Seattle Local Food

Sometime in the last few years I realized you could use greens other than basil for pesto.  It was a revelation.  Arugula, sorrel, or any stronger-flavored leafy green works beautifully. Nettles, which we talked about in the last post, are no exception.  The pesto has a rich, earthy flavor and is dark green. The only [...]

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The nettles are up!  In addition to dandelion greens, I’ve been harvesting nettles and making delicious things out of them. Nettle, or stinging nettle, is a general term for the genus Urtica, an invasive species with painful little stingers and medicinal properties.  You may have learned what nettles are the hard way, brushing against them [...]

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I haven’t been following the Olympics.  Not out of any lack of love for winter sports; I think they’re gorgeous, but I don’t have a TV and have been pretty busy writing a thesis and keeping up with grad school. So I was surprised today when my cousin mentioned over lunch that McDonalds was a [...]

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Along with the early spring, we’re getting lots of greens popping up ahead of schedule. I’m posting a simple recipe for dandelion greens today because I know a lot of people who are aware the greens are edible, but unsure how to use them or when to pick them, or simply never get around to [...]

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Sometime in February I usually start thinking about the fruit I put into my freezer last summer, and how I’d better start using it because fresh fruit will start appearing in the markets in just four months. February is just long enough from last summer, of course, that the fruit tastes extra good.  I was [...]

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I have an article about pastrami and David Sax’s book Save The Deli up at jew-ish.com today.  The beginning is: You know the old joke about Jewish holidays, how most of them follow the narrative, “They tried to kill us; they failed; let’s eat!” But I’m no longer sure which pillar of Jewish tradition this [...]

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Thanks to Jessica for sending this one in.  Local forager Langdon Cook is speaking tomorrow at Wide World Books and Maps on how to improvise delicious recipes out of wild, foraged foods, particularly those of our region. Considering the early spring weather we’re having, you’ll be able to try out some of these ideas right [...]

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Really good quiche should be creamy and moist, much less solid than standard scrambled eggs or frittata. The secrets are: cream and air. To make a creamy quiche filling that will fit in the crust of a standard sized pie plate, you only need two eggs, or three if it’s a really deep dish. I [...]

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Bone broth or stock, as I mentioned yesterday, feels like a perfect cure for colds and aches, especially on a wet winter day. There are commercially available stocks, and some are decent, but I make my own for a few reasons. First, homemade tastes better. Second, it’s full of nutrients from long-simmered bones of animals [...]

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Today is grey and rainy, the kind of Northwest winter day I’ll spend making a pot of bone broth while working and fighting off a cold. But this weather hasn’t been the norm lately. With apologies to our snowed-in friends on the East Coast, we’ve been getting a stretch of gorgeous, sunny weather lately, and [...]

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I’ve wanted to do this for two years. It finally happened. In January, I hosted my first Edible Literature Potluck. The idea is simple: Bring a dish, ingredient or drink mentioned in any work of literature. It can be high-brow, low-brow, children’s lit, poetry, drama, fiction, etc. Bring the passage in which the food is [...]

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Readers of this blog probably know that we ran into a technology hiccup in the fall when my hard drive died, taking old files of my blog with it. Sadly, I was using Apple’s iWeb program to design the site, which seriously limited my options for reviving the old site.  Luckily, I had two URLs [...]

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