Salad & Dressings 
How to Become a Poacher
My enthusiasm for cooking is waning and it’s not only because I don’t want to heat up the kitchen. Anyone who lives in the Northwest knows that when summer finally arrives, we NEED to go outdoors and take full advantage of our beautiful, long sunny days. There will be plenty of time for more serious [...]
Full o’ Beans, Wax & Green
My grandmother said that I was full of beans whenever she thought I was stretching the truth or misbehaving. Which, of course, wasn’t that often.
I’m full of beans at the moment and more on the way. I went on a bean-planting binge in May and planted four vines along with that many bush beans. What [...]
Tuna & Bean Italian Summer Salad
I knew that I liked both tuna and beans. Separately. But epiphanies happen and in Venice last spring we had tuna and cannellini beans together in a salad for lunch. Loved it. Insalata di tonno e fagioli. My Italian Connection again. Our friend Mac made it for our lunch one day just before we headed [...]
Emmer Farro Salad All Dressed Up In Fresh Herbs
Herbs in the garden set the scene for culinary magic. In this case emmer farro is part of the wizardry.
When I planted an herb garden just outside the back door a dozen years ago I had no idea how much it would simplify and influence our cooking, the ability to have what [...]
Wilted Lettuce Salad, Wicked Good
Lettuce loves it when it rains every other day, loves the cool, it dances a jig and flaunts bedazzling arrays of emerald and lime green, dark purple and bronze. The lettuce patch shares a little something with the slugs – any, that is, who survive Bob’s headlamped nighttime slug patrols – and still there’s plenty. [...]
Perfectly Hard-Boiled
Until you’ve eaten a couple of hard-boiled eggs tough enough to bounce off the pavement and tinged with grayish green, you might think that boiling an egg is no big deal.
There seem to be a variety of approaches to the perfectly hard-boiled egg, one that isn’t overdone and has none of that greenish [...]
So Fines Herbes
Tender herbs are popping up all over my garden and it’s making me positively giddy with excitement about spring even though it doesn’t officially arrive until March 20. Our mild El Nino-influenced winter has given the garden a jump-start and it’s gotten me out earlier than ever in anticipation of a long growing season. At [...]
Perfect Protein Quinoa
Growing up on a ranch in eastern Washington, quinoa never entered the culinary picture, nor couscous, rarely rice, not much pasta either. But potatoes aplenty. My father and grandfather grew them which I guess explains it. Food cultures vary from family to family, regionally, and internationally, and time makes a difference too, food fads come [...]
Bring Pears to the Party
Put a pear in a red dress and she’ll dance all night long. And she’s got moves.
We love her decisively pear-shaped bod and the way she fans the culinary flame at the swivel of her ample hip. Party animal. Local pears are in town for the holidays offering feastworthy fare from salads to chutney to [...]
Hats off to Johnny: A PNW Waldorf Salad
Johnny the vagabond meets the highfalutin Waldorf and together they make a mean PNW salad.
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The romanticized Johnny Appleseed, Johnny Chapman, was a real appleseed-totin’-plantin’-canoe-travelin’ eccentric with a passion for apples. At first he was as wild as the seeds he carried, wrote Michael Pollan in Botany of Desire (published 2001). [...]
