On the Table
by Tracey T., January 13, 2017 2:11 PM
Goodbye 2016. I hope you didn’t let the door hit you on the way out. As difficult as many of us may have found the last year, it was a banner year for cookbooks. What can we learn from our food habits from the last year? From our top bestselling cookbooks, it looks like we want to eat local, eat healthier, and know more about how cooking works and how flavors develop together. Many of these cookbooks have a strong ethnic and comfort food component as well.
Hello 2017. Let’s all invite some friends and neighbors over for a casserole and side dish, maybe a pudding, and hunker down to see what this new year has in store for us. Best wishes and hopes for the new year...
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On the Table
by Tracey T., November 23, 2016 11:16 AM
Hurrah! It’s one of our favorite times of the year! It’s the holiday potluck where we get to celebrate some of the recently released cookbooks by cooking and sharing with coworkers. Whatever your political view, the last few weeks have been hard, and for some of us, very disheartening. So we found it especially comforting to join together at the table, to take a moment to relax, chat about food, gossip, and just talk about simple nothings. Dining together is a good way to find common ground amongst differing factions, and a welcome respite for all during challenging times.
We had some bang-up main dishes, such as a sweet potato curry from Oh She Glows Every Day, and a colorful vegetable succotash dish from local chef (and TV chef personality) Naomi Pomeroy’s cookbook, Taste and Technique. Some of the best food comes in small bites...
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On the Table
by Tracey T., November 8, 2016 2:01 PM
The cookbook season isn’t quite to an end yet, but this is the last huge blast of cookbooks. I’m not going to waste your reading time because you’ll want to dig into the plethora of cookbook reviews below. Just know there are some amazing new cookbooks out now, including my favorite cookbook of the year, Deep Run Roots, and my first runner-up for favorite, The Red Rooster Cookbook. Also, here is a shout-out for another fave, the joyful Short Stack Cookbook. Enjoy...
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On the Table
by Tracey T., October 25, 2016 3:18 PM
Halloween is just a week away, which means it’s time for winter holiday hosts to start gearing up for parties and testing new recipes before trotting them out for family and guests. Luckily, we have three recently released appetizer books to help you get ready: one that is attuned to the tried and true, Cook's Illustrated All-Time Best Appetizers; one that can work as a springboard for your own recipe development, Ultimate Appetizer Ideabook; and another for showing off your inner rock star, Chowgirls Killer Party Food. If baked goods are your thing, there are plenty of baking books, including what could easily be the new cookie bible, Dorie's Cookies (by the amazing culinary queen Dorie Greenspan). For those of us with little time for getting ready for parties, Thug Kitchen slaps us all upside-the-head with an easier-to-cook-from cookbook: Thug Kitchen 101...
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On the Table
by Tracey T., October 18, 2016 3:43 PM
Either you are a spring person or you are a fall person. I’m a fall person. I suspect many bookish folks are. Fall evokes memories of going back to school — when there was the excitement, almost at a celebratory level, of seeing old friends and experiencing the thrill of new textbooks to read! Oh sure, perhaps this thrill only lasted a day or two, but the fun of haunting the library for new finds lasted all year.
Even if it's been years since you stepped into a classroom, there are many recently released cookbooks that will help you continue your culinary education: How to Bake Everything, Ingredient (chemistry), Ten Restaurants That Changed America (history), and EveryDayCook (Alton Brown!).There is also a strong social studies aspect to the new releases this time around. America, with its historical melting-pot mélange of immigrants, has a welcome wealth of ethnic foods and cookbooks. Among the new releases are a double-header of Persian eats in the form of two new Iranian cookbooks: Taste of Persia and The Saffron Tales. Other places represented this time around: China, India, Spain, and the Middle East...
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On the Table
by Tracey T., September 26, 2016 4:32 PM
Harvest time! Our summery heat wave is trading off days with the fall rain. Each last ripening tomato is a treasure and we are pondering what to do with the leftover green ones. Over the summer we had some giant zucchinis show up in the employee lunchroom, which is where we share all of our extra goodies. A coworker gave me the most adorable tiny eggplants from her yard. They were almost too cute to eat, but I ate them anyway. I’ve been especially happy with the generosity of my coworkers, as this summer was a transition time for my yard and all I have planted are a few pots of herbs I can’t live without (basil, mint, and rosemary).
Living vicariously through my coworkers' gardens, I’ve heard tell of bush beans, rainbow chard, butter lettuce, gem lettuce, sugar snap peas, French petit pois, zucchini, yellow squash, Mexican sour gherkins, pickling cucumbers, a variety of hot and bell peppers...
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On the Table
by Tracey T., July 28, 2016 1:56 PM
The world is a scary place these days. Even our food can’t be trusted. Bio-engineering and questionable pest repellents used to “protect” the crops have long since made our modern grocery shopping a place of possible hidden dangers. More and more it is necessary for us to pay attention to what we are feeding our families and to search for the highest nutritional content. This has made locavorism a hot topic for a number of years now.
The general guideline for eating locally is to buy food grown within roughly 100 miles of home. Those of us lucky enough to live near an agriculture belt have it easier than others who live in less hospitable areas. Portland, being situated in the Willamette Valley, is positioned right where plentiful precipitation gives way to verdant agriculture, not to mention well-known and beloved viticulture. We have farmers markets, roadside ma-and-pa fruit stands, CSA (community-supported agriculture) providers, and neighborhood urban farmers selling honey, eggs, and vegetables from their front yards. These are marvelous things and I appreciate the sense of community this sort of shopping offers...
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On the Table
by Tracey T., July 15, 2016 3:49 PM
One of the best bits about a potluck is that you get to unabashedly eat many desserts. There is no sense in trying to be health conscious. Like the holidays, this is a time when you can dig in to the sweets with pitchforks and deal with the consequences later. Aubrey not only made two recipes to share, Panna Cotta from Home Cooked and Blueberry Earl Grey Jam from Foolproof Preserving, she reprised her dishes and brought more to the office a few days later. There was much rejoicing as we abandoned our computers and books and took up spoons. Dev, our master of comfort food cakes, outdid himself with a delicately scented and big flavored Orange Blossom Cake from Egg. Speaking of Egg, if you are near a bookstore, pull Egg off the shelf to see the beautifully designed cover...
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On the Table
by Tracey T., July 12, 2016 1:53 PM
Be envious. Be very envious. A perk of working at Powell’s as a book buyer is that we get to play around with new cookbooks before their release date. While we don’t get paid to cook from them, we do have access to the recipes and regularly try them out at home. We like to share the wealth at the office with the twice-yearly potluck. We ponder and browse, sometimes testing dishes ahead of time, sometimes taking a chance on a recipe for the first time the night before the feast — which can, at times, lead to complications...
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