food

Making Mochi

There’s a whole complicated process around making mochi that I can’t explain properly. I remember something about a mallet and a lot of pounding, and how it’s some unfortunate person’s role to flip the mochi between swings of the mallet. There’s a lot of pounding and the end result is something that’s a lot like …


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Chow Town: McMinnville, Oregon

McMinnville has a darned cute downtown, with brick facades and those tschotke shops your mom likes, and, for some reason, a bronze statue of Ben Franklin – you can sit right next to him on the bench, button your shirt up, ladies, I hear Franklin was quite the lech, but even better, there’s some fine …


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Soup Swap? Souptacular!

National Soup Swap Day 2009

Founder Knox Gardner points at the National Soup Swap map.

The original soup swap legend starts as follows: “In the dark times of the woolly sweater, nothing warms the soul as much as a bowl of home made soup…” Or, you know, something like that. Though it’s not so much the soul that’s warmed as the heart and the belly.

Soup Swap this year was the largest I’ve ever attended. A whopping 22 soups appeared in the middle of Dave and Carrie’s perfect new kitchen. The swapping was fierce and competitive as well known chefs in our midst delivered bribes of chocolate, tapioca, and impossible to resist home made bread.


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Book Review: The Man Who Ate the World

Disclaimer: The folks at Holt send me review copies. I don’t always love the books, but I love getting them.

I don’t know what millefeuille is. Or veloute. Or charcroute. This tells you how much I know about fancy cooking. I wouldn’t go out of my way to eat that weird food that’s made by chemistry – foams and dry ice and vacuum sealing and the like don’t interest me, not enough to pay for them, that’s for sure. But I love to cook and, as the scale will confirm, I also love to eat. So it was with a hefty portion of envy that I digested Jay Rayner’s new book The Man Who Ate the World: In Search of the Perfect Dinner

I think I’d like Jay Rayner. Like Anthony Bourdain, he’s acutely aware of the good fortune he has in his line of work. He eats dinner and gets paid to do so. But he’s got none of Bourdain’s macho edge. There’s a funny scene in the book where Rayner and Bourdain are both at  Tokyo’s infamous fish market, and Rayner makes Bourdain’s crew out for something closely resembling a motorcycle gang. But that’s not what the book is about.


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North Seattle Noshing: Grateful Bread

It used to be I thought that any place north of the Montlake Bridge was full of sea monsters, I’d not venture there without the Sea Witch at my side to protect me with spells and amulets. I’m long over my provincial hangups, plus, people act like our West Seattle home is somewhere beyond Hawaii, …


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