Tom Douglas' Seattle Kitchen
Author: Tom Douglas
There's a new culinary melting pot. It's called Seattle. Here you'll find everything from Japanese bento box lunches and Thai satays to steaming bowls of Vietnamese soups and all-American blackberry cobblers. No chef embodies this diversity with more flair and more flavor than chef/author/restaurateur Tom Douglas. And no book does it better than Tom Douglas' Seattle Kitchen.
Tom's creativity with local ingredients and his respect for Seattle's ethnic traditions have helped put his three restaurants and Seattle on the national culinary map. Join Tom and celebrate the Emerald City's rich culinary tradition: sweet I Dungeness crabs, razor clams, rich artisan cheeses, and deeply flavored Northwest beers. Share in the delight of sophisticated Washington wines, coffee fresh vegetables, fruits, and the exotic flavors of the Pacific Rim countries.
Tom Douglas' style is laid-back sophistication with a dash of humor. You can see it in the names of his chapters, "Starch Stacking," "Slow Dancing," and "Mo' Poke, Dadu" (this last title, courtesy of his daughter, Loretta, means "More Pork, Daddy"). And you can taste it in his signature dishes such as Dungeness Crabcakes with Green Cocktail Sauce, Roast Duck with Huckleberry Sauce and Parsnip-Apple Hash, Udon with Sea Scallops in Miso Broth, and Triple Cream Coconut Pie.
Try his hearty Long-Bone Short Ribs with Chinook Merlot Gravy and Rosemary WhiteBeans or spicy Fire-roasted Oysters with Ginger Threads and Wasabi Butter. Relax in the comfort of the comfort foods he prepares for his own family: Loretta's Buttermilk Pancakes with Wild Blackberries, Basic Barbecued Baby Back Ribs, and Five-Spice Angel Food Cake.They're all clear, simple recipes that'll have you cooking like Tom Douglas from the very first page.
But this is more than a cookbook; it's a food lover's guide to Seattle. Join Tom on a tour of his city with his list of top ten best things to do -- and eat -- in Seattle, from his favorite ethnic markets and neighborhoods to where to get the best breakfast.
Why not turn your kitchen into a Seattle kitchen? All it takes is a little help and inspiration from Tom Douglas.
Bruce Aidells
On numerous trips to Seattle I have often enjoyed Tom Douglas' innovative food. His cooking, accurately recreated in his cookbook, epitomizes the man—generous, robust, and reflective of the influences of the local Asian community. How fortunate to be able to bring this food into my own kitchen.
Thierry Rautureau
A 'Bon Vivant' at its best! To spend time with Tom, in the kitchen or around a table is always a great time. A big heart, a good soul, always one hand to help and one to give. The best of all, a great guy who can make you feel his passion both for his passion for food and the city he is living it in.
Lynne Rossetto Kasper
I'd fly across the country to Tom Douglas' food. Now he's put it all down on paper. What I love about this book isn't just the kind of food I can't wait to cook myself, Tom also shares the extraordinary sources for his products. Washington State is the undiscovered Eldorado for food lovers. Tom is giving us the keys to the kingdom. Use this book in the kitchen, then take it with you to experience Tom's territory.
Publishers Weekly
In his three Seattle restaurants, Douglas capitalizes on the wealth of seafood and produce in the Northwest, while also emphasizing the robust fusion of tastes inherited from the city's multiethnic community. These components inform such starters as Tom's Tasty Sashimi Tuna Salad with Green Onion Pancakes and Tiny Clam and Seaweed Soup. One section of the book is devoted to the Japanese concept of bento, which traditionally presents several small tastes in a lacquered box. Douglas, however, employs a platter for his array of bento, which includes such items as Octopus with Green Papaya Slaw and Green Curry Vinaigrette, and Matsutake Dashi made with unusual matsutake mushrooms. Folks outside the area will need the mail-order sources Douglas suggests because some ingredients like matsutakes or kasu paste will be difficult to locate elsewhere. Most recipes, however, use accessible ingredients and techniques. The section on grilling includes Basic Barbecued Chicken and Maple-Cured Double-Cut Pork Chops with Grilled Apple Rings and Creamy Corn Grits. Recipes are primarily within the reach of home cooks, but many do require time. Roast Duck with Huckleberry Sauce and Parsnip-Apple Hash is one of the more demanding. Sides range from Red Beet Ravioli with Fresh Corn Relish to Grilled and Roasted Walla Walla Sweet Onions with Pine Nut Butter and Chard. Desserts are as simple as Peak-of-Summer Berry Crisp and as innovative as Apple Dumplings with Medjool Dates and Maple Sauce. (Jan.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.
