Eat All About It

Jeff Koehler is technically a native son, but Barcelona’s got him now — and, lucky us, it’s been his home base for travels around the Mediterranean to write about food. Don’t miss him in a rare Seattle appearance at The Elliott Bay Book Company at 2 p.m. Saturday (Nov. 14) to discuss his latest book, Rice Pasta Couscous. It’s a cross-cultural look at those staple ingredients, with Koehler sharing recipes from a broad swath of kitchens, from Syria to Valencia to Sardinia. To me, the stories in the recipe headnotes, the short descriptions above the recipes, are as vivid as the foods. I can picture digging into the Alexandria-Syle Amber Rice With Fish in the fishermen’s quarter of that Egyptian city, or admiring the “white-washed Tunisian village that clings to the cliffs” where he ate Lamb Couscous With Pistachios, Almonds, Pine Nuts, and Golden Raisins. I don’t ever expect to make Neretva-Style Eel and Frog Brodet, but I like the recipe anyway for the reply Koehler got when he asked his Croatian host how many frogs should be on the ingredient list: “As many as you can catch.”

I interviewed Koehler here on Al Dente Blog about his cookbook, his travels, and how you really make perfect couscous.

The Steamy Kitchen book tour is coming to Seattle this week, and you’ve got three chances to meet author Jaden Hair.

I asked Jaden last week how Seattle wound up as a tour stop for her book on “101 Asian Recipes Simple Enough For Tonight’s Dinner,” in these days of pinched book budgets. Are we (I hope) such a hotbed of fish sauce, lemongrass, and soba noodles that we were a natural audience?  She told me it’s because she had so much fun on her last trip here.

You can find Jaden from 4:30 p.m. to 6 p.m. Monday (Nov. 9) at the Admiral Metropolitan Market (2320 42nd Ave S.W.), then at the University Bookstore (4326 University Way N.E.) at 7 p.m. the same night for a book signing and food. On Tuesday, Nov. 10, she’s teaching a cooking class at 6 p.m. at Sur La Table in Kirkland (cost: $69, registration here).

My interview with Jaden is up here on Al Dente Blog, but here are some other highlights from our conversation:

One was that her speaking voice strikes the same fun, casual, best-friend tone as her blog. That’s hard to do. But it should work that way, Jaden said, because the blog is literally her voice. She writes using voice recognition software, talking through her posts instead of typing, for every part except the recipes. “I hate to write,” she said. 

She’s worked hard to get where she is today, moving in just two years from beginning blogger to author and photographer and TV personality. And now, she isn’t sure what to do next. “I’m at the point where I love what I do so much,” she said. The next big career step would be a regular TV show (she’s talked with the Food Network), one where “I would have a boss again,” she said. “I would have an editor, a producer, all those people who have influence on what I do. I don’t know if I’m quite ready for that yet. I want to sit back and relax and enjoy this. I can pick up my kids anytime from school, and they can hang out with me at home. If I want to cook pork chops on TV tomorrow, I can do it. I don’t have anyone telling me it has to be this style or this way.”

I also asked if her relationship with readers has changed as she’s grown from an unknown to a blog-star with a newspaper column and more Twitter followers than Ruth Reichl. Does that change her relationship with new readers, are people seeking her out now as a potentially powerful mentor rather than a blog buddy? 

She is getting a lot more requests from writers and chefs, asking how to promote their products, or saying something like “My publisher asked me to start a blog.” She tells them that blogging and Twitter have to be things they do every day. “It’s like, you don’t schedule time to brush your teeth, it’s something you do. You can’t say “I’m going to tweet for an hour tomorrow at two.” If you want to be successful at blogging, at promoting something, it’s got to be part of your life…it’s got to be all, or don’t bother.”

She can’t always answer questions one-on-one, but she was glad to do a recent phone-in forum with the International Association of Culinary Professionals, and said she’ d like to do more group talks like that. “I want to share the information (I have), because I got started because people were generous with their time with me.”

When Cindy Mushet and her daughter Bella came to town to talk about Cindy’s new book, Baking Kids Love, I couldn’t resist asking them to come by my house and do some baking with my own kid. My 7-year-old does like cooking with me, but, with a professional in the kitchen, I wondered if we could take on a more challenging project than usual. And we did. I wrote about it here on Al Dente Blog, along with the recipe for the meringue cookies the kids whipped up and piped into Halloween-style “rattling bones and fingers”. The cookies can be made into any shape you like, though — alphabet letters seem like a natural favorite. Here’s a little video showing some of the highlights of our after-school cooking lesson. It struck me that it’s always easier to learn new techniques with experienced helpers — even when one of them is only in middle school.

