Food

During the years she was the Seattle Times restaurant critic, Nancy Leson was often told she had the perfect job. Go out to eat every night on the boss's dime — that ain't workin'. 

But it wasn't all honey for nothin' and tips for free. As Nancy asked me back then: "How'd you like to go back to a restaurant you didn't like? Twice? After all, any restaurant can have a bad night. And that's what you have to do if you're going to give a fair review."

Seems that both Nancy Leson and I are into heavy metal for gift giving this time around.  

"There's one piece of equipment that I adore, and that's my Lodge 15-inch, pre-seasoned cast iron skillet," Nance says.

She loves it because, well, it turns out that size does matter after all.

From now on, my my pizza stone is demoted to trivet duty. I've been reading about pizza "steels" for a while now, and last week, in a moment of wild abandon, actually shelled out $42 for a 15"x15"x1/4" plate of carbon steel. 

Nancy Leson came home from a week of media blackout, reactivated all her many electronic devices, "and all I hear about is buying stuff!" she wailed.  

That was my cue to brag of my immunity to all retail blandishments. 

"But," she replied, "I saw something that was a great idea if you were going to buy somebody something."

As we all know, the real reason for the Thanksgiving Feast is to ready the components of the post-TG turkey sandwich (PTGTS).  Like just about everyone, I have strong feelings as to what constitutes its most perfect manifestation.

Nancy Leson always hosts huge gatherings for Thanksgiving. How huge? Huge enough to require two  birds, each the size of a turkey-shaped dirigible. 

One way she keeps the cooking-day rush to a minimum is to make what she can in advance, especially her favorite cranberry sauce, which keeps so well she can make it six months ahead of time. I was shocked — simply shocked.

"Nancy Leson," I gasped, "I cannot believe that you are talking on an NPR affiliate about a cranberry sauce recipe that is not Susan Stamberg's."

Among my favorite cooking sites is Diana Kuan's "Appetite for China." It was there that I discovered that Coca-Cola chicken wings is an actual Chinese dish. 

Kuan says she's never seen it in an English language Chinese cookbook or menu, but that it does appear from time to time in Chinese cookbooks and TV cooking shows.

The editor of Food & Wine magazine owns up: "I am going to be honest: I am not a great cook." 

Early in the book "Mastering My Mistakes in the Kitchen," author Dana Cowin acknowledges that she's "messed up literally every type of food." 

But there's no cooking conundrum that can't be made at least a little more manageable, especially with the help of top chefs such as Mario Batali,  Jacques Pepin, Alice Waters and Thomas Keller, who wrote the introduction. 

I can't even remember exactly where or when I bought the monster steamer pictured above, but it's been at least 30 years. I've given it plenty of use over the decades but it's always been way more steamer than I needed. 

Finally, after a few not so gentle nudges from DeGroot (she should talk about clutter!), I figured I'd fob it off on Leson in exchange for her more practical-sized utensil. But nooooooo...

Both Nance and I have been traveling these past weeks. I traveled across Canada by train, and Nancy went to Spain and France with the KPLU Travel Club. While there, she and her fellow eaters tried their hands at the iconic Valencia dish, paella.

Editor's Note: This is a rerun of a vintage Food for Thought post.

Nancy Leson and I love the XO sauce, the incredibly flavorful Chinese condiment, but we don't love the price. Besides, it's always more fun to make your own. And there's no shortage of recipes.

What say you? In Nancy Leson's case, "1,500 to 2,000" was too many cookbooks — so many that she could hardly get into her office any more.  So she called in her good friend Judy Amster, she said, "and we had an intervention." 

Nancy Leson now knows more about apples, thanks to her friend Bill Davis, who really knows his apples. Which is way more than I knew, never having bitten into one in my whole life. But even fruitophobic me learned plenty of interesting stuff this week, including the best kind to grow in the Pacific Northwest.