Library Journal
Douglas has three popular restaurants in Seattle--Dahlia Lounge, Etta's Seafood, and Palace Kitchen--each of which has a specific identity but all of which feature deeply flavorful, imaginative food. Fish and shellfish are favorite ingredients, of course, and the influence of Asian, especially Japanese, cuisines is evident, but there are other inspirations as well in dishes such as Fire-Roasted Oysters with Wasabi Butter, Blue Crab R moulade with Fried Green Tomatoes, and Charred Ahi Tuna with Pasta Puttanesca. Although some recipes may require a trip to an ethnic market, most are fairly easy to prepare. Douglas has an enthusiastic, approachable style, and his recipes are unusual but uncontrived. Recommended for most collections. Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.
Book review: Strategic Planning or Exploring Macroeconomics
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life
Author: Barbara Kingsolver
Bestselling author Barbara Kingsolver describes her family's adventure as they move to a farm in southern Appalachia and realign their lives with the local food chain.
When Kingsolver and her family move from suburban Arizona to rural Appalachia, they take on a new challenge: to spend a year on a locally produced diet, paying close attention to the provenance of all they consume. "Our highest shopping goal was to get our food from so close to home, we'd know the person who grew it. Often that turned out to be ourselves as we learned to produce what we needed, starting with dirt, seeds, and enough knowledge to muddle through. Or starting with baby animals, and enough sense to refrain from naming them."
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle follows the family through the first year of their experiment. They find themselves eager to move away from the typical food scenario of American families: a refrigerator packed with processed, factory-farmed foods transported long distances using nonrenewable fuels. In their search for another way to eat and live, they begin to recover what Kingsolver considers our nation's lost appreciation for farms and the natural processes of food production. American citizens spend less of their income on food than has any culture in the history of the world, but pay dearly in other ways -- losing the flavors, diversity and creative food cultures of earlier times. The environmental costs are also high, and the nutritional sacrifice is undeniable: on our modern industrial food supply, Americans are now raising the first generation of children to have a shorter life expectancy than their parents.
Believing that most of us have better options available, Kingsolver and her family set out to prove for themselves that a local diet is not just better for the economy and environment but also better on the table. Their search leads them through a season of planting, pulling weeds, expanding their kitchen skills, harvesting their own animals, joining the effort to save heritage crops from extinction, and learning the time-honored rural art of getting rid of zucchini. Inspired by the flavors and culinary arts of a local food culture, they explore farmers' markets and diversified organic farms at home and across the country, discovering a booming movement with devotees from the Deep South to Alaska. Part memoir, part journalistic investigation, and complete with original recipes, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle makes a passionate case for putting the kitchen back at the center of family life, and diversified farms at the center of the American diet.
The Washington Post - Bunny Crumpacker
This is a serious book about important problems. Its concerns are real and urgent. It is clear, thoughtful, often amusing, passionate and appealing. It may give you a serious case of supermarket guilt, thinking of the energy footprint left by each out-of-season tomato, but you'll also find unexpected knowledge and gain the ability to make informed choices about what -- and how -- you're willing to eat.
The New York Times - Korby Kummer
What is likely to win the most converts, though, is the joy Kingsolver takes in food. She isn't just an ardent preserver, following the summertime canning rituals of her farming forebears. She's also an ardent cook, and there's some lovely food writing here.
Publishers Weekly
In her engaging though sometimes preachy new book, Kingsolver recounts the year her family attempted to eat only what they could grow on their farm in Virginia or buy from local sources. The book's bulk, written and read by Kingsolver in a lightly twangy voice filled with wonder and enthusiasm, proceeds through the seasons via delightful stories about the history of their farmhouse, the exhausting bounty of the zucchini harvest, turkey chicks hatching and so on. In long sections, however, she gets on a soapbox about problems with industrial food production, fast food and Americans' ignorance of food's origins, and despite her obvious passion for the issues, the reading turns didactic and loses its pace, momentum and narrative. Her daughter Camille contributes recipes, meal plans and an enjoyable personal essay in a clear if rather monotonous voice. Hopp, Kingsolver's husband and an environmental studies professor, provides dry readings of the sidebars that have him playing "Dr. Scientist," as Kingsolver notes in an illuminating interview on the last disc. Though they may skip some of the more moralizing tracks, Kingsolver's fans and foodies alike will find this a charming, sometimes inspiring account of reconnecting with the food chain. Simultaneous release with the HarperCollins hardcover (Reviews, Mar. 26). (May)
Copyright 2007 Reed Business InformationRisa Getman - Library Journal
Best-selling novelist Kingsolver and her family moved from Tucson, AZ, to the fertile lands of Southern Appalachia, where agriculture is an accepted excuse for absence from school, to undertake an experiment of sorts. The family joined the locavore movement, which promotes eating only what is locally raised, grown, and produced. This account of their ongoing experiment is a family affair: daughter Lily morphs into a poultry entrepreneur; daughter Camille, a college student, sprinkles her own anecdotes and seasonal menus throughout; and essays by Kingsolver's husband, Hopp, an academic, warn of the high cost of chemical pesticides, fossil fuels, and processed foods environmentally, financially, and on our health. Patience is a virtue in this undertaking, which calls for eating only what is in season; however, Kingsolver's passion for food and near sensual delight in what she pulls from her garden make the enterprise seem enticing. The author's narration is homey, folksy, and warm; Camille and Hopp narrate as well. Part memoir, part how-to, and part agricultural education, this book is both timely and entertaining. With Kingsolver's broad readership; a large movement toward organic, healthful eating; and heavy media attention on the subject, expect demand. Recommended for public libraries.
