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Cooking

Spring 2011

Kim Fay ’88—Communion: A Culinary Journey through Vietnam

Any prospective reader of Kim Fay’s book about Vietnamese food should be forewarned. Her descriptions are awfully good. In the city of Hue, following her first exposure to com hen, or clam rice, which was served to her Vietnamese-hot, well beyond the four-star scale, she returned the next morning for a lower heat version.

“It had not rained in the night,” she writes, “and so this com hen was topped with thin slivers of star fruit. Their tartness sparked against the dry crunch of the wonton sticks. The clams were light, and just a bit gritty from the alluvial bed of the Perfume River. The … » More …

Winter 2009

Nöel Riley Fitch ’65, ’69—At Julia’s table

As a graduate student at Washington State University in the late 1960s, Noël Riley Fitch found her calling in an issue of Ladies’ Home Journal. A two-page story about Sylvia Beach and her little bookshop called Shakespeare and Company in Paris in the 1920s sparked her interest.

Her professor, John Elwood, encouraged her to pursue Beach as a subject for her master’s thesis. Elwood had long had a love for French café society. When he was in the armed services in World War II, he met writer and critic Gertrude Stein in Paris. He loved that period of literary history, says Riley Fitch.

She … » More …

Summer 2005

Savor the Flavor

They started with soups and creative napkin folding, and spread out into a weekend of cooking and wine at the Savor the Flavor culinary show in Kennewick this March. The two-day fundraiser for the small, privately-run nonprofit Oasis School has become a major draw for eastern Washington, attracting several thousand attendees.

This year the event at the Three Rivers Convention Center featured well-known northwest chefs Mike Davis of 26 Brix in Walla Walla, who demonstrated how to make beignets, and Tom Douglas of Seattle’s Dahlia Lounge, who made barbeque pork butt tacos and goat cheese fondue.

A third of the Oasis students have parents or … » More …

Spring 2002

Better chow

As anyone who has stir-fried vegetables knows, quickly cooking foods at high temperatures makes for crisper, fresher-tasting foods than using slow-cooking methods.

So it is that over the past six years, associate professor of biological systems engineering Juming Tang and his associates have been working on new technologies to produce high-quality, ready-to-eat military rations (MREs) and “humanitarian daily rations” like those recently air-dropped in Afghanistan.

With conventional methods, lengthy processing times are necessary to kill harmful bacteria that can thrive even in hermetically sealed packages. Depending on package size and type of food, traditional  processing can take anywhere from one to two hours. By the … » More …