food and gardening

  • Our Table: Sharing Stories and Meals

    We begin, as with so many meals, with thanks. Thank you to our grocery clerks, farmers market vendors, restaurant owners and employees for all you do and all you have given for your neighbors, your customers and fans. Thank you for sharing what Seattle needs: sustenance for body and heart. To satisfy both, look to… Continue reading

  • Food Comics and Manga

    I’ve been reading a lot of food-focused manga and comics recently. Maybe I’m just a hungry person? I do like food, but really, while these manga and comics share the culinary theme they span some wildly different story-telling territory; from D&D-esque dungeon crawlers, to queer slice-of-life stories, to cooking competitions. Some of these stories even… Continue reading

  • Bringing Mexico Home

    I finally traveled abroad for the first time last year to Mexico! It was beautiful and rugged, but the best part was the food! I searched and searched the library to track down the food I fell in love with. Here are the recipes I’ve found and the stories attached: Tequila: Myth, Magic & Spirited… Continue reading

  • Happy Hour at Home

    The older I get the more I like staying at home, especially when it comes to imbibing a few alcoholic beverages. At home I’m safe and comfortable and I’m not breaking the bank. I got to thinking how I could make a happy hour at home more inviting to my partner and friends. Here are a… 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

  • Wide Open Spaces

    I was lucky to grow up in a DIY environment since the women in my family have all been blessed with something like a “creating” gene. Smells of baking and crocheted projects lying about were just a part of my childhood. My dad was the fixer-upper working in the garage or the garden out back.… Continue reading

  • Interested in healing foods? Try our Ways to Wellness Program…

    Food can be your best medicine! This Sunday the Beacon Hill branch will host the talk Anti-Inflammatory Food for Health and Wellness, by family nutritionist Michelle Babb. She’ll discuss how chronic inflammation can be the root cause of many diseases, including cancer, Alzheimer’s, heart disease and diabetes. She’ll also teach you how to prepare low… Continue reading

  • Romantic Wednesdays: Sweet Reads

    This is not a good time of year for the sugar-averse. From leftover Halloween candy to holiday pies and cakes, it seems that tempting treats are everywhere! If you’d like to get your sugar fix without the pesky calories, the following books featuring pastry chefs should satisfy your sweet tooth. Always on My Mind by Jill… Continue reading

  • An American in Paris — with food!

    I am a not-so-secret Francophile. To put it bluntly, I am obsessed with France – Paris especially. A big part of this obsession is the food. The baguettes, the soft cheese, the macarons, the chocolate – my god, the chocolate! I have been to Paris only once. It was a high school trip and we… Continue reading

  • Your Next 5 Books: Books with families and food

    In this column we regularly highlight a Your Next 5 Books submission that we find interesting, funny, unique, or useful to other readers. Submit Your Next 5 Books entry now, or stop by and see us in person, and maybe you could see your (anonymous) reading habits on Shelf Talk! 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: 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

  • Title Sparring

    I am obsessed with book titles and how some really strange, overlong and obscure misnomers slip through the editing process. I have a bone to pick with these titles I recently found in a few minutes searching for self-help and do-it-yourself books on the library catalog. Great books with ambiguous titles can really put me… Continue reading

  • Baking Day Adventure!

    Martha Stewart’s New Pies and Tarts: 150 Recipes for Old-Fashioned Favorites and Modern Classics came in recently and I was shocked to find it had no holds so I snapped it up and promised my co-workers that goodies would soon be on the way. I had a whole day off set aside to bake! I read… 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