Library Journal
What happens when the beloved novelist and her family decide to settle in southern Appalachia and eat only food that's available locally. With a 12-city tour; one-day -laydown. Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information.
School Library Journal
Adult/High School -This book chronicles the year that Barbara Kingsolver, along with her husband and two daughters, made a commitment to become locavores-those who eat only locally grown foods. This first entailed a move away from their home in non-food-producing Tuscon to a family farm in Virginia, where they got right down to the business of growing and raising their own food and supporting local farmers. For teens who grew up on supermarket offerings, the notion not only of growing one's own produce but also of harvesting one's own poultry was as foreign as the concept that different foods relate to different seasons. While the volume begins as an environmental treatise-the oil consumption related to transporting foodstuffs around the world is enormous-it ends, as the year ends, in a celebration of the food that physically nourishes even as the recipes and the memories of cooks and gardeners past nourish our hearts and souls. Although the book maintains that eating well is not a class issue, discussions of heirloom breeds and making cheese at home may strike some as high-flown; however, those looking for healthful alternatives to processed foods will find inspiration to seek out farmers' markets and to learn to cook and enjoy seasonal foods. Give this title to budding Martha Stewarts, green-leaning fans of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth (Rodale, 2006), and kids outraged by Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation (Houghton, 2001).-Jenny Gasset, Orange County Public Library, CA
Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.Kirkus Reviews
With some assistance from her husband, Steven, and 19-year-old daughter, Camille, Kingsolver (Prodigal Summer, 2000, etc.) elegantly chronicles a year of back-to-the-land living with her family in Appalachia. After three years of drought, the author decamped from her longtime home in Arizona and set out with Steven, Camille and younger daughter Lily to inhabit fulltime his family's farm in Virginia. Their aim, she notes, was to "live in a place that could feed us," to grow their own food and join the increasingly potent movement led by organic growers and small exurban food producers. Kingsolver wants to know where her food is coming from: Her diary records her attempts to consume only those items grown locally and in season while eschewing foods that require the use of fossil fuels for transport, fertilizing and processing. (In one of biologist Steven's terrific sidebars, "Oily Food," he notes that 17 percent of the nation's energy is consumed by agriculture.) From her vegetable patch, Kingsolver discovered nifty ways to use plentiful available produce such as asparagus, rhubarb, wild mushrooms, honey, zucchini, pumpkins and tomatoes; she also spent a lot of time canning summer foods for winter. The family learned how to make cheese, visited organic farms and a working family farm in Tuscany, even grew and killed their own meat. "I'm unimpressed by arguments that condemn animal harvest," writes Kingsolver, "while ignoring, wholesale, the animal killing that underwrites vegetal foods." Elsewhere, Steven explores business topics such as the good economics of going organic; the losing battle in the use of pesticides; the importance of a restructured Farm Bill; mad cow disease; and fairtrade. Camille, meanwhile, offers anecdotes and recipes. Readers frustrated with the unhealthy, artificial food chain will take heart and inspiration here.
Table of Contents:
Called Home 1Waiting for Asparagus: Late March 23
Springing Forward 43
Stalking the Vegetannual 63
Molly Mooching: April 70
The Birds and the Bees 86
Gratitude: May 100
Growing Trust: Mid-June 111
Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: Late June 124
Eating Neighborly: Late June 148
Slow Food Nations: Late June 154
Zucchini Larceny: July 173
Life in a Red State: August 196
You Can't Run Away on Harvest Day: September 219
Where Fish Wear Crowns: September 242
Smashing Pumpkins: October 259
Celebration Days: November-December 277
What Do You Eat in January? 296
Hungry Month: February-March 315
Time Begins 334
Acknowledgments 353
References 355
Organizations 358
Sidebar Resources 364
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