Kathleen Flinn's Blog, page 13

Recipe: Potato Gratin with Camembert and Pancetta

Recipe by Jess Thomson, from Dishing Up Washington, photo by Lara Ferroni At Vashon Island’s Kurtwood Farms, owner Kurt Timmermeister makes a bloomy-rind cow’s milk cheese called Dinah’s Cheese. When it was first released in 2009, Seattle swooned; nowhere in the state is there a farmstead Camembert-style  cheese so clearly fit for international fame. In […]

Fearless Thanksgiving Supermarket Shopping Guide

I may be the only person on Earth who likes grocery stores. Oddly fascinated by them, actually. I can spend hours in a supermarket, marveling over this new perverse concoction or that, engaging in some passive cart voyeurism. The one time of year I don’t enjoy the aisles, however, is around Thanksgiving. Harried people make […]

Fearless Thanksgiving: Homemade vs. Purchased

Story by Kathleen Flinn, with excerpts from Buy the Butter, Make the Bread by Jennifer Reese I may be the only person on Earth who likes grocery stores. Oddly fascinated by them, actually. I can spend hours in a supermarket, marveling over this new perverse concoction or that, engaging in some passive cart voyeurism. The […]

The Firehouse Challenge: Packaged vs. Homemade Holiday Dinner Classics

For years, a relative of mine served boxed stuffing at her holiday gatherings, spiced up with cut-up pre-cooked turkey sausage. When I offered to make some homemade stuffing one year, she waved me off. “No one can the tell the difference, anyway.” This made me wonder. How do real mashed potatoes, gravy, fresh green beans […]

Podcast Season 1: Episode 4 – Dan Jurafsky

Dan Jurafsy is a professor of linguistics and computer science at Stanford University. He has all kinds of impressive academic credentials, but what I brought him into my kitchen to discuss was his fascinating book, The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu (W.W. Norton). His book applies computational linguistics to menus to find what […]

Podcast: Season 1, Ep 3: Darra Goldstein

I’ve long been a fan of Darra Goldstein. After all, it takes guts to write a love letter of a cookbook to a country with which your own has been in a Cold War for decades. But in 1987, that’s exactly what Goldstein did. After spending time in the Soviet Union, she fell in love […]

Want to start a podcast? A guide to gear

The second I mentioned I was launching a podcast, my husband Mike immediately began to research audio equipment. In part, this was to be helpful, but it also provided an excuse to geek out on tech gear. He even asked Doug Berman, famed producer of NPR’s Car Talk and Wait, Wait Don’t Tell for his […]

Podcast: Season 1, Episode 2: Andrea Nguyen

In episode three of season 1, I talked with Andrea Nguyen, author of several books, including the classic Into The Vietnamese Kitchen. We talked for more than an hour and a half on a wide variety of subjects. In the edited version, we discussed the origin of pho (plus how to pronounce it), the state […]

Podcast: Season 1, Ep 1: Alex Prud’homme

In my first podcast episode, I chatted with Alex Prud’homme, the great-nephew of the late great Julia Child. Alex has an amazing background and is a highly regarded journalist and writer in his own right. As his bio states on his site, he became a writer “the old-fashioned way.” This included a three-month jaunt to […]

Moules à la Mariniére

Something big happened in my life a couple years ago. Taylor Shellfish Farms opened a store in my neighborhood. I’m a huge fan of, well, any shellfish to be honest. But mussels – moules in French – make me weak at the knees. Combined with fries and a crisp glass of white wine, it’s probably one of […]