We quadrupled (yes, quadrupled) the recipe to feed our extended family and to ensure leftovers, because, truth be told, this mac and cheese is even better on reheat.

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Tags: Cookbooks, Cooking, Fourth of July, The Cookbooks of Our LIves, Good Housekeeping

Skillet’s Josh Henderson Is Coming Out With a Cookbook

The food whiz partners with local powerhouse publisher Sasquatch Books.

Posted by: Christopher Werner on Jun 03, 2010 at 01:42PM 0 Comments

I just was tuned into awesome news: Skillet ’s Josh Henderson is teaming up with local publishing house Sasquatch Books to pen a cooking tome.

Details are on the DL, but here’s what I do know: The book is slated for late spring of 2012. It will include recipes for food you’d find at the Skillet trailer and at his (also awesome news) forthcoming diner—retro, Americana stuff with a French flair. That diner is expected to open in early spring of 2011 on Capitol Hill.

This is the first publishing project for Henderson, whose roving airstream trailer revolutionized Seattle street food when it hit the pavement in 2007. His gourmet treatment of comfort food classics—poutine, burgers, lasagna—forced us to rethink the brick-and-mortar model, proving an always-on-the-move truck can sling mighty fine fare. That story alone packs book cred.

More details should surface in coming weeks, so make sure to stay tuned and check back for updates.

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Tags: Celebrity Chefs, Cookbooks, Locavore News

The Cookbooks of Our Lives

A cookbook with recipes that are inedible, and a value that is immeasurable.

Posted by: Kathryn Robinson on Mar 19, 2010 at 10:29AM 0 Comments

In this series, Seattle Met staff share the cookbooks that have shaped their lives. First Betty Crocker helped arts editor Laura Dannen keep her relationship balanced. Then style editor Laura Cassidy shared some rare finds, and senior editor James Ross Gardner saw his future in a single saucepan. This week, senior writer Kathryn Robinson remembers that sometimes the cookbooks we treasure most are the ones we should cook from least.

My husband is the food savant in our family, the one who can perform a quick inventory of an empty kitchen and whip a perfect dinner out of oatmeal, almond butter, and a dash of cream of tartar.

Me, I need a cookbook.

Professionally I can identify a successful meal at 60 paces. Personally I can assemble the edible components of a swell dinner party with a little notice. But that little-of-this, little-of-that sixth sense that true cooks possess—nope. This pretender needs instructions. And so I found myself a couple of weeks ago standing in my sister’s kitchen, pawing through her cookbooks. Being in the midst of a kitchen renovation—in part to give me a place to store mine—we stayed in her empty house for a week. They were due back from vacation and I wanted to greet them with a hot, edible thank-you.

She has a tall husband and two ravenous teenage athletes for sons, so I rejected as overly foofy a number of the books I treasured from my own collection—no thanks Ina Garten, no thanks Julee and Sheila. Never mind those silver palates. (Go check how many cookbooks you have in common with family members. Go on, do it. It’s uncanny.)

And then I saw it: The Ryther Cookbook, circa 1970-something. I had the same one, of course; all we siblings did. Our mother was a member of the same Ryther Guild from the day she left the UW sorority to the day she died—into their dotage she and the sorority sisters still called themselves The Campus Unit—and occasionally produced these cookbooks as fundraisers.

I pulled it down and scrolled through its familiar pages bound in cracking red plastic, its 70s housewife aesthetic all but fragrant on the page. Four different recipes contributed by four different familiar names, all for the same overnight cream-of-mushroom soup breakfast bake. Then there was the Pumpkin Chiffon Cake. Mary Ann’s Upside-Down Tamale Pie. Mock Green Goddess Dressing. And there was the classic “recipe” from my mom’s best friend: Table for two, 8pm, Canlis.

