If you’ve read this blog or know me in any way, you may be aware that I have this obsession with/love for baking bread. Despite reading numerous books and taking bread baking classes, I am still far from perfecting the art form. A few months ago, I ran into Chef Laurie Pfalzer. We used to [...]

I missed out on the Eat Local for Thanksgiving campaign. Merely a participant in the eating festivities, I refrained from being too involved in dictating the meal’s ingredients. For Easter, I was called in to be the back-up family cook as my husband’s grandma had recently undergone knee replacement surgery. Thrilled to help, I also [...]

Through the Twitter grapevine but mostly from the mouth of @LolaLocal, I discovered the Cascade Harvest Coalition’s Eat Local Challenge for Thanksgiving. I unofficially took on the challenge, but there was just one small glitch. My grandma-in-law is the sanctioned Thanksgiving chef in the family and I couldn’t step in and dictate her ingredient choices.

“Supper’s ready!” Grandpa’s voice echoed down the hallway into each room of the house, catching everyone’s ear as it passed by. Caught mid-stroke while combing Barbie’s hair in my Aunt Suzie’s room, I moved with the family herd as we gathered around the dining room table, some of us spilling into the adjacent living room. [...]

I often dismiss the culinary side of my upbringing, tossing aside my meat and potatoes diet and wondering where in the world I acquired my curiosity for food.
My palate has expanded light years since moving to the Pacific Northwest and perhaps so has my mom’s, still planted in northwestern Minnesota, but the more I look [...]

Every other month or so, we gather with a group of friends for wine night. We have explored Washington, Italy, Australia, Spain, and Germany with our taste buds, each of us bringing a bottle of wine and a dish from the country we chose for the evening. Having traveled around the world, we decided to [...]

Every Sunday morning after church, my cousins, aunts, and uncles would cram into every little nook and cranny at my grandparents’ house. One group gathered around a card table to watch my grandpa and my uncles play a fierce game of Wist, the girls hibernated to my aunt’s room to gossip about boys, and the [...]