Fall is mushroom madness time, which means the new book "Shroom" by Seattle author, chef and 10-year PCC cooking instructor Becky Selengut couldn't be more timely. 

Nancy Leson keeps a lot of stuff on hand to do what she characterizes as stir-frying. These techniques include first searing meat on the grill rather than in the wok. Tut-tut.

She also uses "stir-fry" as a noun, as in "my favorite stir-fry." I am left with no choice but to remonstrate.

Seems like school and military food have always been fair game for those mystery meat jokes and general put-downs. While I admit that I never got any four-star chow in either environment, what I did get wasn't so bad and sometimes pretty good. 

Who but Nancy Leson could go so gaga over yogurt? You, maybe, but not me. A  little may do no harm but I'm just not an eat-it-out-of-the-carton kind of guy. Still, when Nancy cajoled me into trying Ellenos Greek Yogurt, it really was the best I'd ever tasted. The Big Balk came when she attempted to get fruit-o-phobic me to try the passionfruit variety.  

"I would not get out of an electric chair to eat that," I told her. And I didn't.

I can't believe I've never come across this method for corn off the cob before. After our friends Lori and Denny made it for us this weekend, I checked online and there were pages of variations on this same theme. It's so simple that ingredients are measured in units of "some." 

It's my favorite time of year. The cukes are out at the Duris Cucumber Farm on River Road, just a little west of Puyallup. For years, I've been trying to convince my Food for Thought pard Nancy Leson to accompany me there. She finally did, and boy, was she glad.

Nancy Leson's just back from a trip to downstate Illinois where she ate not wisely but too well. Besides the extra avoirdupois, she also brought back the rust bucket pictured above. It came from the estate of her husband Mac's aunt. Can you guess what it is?

Nancy Leson thought I was repeating an urban legend when I told her that diners have swallowed bristles from metal grill brushes along with their steaks.  But then I showed her this story about their dangers , and she admitted in an email I will save forever, "You were right — as always, Stein."  

And it's happened not just in Seattle, but all over the country.

Nancy Leson's got a brand new bag, and it's full of bees.

In a recent Seattle Times piece about backyard beekeeping, she expressed interest in keeping bees in her backyard. In this week's "Food for Thought" I suggested that she leave them where they always were — in her bonnet. Ms. Leson begged to differ.

I'm a recent though enthusiastic consumer of banh mi and a longtime fan of Andrea Nguyen's superb cookbooks. Her newest, "The Banh Mi Handbook: Recipes for Crazy Delicious Vietnamese Sandwiches," was just released.

That subtitle is no overstatement. If you're unfamiliar with banh mi (bunn mee) Viet sub sandwiches, it's time to try one. And what better way to get started than to make your own with the easy-to-follow instructions in Andrea's handbook. 

I know, I know. It's no concern of mine what other people do with their money in a supermarket.

But for the life of me, I cannot understand how bottled iced tea got to be such a popular item. How could something in a bottle on a shelf possibly be better than what you can get started at home in 10 seconds? One thing I do know — it sure ain't cheaper. And it's not exactly hard to make. You don't even have to boil it.

"Stein, do you cook much fish?" Nancy Leson asked me.

To get a rise out of her, I answered, "No, never!" 

The Gilbert and Sullivan fan that I am, I was hoping she'd sing her reply as: "What neverrrrr?" To which I could have answered, "Well...hardly ever."

Instead I just got, "Oh, c'mon, really?"

I'm convinced my morning coffee wouldn't taste as good anywhere else but from Mr. Busy Bee. Nancy insists her steaks would not be half as tender when cut with any other knife but her fancy French Laguiole “heavy-duty, feeling-great-in-your-hands” Sabatier knives.

My grandfather Willie would agree. He always maintained that the difference between the $5 steak and the $20 steak is the steak knife.

And so we extol the virtues of our favorite tableware. Nancy likes a fork with heft. She turns up her nose at flimsy little salad forks.