Sweet, delicious Dungeness crab is always a treat.
Tom Douglas
If you want something beautiful to put on the dinner table, pick up a sockeye, the salmon species with the most vivid red flesh.
In my 'Big Dinners' cookbook, I recreated my mother's recipe for crab dip. The creamy dressing for this dip, made with mayonnaise, tomato paste, a touch of honey, sliced chives, lemon juice and zest, horseradish and Tabasco, is reminiscent of Thousand Island dressing.
Who doesn't love digging into a plate of crab cakes or going after a chilled cracked crab with crab cracker, cocktail fork and a plastic bib for protection?
If you just feel lazy and don't want to cook, then don't cook.
The simplest way to prepare Dungeness crabs is to boil them in the shell and set them in front of your guests with crab crackers or crab hammers, cocktail forks, and plenty of napkins.
Over the years I've tweaked my stuffing recipe many times, adding a variety of ingredients like sauteed wild mushrooms, dried cherries, fresh chevre, toasted hazelnuts, chopped ham hock meat, and other taste treats.
One-pot meals make a lot of sense... because so much of what people hate about cooking is really the cleanup, the mess, the grease.
When I eat oatmeal, I'm hungry by 10 A.M., but pho is a great way to start the day.
Around the time I opened my second restaurant, Etta's, I had just finished judging at the Jack Daniels World Invitational BBQ Championship in Lynchburg, Tennessee. Back home in Seattle, my goal was to recreate the sweet and smoky taste of that BBQ using our local wild king salmon instead of pig.
To shuck oysters, you'll need an oyster knife, a handy tool with a sturdy handle and a short, rigid blade which you can pick up for about ten bucks in a kitchenware shop or fish market. A quick trip online will yield any number of videos and slide shows with step-by-step instructions on how to shuck an oyster.
The classic Italian green sauce, salsa verde, is easy to make and especially nice in the spring when bunches of fresh herbs start appearing in the farmers market or in your garden.
Another way I like to barbecue king salmon is as a whole fish stuffed, literally to the gills, with sweet onions, sliced lemons, and summer sage.
Catfish has a nice firm texture and mild flavor.
I have an affinity for the old Seattle coffee shops, places like the Green Onion and the Copper Kettle, the classic kind of coffee bar - little places that served breakfast, lunch and dinner and have pretty much disappeared.
Spooning a seasonal fruit relish onto a plate of grilled king salmon is very much my style - flavorful, straightforward, and unfussy. I also like the way fresh, ripe fruit balances the richness of the salmon.
Cooks are an undervalued, awesome profession.
At the fishmonger, choose fish with bright scales and clear eyes.
The two things that are going to make you a better baker without even trying are a scale and a thermometer in your oven.
I don't know too many kids who ask to weed the garden.
My own favorite way to cook and eat razor clams is to simply dredge them in a mix of seasoned flour and cornmeal, then pan fry them in butter until crisp and golden. Be careful not to overcook them so they stay tender, not tough and chewy.
Maybe there are too many restaurants. Maybe some of mine need to close. So be it. I'll live with the market place.
Summer in Seattle allows me to indulge in some of the region's top culinary delights - I'm talking about wild king salmon and fresh, ripe Washington stone fruits and berries like cherries, peaches, plums, and blueberries.
When I was a kid and my mom made tomato soup, she would cut buttered toast into squares and float them on top of each bowl.
For a group of friends or a family dinner, fish tacos are popular and fun to make.
How can anyone live off of minimum wage?
It's just an American tradition to make sure people don't leave hungry. The worst thing is to have them say, 'Great dinner, but now I have to go get a burger.'
It's really fun to have a convection oven, even it if it's a little convection toaster oven. It really changes the way you bake.
There's something majestic about a 30-pound Chinook salmon roasted and served whole - people get excited when you present it with the head and tail on. It has beautifully browned skin and extraordinary bright red flesh when you cut into it.
I pay a living wage, I believe in healthcare, I declare all my income, and I don't cut corners.
I was driving around the country when I was 19 and happened to run out of cash in Seattle, so I settled here.
I want to do the basic things, like putting my daughter to bed. It's the sweetest thing.
Every cook I knows loves to make pizza.
Alaska Airlines and I have a lot in common, so coming together to delight travelers with savory, high quality food from the Pacific Northwest made sense.
Support a small chef. Not these big chains... but support the people who are out there trying to do things right and working hard to do that.
I use ginger like garlic. I love it for steaming fish and making barbecue sauces or roasted chicken.
I can't stand it when restaurants don't have a sense of place in a city. When I'm in London, I want to know I'm in London. When you're sitting in my joint, you know you're sitting in Seattle.
I'm much less shy in conversation than I am on my own.
While it's typical to find steamed clam recipes which include a bit of bacon or sausage, you might not think of adding shredded ham hock, but it's another way to pair the lusty, smoky flavor of animal fat with the briny ocean flavor of shellfish.
Tender and sweet, Manila clams partner well with a wide variety of foods - white wine, sake, beer, butter, leeks, fresh herbs, roasted peppers, olives, and wild mushrooms, to name a few.
Mastering one recipe is better than mastering too many. Learn something and own it, and you'll feel so much better about it. You'll have more confidence if you've made it five times, and that confidence adds so much fun to cooking.
In some cities, McDonald's rules, but Seattle is ruled by teriyaki joints.
Every time you make a fruit crisp for me, you are my favorite person in the world. It's something delicious and warm, right out of the oven. I mean, what more could anyone want? And all you're doing is taking the best fruit of the season, putting a crumb topping on it and putting it in the oven.
I love being able to help promote Seattle to travelers worldwide.
Some versions of crab cakes are mostly crabmeat lightly bound with egg, but I'm a firm believer that a crab cake should contain bread crumbs.
Sweet Washington cherries and Walla Walla onions are two of my favorite local treats.
Often we eat squid fried, so it's fun to grill it for a change. To grill squid, slice the cleaned bodies open into two flat pieces and thread them, along with the tentacles, onto skewers, then grill quickly over a direct fire with the coals as close as possible to the grate, turning the squid several times.
One of my favorite ways to eat albacore is tuna poke.
Salsa verde is delicious with trout or most any fish.
My wife and I decided to try and kick start our kitchens to a $15 minimum wage for cooks. I've probably had to go through and raise every menu price now by 50 cents because it took away my profit. I just underestimated what it was going to cost.
