cooking

  • Don’t forget to eat your veggies!

    Have you ever wondered what this whole ‘vegan’ movement is about? These days there’s an abundance of animal-free products on grocery shelves. Restaurants specializing in meatless and dairy-free cuisine are gaining popularity in many cities. People adopt a vegan way of eating for many different reasons. Some are concerned about how animals are treated on… 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: Turning the Pages with Kathy Casey

    by Kathy Casey Time-worn. Yellowed. Dog-eared. Marked-up. To some, these words might describe relics to be brushed aside as part of the past. To me, they are the qualities I love most about my cookbook collection. I’m not a “cookbook preserver”; the more splatters and spills and notes left in the margins, the more loved… Continue reading

  • Nightstand Reads: Karen Gaudette

    As a writer, food lover and former reporter, I look to cookbooks as entry points to a variety of cultures and eras. Ever wonder why Southern cookbooks devote so many pages to dessert? One trip to my husband’s grandmother’s church social in middle Tennessee, with its bountiful tables of cakes and pies, neatly answered that… 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

  • Nightstand Reads: Greg Atkinson

    As a food writer, I use words and letters almost without thinking. Just as whisks, rolling pins, pots and pans are incidental to the actual foodstuffs with which they interface, so words and letters, paragraphs and sentences are just a means to an end. The end is whatever meaning I hope they will eventually convey… 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

  • A Couple Fun Recipes

    When I put on the apron I am truly at the mercy of the cookbook. I’m no chef, but I can follow a recipe reasonably well and I do enjoy the process. Here are a few recipes that helped me keep dinner at home and made me look good.  Spaghetti alla Carbonara – The New Best Recipe (p. 251-252). Gotta’… Continue reading

  • So what’s for dinner tonight?!

    I must admit that I’m a bit of a foodie – I love food, enjoy cooking, trying out new and exciting recipes and putting my own signature spin to some classic dishes. And I love watching reality TV cooking competition shows like Top Chef, Hell’s Kitchen and Iron Chef: America. I’ve always thought that I’d… 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

  • BiblioBagels: My Adventures in Bagel Chemistry (Part 1)

    Seattle is not a bagel town. It’s nearly impossible to get a genuine bagel here. Sure, lots of places claim to sell the real thing, but they’re only a pale imitation. And don’t even get me started on bagels from a grocery store—those are just lifeless circles of bread masquerading as bagels. What is a… Continue reading

  • Cooking with Gas

    These are not your everyday cookbooks. When you’re tired of the same old thing for dinner, try one of these unconventional possibilities. Kafka’s Soup: a complete history of world literature in 14 recipes by Mark Crick. This guy is smart!  Food + fiction = satisfaction. Raymond Chandler cooks lamb with dill sauce; “before I knew… Continue reading

  • What I Made: Dessert Party — even if you can barely boil water

    Seattle is home to a thriving DIY ethic and culture.  As part of an occasional series of posts, we feature hand-made items created by staff at The Seattle Public Library and the library books, CDs, and DVDs that showed them how to do it themselves. We hope you’ll draw inspiration from their creations and check… Continue reading

  • Soup’s On!

    The New Year is already off to a flying start and everyday routines are back in full swing with work, school, homework, sports… You get the picture. As a librarian, I don’t work banker’s hours. I work “public service” hours, which include weekends and evenings, with a schedule that varies from week to week and… Continue reading

  • A Feast of Words

    Next month, you may have trouble finding Gourmet magazine on the library shelves. This time, though, it’s not just that somebody else is already flipping through page after deliciously glossy page.  After nearly 70 years of publication, Gourmet will release its final issue this November.  It’s collateral damage in publisher Condé Nast’s desperate bid to turn a… Continue reading

  • Early American Eating

    Back before eating locally was trendy, it was a necessity.  In Depression-era America, one of the WPA projects for out-of-work writers – including Eudora Welty, Saul Bellow and Zora Neale Hurston – was the documentation of regional food traditions.  The bombing of Pearl Harbor cut the project short, and the unedited manuscripts were sent to… Continue reading