After careful consideration of which of Mom’s friends were likely to have contributed the least inedible recipes, I chose a hearty seafood lasagna, and was only momentarily put off when confronted with the abbreviation “1 ctr cottage cheese.” Hmm…container? To hell with specificity! This was the 1970s, when a container was a container! As I stood in the dairy aisle pondering the exciting explosion 40 years have brought to the container industry, I cast myself back to those days, trying hard to remember the size of the cottage cheese containers that used to propagate like bunnies in our Frigidaire. Oh yeah, I remembered. That size.

As we did dishes later, my sister poised the half-empty pan over the garbage and blurted, “Um…would you be hurt? Because that was…just…spectacularly…bad.” We burst out laughing, and she took the cookbook and scrawled in the margin beside the recipe: “Really SUCKS!!”

Then she lovingly tucked the cookbook back into its hole on the shelf, and I realized with a pang how priceless a collection of awful recipes can be. Priceless as the dented flour sifter, or the nicked garden trowel. Or a thimble for a finger much more delicate than my own.

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Tags: DIY cooking, Cookbooks, Cooking, Family and Relationships

The Cookbooks of Our Lives

A breakup leaves Senior Editor James Ross Gardner with a Joy-less home.

Posted by: James Ross Gardner on Feb 18, 2010 at 02:05PM 3 Comments

Not everybody cooks, but everybody has a cookbook: The one you hid from your mom so she wouldn’t make that dreaded carrotloaf for supper, the one your grandpa splattered with flapjack batter that Sunday morning when your parents left him to babysit.

In this series, Seattle Met staff share the cookbooks that have shaped their lives. First Betty Crocker helped Arts Editor Laura Dannen keep her relationship balanced. Then Style Editor Laura Cassidy shared some rare finds. This week, senior editor James Ross Gardner sees his future in a single saucepan.

I barely noticed their existence until they were gone—out the door one crisp January afternoon along with the couch, shelves, the wide-screen TV. The collection had included the Moosewood Cookbook, Rachael Ray’s Classic 30-Minute Meals, and the Joy of Cooking. My girlfriend kept the books in a drawer, but they emerged nightly to fulfill a pact we made five years earlier: I cleaned the kitchen and dishes and she, because she loved it, cooked.

I had never enjoyed food more. Elaborate bean salads from Moosewood. A roasted chicken smothered in garlic from Joy. Tomato, spinach, and potato soup, pita bread tacos, or grilled mushroom and cheese sandwiches from Rachael Ray. Sometimes she read out loud, theatrically, from Joy of Cooking—performing a hilarious parody of Julia Child, as if Julia Child had been from the Caribbean, which my girlfriend was.

I didn’t love doing the dishes, but I had next to no culinary skills, which was an ongoing joke between us. Once, as a gag gift she bought me A Cookbook for a Man Who Probably Only Owns One Saucepan.

Watching her experiment with a new recipe, listening to the clatter of pans, then sitting down with her to eat—it was my favorite part of every day.

Then something happened. Jobs with unpredictable hours happened. Grad school happened. We made different new friends in a new city. This city. We were rarely home at the same time. Finally we decided, tearfully, that we weren’t going to be in the same home at all. I felt guilty. Take anything, I said. Anything you want. Then I made sure I wasn’t there when it all went away.

I returned to the half empty apartment after seeing a movie. The film’s main character was born an old man and became younger with time, regressing until he was a baby, an infant reliant on others. Things have to change. The hollow apartment echoed back my words.

I surveyed the kitchen. In the drawer below the one that had held the cookbooks there was a single item. A saucepan. I had a lot of work to do.

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Tags: Celebrity Chefs, Cookbooks,

The Cookbooks of Our Lives

Things get a little geeky in Style Editor Laura Cassidy’s cookbook collection.

