cookbooks

  • Get Your Brunch On!

    I’m a huge fan of brunch because it combines some of my favorite things; sleeping in, booze before noon, and breakfast food! Plus everyone loves brunch too, so it’s a wonderful opportunity to booze with friends in a relaxing environment. Since my late night days are long behind me, I can brunch and have the… Continue reading

  • Slow cooking for cold weather

    -posted by Anne C. This winter, I visited my aunt at her home in rural England. I love her old house, with its thick stone walls, but my favorite feature is the oil-fired aga in the heart of the kitchen. An aga, rare in the US, is a very efficient, unique kind of cast-iron stove… Continue reading

  • What to Eat with your Beer for the Super Bowl

    ~posted by Frank It’s Super Bowl weekend. If you’re a football fan, it’s time to grab a beer and settle in for the game. If you’re a Seahawks fan, you may want to drown your sorrows in a beer. If you’re not a football fan, what better way to pass the time than with a beer?… Continue reading

  • Food And Dating

    One of the best things about the past year with my boyfriend Adam has been discovering our mutual love of food. We’ve searched for new restaurants to try together, showed off our favorite diehards, and have both created kitchen perfection for each other. Here are a few of our favorite dishes: Continue reading

  • A Fall Of Pie

    One of my favorite things about the arrival of fall is getting back into the kitchen to bake. Cookies, cakes, breads, and most importantly PIE! I found three lovely pie books from the library and decided to focus on one recipe from each book located in their fall sections. Now the one thing I did… Continue reading

  • October Takeover: Harry Potter Nostalgia

    ~posted by Selby G. Nothing screams fall for me like Harry Potter. The music, characters, scenery, the entire vibe of the books and movies epitomize what I think Halloween, and Fall, should be like. For the last couple of years my husband and I have the tradition to watch the Harry Potter movies again when… Continue reading

  • Following My Nose

    I spent a weekend in Tacoma enjoying the Taste of Tacoma at Point Defiance Park, which involved wine and beer tastings, fried oysters and a BBQ pork bun. It was a wonderful little food adventure. To be honest though, I have been spending more and more weekends off in Tacoma gallivanting with my boyfriend and… Continue reading

  • Seattle Cooks…Digitally

    Everyone knows that The Seattle Public Library has an outstanding cookbook collection. But you may not know that you can check out “e-cookbooks” through OverDrive. If you’re a messy cook prone to spilling ingredients on page after page, then this could be the best option for you! OverDrive has more than two dozen cookbooks, food and wine… Continue reading

  • Get Your Banh Mi On

    I love banh mi! Those amazing Vietnamese sandwiches have occupied many coffee shop visits with friends. However, finding time to go get my banh mi fix can be somewhat of a pain. But then…The Banh Mi Handbook: Recipes for Crazy-delicious Vietnamese Sandwiches by Andrea Quynhgiao Nguyen crossed my path one day at work and when… Continue reading

  • Thug Kitchen

    ~posted by Kara Our region is ahead of the rest of the country when it comes to organic farming and produce provided to our population. But even though we spend six billion dollars on food, we only spend 2% of that on local food. One of those reasons is food deserts. Food deserts are something… Continue reading

  • Happy (vegan) Holidays!

                                      Happy (vegan) Holidays! Are you a vegan living in self-imposed food exile, avoiding holiday parties? Are you afraid to bring dessert to a potluck, lest it taste like dense cardboard? Are you tired of answering the question, “but what… Continue reading

  • Author Kevin West shares five readable cookbooks

    We are thrilled to have Kevin West, author of Saving the Season: A Cook’s Guide to Home Canning, Pickling, and Preserving, a new (and gorgeous!) book covering the basics of preserving as well as advanced recipes.   Continue reading

  • Cooking the Northwest: Jess Thomson’s Favorite Local Cookbooks.

    Jess Thomson’s latest cookbook, Pike Place Market Recipes: 130 Ways to Take Home Seattle’s Famous Market, was released this week. We asked Thomson to comb through her cookbook library for a selection of her favorite local authors.   If there’s one book I want to carry with me at all times when I shop, it’s Edible… Continue reading

  • Downloading for Dinner – Part II

    Yesterday’s post took a look at the library’s growing collection of electronic cookbooks. After browsing the collection, a curious librarian might wonder how using a print copy differs from using an ebook? With the help of a willing participant and a few pieces of technology, an experiment was conducted comparing use of the same title in… Continue reading

  • Downloading for Dinner – Part I

    When looking for a good cookbook, many people do not realize the library has a growing and diverse ebook collection. Using the term “cookery” as a subject keyword and limiting to ebooks reveals the library’s current holdings of 399 titles about food preparation, as well as food culture and history. A quick perusal shows the… Continue reading

  • Nightstand Reads: Matthew Amster-Burton

    When I’m sick, sad, or don’t know what to eat for lunch, I always turn to Asian food for comfort. Usually it’s some kind of spicy noodles, like pad Thai or the Tetsu Hell Fire dipping ramen at Samurai noodle, a dish you can’t eat without looking like a barbarian. Similarly, when I wander into… Continue reading

  • Eggs, eggs, my kingdom for a recipe!

    We have three happy chickens in our backyard: Chipmunk, Jayne and Lucy. They usually produce about twelve eggs a week, which is plenty for our household. Sometimes, however, they get really fired up and give us far more eggs in a short period of time. That’s what they’re doing right now. In an attempt to… Continue reading

  • BiblioBagels: My Adventures in Bagel Chemistry (Part 2)

    In yesterday’s post, I was on a quest to make Montreal bagels with the help of the library’s resources. A friend had just told me about the process of retarding the dough (placing it in the fridge overnight before boiling and baking the bagels). I was curious about this mysterious-sounding process and decided to investigate… Continue reading