Whitney Ricketts
The Uniter
WHITNEY RICKETTS’s roving New Guard dinner parties —inspired by BFF Michael Hebb’s One Pot series and achieved alongside local creatives Sarah and Damien Jurado and Joey Veltcamp—unite one unsung musician, one artist, and one chef and provide them a platform to shine. As an editor at Sasquatch Books, she’s lured familiar local food figures—Joshua Henderson of Skillet Street Food fame; food writer Anna Roth (a sometime Seattle Met contributor); Amy Pennington, the Go Go Green Garden green thumb—to bring their fresh new takes on food to the Sasquatch table. And on the side, Ricketts organizes fun fetes for new restaurants. If food is the heart of this city, which, let’s face it, it is, Ricketts has her finger squarely on the pulse.
She can’t live without her “iPhone, the ultimate enabler to my distractibility.”
Food fad that should fade “Crostini, the frumpiest of appetizers. Keep your stale bread away from my cheese!”
The Fresher Your Fowl the Less You Spend
Perusing her neighborhood supermarket KATHLEEN FLINN, author of the culinary-school memoir The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry, spied a woman loading her cart with a landfill’s worth of brightly labeled boxes. Intrigued, the Cordon Bleu–trained chef started trailing the woman through the aisles, observing (she prefers observing to stalking ) how she shopped. Eventually Flinn said hello, and she was soon showing the stranger how she could swap pricey prewrapped poultry pieces for a whole chicken chopped on the spot by the butcher, and save money by buying fresh foods in place of packaged.
And so, between penning a second food book and waiting to see how the Lifetime channel’s adaptation of Knife turns out, Flinn began teaching free one-on-one lessons to wean consumers from mass-market staples and enable them to prepare natural, nutritious meals while spending less. Today she’s taught more than 50 students and created a nonprofit school, Changing Courses, for which she is currently seeking a permanent space.
She can’t live without her “Trusty chef’s knife. And tongs. I use them for everything.”
The next big food thing will be “Canning, and not just among home cooks. I expect more hand-canned items on menus, too.”
Street Eats Spambassador
Roz Edison and Kamala Saxton
KAMALA SAXTON has had enough of that princess Portland wearing the street-food crown. “It’s time,” she says. Time, that is, for Seattle to claim that distinction as our own. Marination Mobile, her collab with Roz Edison, has done much to help that cause. From the moment the Korean—Hawaiian food truck took to the streets in June 2009 it was a hit; today 200 customers per day line up for Spam sliders and quesadillas perked up with kimchi, the spicy fermented cabbage concoction from Korea.
Food fad that should fade “I want the stuff on shelves today to sound like urban myth to the next generation. ‘Grandma, did people really eat stuff loaded with high fructose corn syrup? Ewwww!’ ”
The next big food thing will be “BBQ joints. In fact, any kind of joints. Places you pass by, and think, People in there are having a damn good time.”
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