When we have friends over for dinner, or when we host parties, one of the things that’s fun to do is to push the boundaries of “finger food.”
Face it. Sometimes you’d rather serve things that people can use their fingers to eat so you can manage the volume of dirty dishes and silverware.
And when you [...]
One of the nice things about living in the Pacific Northwest is the availability of live shellfish at the grocery stores.
Almost any time of the year we can find live oysters, clams, and mussels. The mussels come from mussel farms in Washington State’s Puget Sound, live oysters come from the many Oregon bays as well [...]
When contemplating what’s for dinner, fish comes to mind often in our household because we’re trying to eat healthy.
One of my favorite childhood memories from living in Singapore is of eating out at seafood restaurants and being served whole fish that had been steamed with pickled plums (the Japanese call them umeboshi) and covered with [...]
In the wintertime most of the U.S. is gripped by snow, freezing weather, or some combination of the two. In Oregon, we have the winter monsoons. It rains almost daily from November until April.
Most of the time it’s a civilized, spritzing kind of rain, where you don’t need head gear. Sometimes it’s a heavier spritz. [...]
Vic and I are fortunate to have our very own personal chef to share the cooking duties in our home several days a week. Pranee Townsend, Vic’s mom, lives with us and keeps us well fed on her extensive repertoire of Thai and Chinese cuisine. She even delights us occasionally with her fusion creations such [...]
In the great crab race, there are those who believe that Alaska’s King Crabs get the checkered flag and beat all other decapod crustaceans for flavor. When Charles and I lived in Baltimore, Md., and Fort Worth, Tex., we were in the stands cheering on the sleek Blue Crab while the rambunctious Floridians were raising [...]
When you get adventurous with food, sometimes you just want to drag your friends along whether or not they know what they’re getting into. Lately I’ve been having this craving for something from my childhood in Thailand—Periwinkle snails—and I was thrilled to finally find that I could get some at Om Seafood in Portland and [...]