Ivy Manning’s Farm to Table Cookbook made my top 10 list last year, but I was surprised by how little I heard of it elsewhere. It’s a combination of original dishes and recipes contributed by some of the Northwest’s top chefs (farro from John Sundstrom, sorrel-fig salad from Maria Hines, and so on). I liked its handful of primers — telling you the difference between Black Krim and Cherokee Purple tomatoes, for instance — and advice on how to select less-common ingredients, from ramps to lobster mushrooms. Some commenters on the Amazon site found the recipes too complex, but I liked the stretch (and easy counterpoints like the “Versatile Recipe For The Hearty Greens You Don’t Know What To Do With“).

In short, I thought the book was underappreciated, and I was glad to see this month that Manning was back with a new book, The Adaptable Feast: Satisfying Meals for the Vegetarians, Vegans, and Omnivores at Your Table. I think I’m seeing a convergence zone around this issue, cooking in a way that reduces meat consumption but provides options for those who love meat. I wrote about that at the Christian Science Monitor here, (and look out for Kim O’Donnel’s coming cookbook), and talked with Manning about how she adapted her recipes over at Al Dente, here. 

Which food writers or cooks are underappreciated in your book?

Absolutes almost always cause trouble in the food world, whether it’s “always eat organic” (but what if I can’t always afford it?) or “never eat carbs”. I’ve been glad to see some recent bookspromoting a more manageable middle ground, most recently, Almost Meatless by Joy Manning and Tara Mataraza Desmond. Today I’m joining a virtual potluck for the book, where food writers from around the country are making an Almost Meatless dish and sharing it online (look for a list of contributors at the end of this post).

The book champions several ways to eat healthier and improve the environment. We all know we need to eat less meat — but if you can’t go cold turkey (no pun intended), why not use just a few ounces of paper-thin rib roast for a homemade shabu-shabu, instead of grilling a whole steak? Or maybe spread a single chicken breast out over four servings for your buttermilk chicken salad, or, for the die-hard, at least cut the beef in your Philly Cheesesteak with malted portobellos? 

Compromise is involved, yes, but this is not wishy-washy dining. The authors state baldly that the majority of American beef and dairy cows “probably lived very unhappy lives,” and recommend ways to find animal products you can feel better about eating. With recipes for homemade mayonnaise and carbonaras, they also put numbers on a question that’s vexed me for some time, the odds of getting salmonella from a raw egg. (They put it at 1 in 20,000. “You are more likely to get in a car wreck or become the victim of a violent crime than you are to get sick from a bad egg. Really.”)  

For my potluck dish, I decided to move away from meat (there are also recipes using minimal amounts of lamb and pork and turkey), looking at parts of the book that dealt with eggs and fish. Representing the Northwest, I had to try the Roasted Salmon Citrus Salad. The recipe header lets readers know that salmon is a fine addition to the table — but to “take care in selecting our sources for the sake of sustaining the species.” If you grill the salmon outside instead of roasting it, it’s a great dish for our record-breaking heat wave, a tangy, crunchy, flavor-packed plate. And, remember that middle ground? I may have used wild-caught salmon, but it did cross my mind how few hardcore locavores would be on board with the dressing of limes and mangoes. I think that’s OK.  Here’s the recipe:

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Fellow dessert lovers, who among us has not wondered about the technical differences between a crisp and a crumble, a galette or a buckle? Enter Rustic Fruit Desserts, a collaboration between James Beard winner Cory Schreiber and Portland baker Julie Richardson, a book whose usefulness is clear straight from the introduction, where the authors describe each pastry-fruit iteration. (A galette? It’s a free-form tart that does not require a pan. A buckle has cake batter poured in a single layer, with berries added to the batter.)

In summer’s heat, flipping through the pages of their seasonal desserts makes me want to load up on ingredients for Raspberry-Red Currant Cobbler or Stone Fruit Slump. The recipes are straightforward, but irresistable– a bite of ginger here, candied rhubarb ribbons there, flavor combinations like plum and vanilla, peach and caramel. 

