Salad & Dressings 
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). [...]
A Baby with a Big Heart
It turns out that baby artichokes aren’t really babies but fully-grown small varieties instead. I hope I’m not the last person to make this realization. I still love them but I’m a real sucker for baby vegetables. They seem so perfect in their smallness. For many years now I’ve had a fantasy of planting a [...]
Green Beans & Julia’s Salad Niçoise
The livin’ is pretty easy at the moment with mid-summer vegetables in full swing. Green beans, for example, are like a pair of summer sandals, culinarily speaking – they’re laid back, slip easily into any meal, and, like a comfy sandal, they make you feel good (vitamin C, iron, protein and potassium).
A couple of [...]
Mix ‘n Match Summer Salads
This hot weather is enough to drive even a southern girl like me out of the kitchen around dinner time. My solution is to fix salads — lots and lots of salads. Buy your basics from the farmers market or better yet, grow your own. Add a couple of exotic accessories and you [...]
Handmade Dressings for Salad
I swear I’m going on the road to promote homemade/handmade salad dressing. Not a lot of hoopla, no sponsors that I can imagine, just me on my bandwagon. And this would be my plug: forgo the processed stuff and make salad dressing because it’s tasty and because it’s a small action toward sustainable living.
Annie, and [...]
Tabbouleh & Salmon, Summertime on a Plate
Tabbouleh from the middle east meets salmon from the PNW and summer romance begins, together they make sweet and local dinner music. Good beat, you can dance to it and it tastes delicious. Cook on.
This is the moment for herbs. In warm, dry conditions, they flourish. Actually, it’s false to characterize herbs as having a [...]
Spreading Fava Love
Fava love may not equal our devotion to tomatoes or strawberries, but they’re in the running, for their flavor and remarkable bright green stature, and even for the intent required to prepare them.
This is slow food. Prepare to be nurtured – it will take time, more than we’ve become accustomed to. Shelling and [...]