Posted by: Laura Cassidy on Jan 26, 2010 at 11:00AM 4 Comments

Not everybody cooks, but everybody has a cookbook: The one you hid from your mom so she wouldn’t make that dreaded carrotloaf for supper, the one your first live-in girlfriend bought you—then took back when she bailed on you for that douchey guy at her office.
In this series, Seattle Met staff share the cookbooks that have shaped their lives. Last week Arts Editor Laura Dannen talked about Betty Crocker basics. This time, Laura Cassidy, Seattle Met Style Editor and overseer of all things wedding, breaks down her cookbook shelf and shares some rare finds.

My cookbooks can be classified into three groups:

1.Reference This group includes Alice Waters’ vegetable bible, an old, old paperback copy of James Beard’s fish preparation methods, Traunfeld’s herb recommendations, etc.

2. Inspirational I’ll probably never make anything from that 1978 Judie Geise book The Northwest Kitchen, but I love it as a historical artifact of our city’s food culture, and when I’m bored with my usual repertoire, instructions for Dandelion Salad Mimosa — not to mention George Tsutakawa’s accompanying sumi drawings — always lead to something delicious.

3. Healthy We sometimes call the house cuisine Pottery Teacher’s Potluck. To many that will sound boring and bland, but I love rich, flavorful, seasonal meals that I don’t have to feel guilty about. This section is by far my favorite and it gets pretty geeky — texts on the energetic properties of food from a Chinese medicine perspective (Paul Pitchford’s bible is indispensable) mix with the Moosewood collection and other 80s-era world/veggie/macro-biotic/Diet-for-a-Small-Planet type stuff. Then again, if I’m past deadline or late for a meeting, it could be because I fell into a hole at Tastespotting or some online compendium of Mark Bittman salads, and I can’t get out …

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Tags: DIY cooking, Cookbooks, Cooking, Health Food

The Cookbooks of Our Lives

Seattle Met staff serve up the recipe tomes they relish. This week: Betty C’s basics helps keep things balanced in the kitchen.

Posted by: Laura Dannen on Jan 19, 2010 at 02:00PM 8 Comments

Not everybody cooks, but everybody has a cookbook: The one you hid from your mom so she wouldn’t make that dreaded carrotloaf for supper, the one your first live-in girlfriend bought you—then took back when she bailed on you for that jerky accountant at her office.
In this series, Seattle Met staff share the cookbooks that have shaped their lives. This week: Arts Editor Laura Dannen on Betty Crocker and the importance of equal partnership in the kitchen.

I don’t cook. I mean, I do, to survive. Everyone has to know how to make pasta, grilled cheese, and soup to get through grad school. But I don’t cook for fun. I eat for fun all the time. Love eating. But I enjoy it much more when someone cooks it for me, like my fiancé. His perfectly crafted breakfast burrito is one of the reasons I’m marrying him (just one).

You know the old saying? It’s not “the way to a woman’s heart is through her stomach.” I don’t want my fiancé to resent me 30 years from now, realizing while cracking an egg on breakfast burrito #1,501 that I’ve never made him a breakfast burrito. That could be bad. So I’m tiptoeing into the kitchen with a copy of Betty Crocker’s Cooking Basics: Recipes and Tips to Cook with Confidence (2nd edition, $17).

There are 100 recipes for the “meals you most want to cook”—chicken enchiladas, pad thai, meatloaf, cheesy baked rigatoni—and every dish comes with a beautiful full-page photo. Not those intimidating, rose-petals-garnishing-the-steak photos, but actual “I could do that, and it looks delicious” photos. This isn’t Cooking for Dummies—I had that book in college, and it taught me how to microwave a potato. It’s one step up, like having your mom in the kitchen, pointing out when an avocado is ripe, then giving you an easy and tasty recipe for guacamole. Cooking Basics lives up to its name with other words of wisdom, including a list of essential equipment for your kitchen (great for a couple planning a registry), how to pick fresh fruits and vegetables, food safety tips, cooking techniques, how to make a Thanksgiving dinner, etc.

The best part about this book? It’s so accessible, my fiancé and I end up cooking together. We recommend the enchiladas.

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Tags: Cookbooks, Cooking, Recipes,