 The pair will be in town Wednesday, July 29, for a Cooks & Books event, with the exceptional Neil Robertson cooking up their recipes. They answered some questions in advance via e-mail, including my unusually impolite inquiry about whether the “rustic” of their title could properly be considered a code word for “ugly”. (Read about that in my Christian Science Monitor post here.)

Here’s what they had to say. And if you want to nibble on more than just their words, tickets to the event are online here:

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Of course having children changes our lives in fundamental ways. But what writers so often fail to remember are all the ways children don’t change us.

So if you knew Matthew Amster-Burton’s writing before his daughter, Iris, was born, I can tell you he’s still one of the sharpest, funniest food writers around. He operates with a scientist’s sense of kitchen adventure, a well-rounded palate (know anyone else who enrolled in a Thai language class because he liked Thai food?), and a well-calibrated bullshit meter for his own foibles as well as those of others. All these things — smarts, humor, perspective — seem to vanish when otherwise sane people start writing about children and food. That’s what makes Amster-Burton’s first book, Hungry Monkey: A Food-Loving Father’s Quest to Raise an Adventurous Eater, a find that should be required packaging with every high chair. 

The subtitle talks about raising an adventurous eater, but the book is mainly common sense perspective for anyone who plans to raise any kind of eater. At childbirth classes, I would hand out the chapter where he talks about the “terrible lie” that most new parents hear about breastfeeding (i.e., that it’s automatic and instantly fulfilling.) For any new parent investing in a blender and baby food purees, I would share Amster-Burton’s recipes for pad thai and bibimbap. And for anyone who doubts whether 5-year-old Iris can be for real, or whether a kid who eats what adults eat  is as charming a literary creation as Sal or Frances, I would refer them to Boom Noodle. That was Iris’s restaurant of choice when I asked Amster-Burton if I could meet them both for lunch, and it’s where Iris politely requested a bento box of “crunchy shrimp,” while my own 2-year-old scarfed down his first plate of okonomiyaki. (Next I want to see if she’ll take my boy to Jerry Traunfeld’s Poppy, her next favorite.)

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If you read this blog you probably already love food, and if you already love food, you probably already look for work by Jonathan Kauffman and Jess Thomson. Just in case you needed another push, though, Seattle Weekly writer Kauffman, already a recipient of a James Beard Award, just won the industry’s other big honor, the International Association of Culinary Professionals’ Bert Greene Award. He took it for this story on “What I Saw, And Ate, At The Pig Sacrifice.” Kauffman was not able to accept in person, as he’s eating his way around Korea this week. Hogwash writer Thomson was a finalist in the essay category for her gently descriptive, stingingly perceptive piece on nettles in Leite’s Culinaria; she was not there to celebrate the honor because she’s got another rather major life event in progress.

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When I first picked up Coffee Love, the new book by Daniel Young, I figured readers would welcome its ’round-the-world anecdotes and succinct nuts and bolts overviews: Storing and roasting beans, selecting a coffeemaker, steaming milk, and so forth. After reading it through, though, I — perhaps slow on the uptake here — realized it’s a resource for making the sort of coffee drinks at home that are usually reserved for coffeehouses or bars or ethnic restaurants. Even for those with home espresso machines (required for some, but not all, of the book’s 50 recipes), it’s rare to find a home kitchen brewing up anything more complicated than a cappucino. If at-home baristas have been waiting for recipes, now they can do anything from a Thai iced coffee to a flambeed Cafe Brulot. 

Young, former restaurant critic for the New York Daily News, kindly answered questions on the book by e-mail from his home in London. Don’t miss his message to Seattle readers and Starbucks haters, at the end:

Q: As we Seattleites like to think the coffee universe revolves around us, I’m glad to see you divide the world (in the book) into pre-Starbucks, Starbucks, and post-Starbucks. But it does beg the question: Where do you see the specialty coffee trade going from here?

A: If the industry follows the geeks, I think the next wave is lowtech.  Up until now, everybody wanted a coffee at home like the one they got in their favorite coffee shop.  Soon they will want a cup at the coffee shop like the one they can have at home. There has been too much coffee technology, too much automation, too much hype about $10,000 brewers. And there’s almost a stigma to the pod machines that do everything except harvest the beans. I see a return to the hands-on, coddling-the-coffee experience that’s possible with a pour-though manual cone filter (Chemex, Melitta), a Japanese vac pot (siphon brewer) or even a Thai coffee “sock” (muslin bag filter).

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