Events

INCLUDES SLIDE SHOW!    Langdon Cook learned the hard way.  You can’t impress a potential mate by claiming a homemade “Egg McMuffin” as part of your culinary cadre.  He’s mended his ways, and has as a master forager, he crafts delicious dishes from wild nettles, freshly dug clams, a variety of berries, mushrooms and crab.  Through trial and error, and years spent experimenting, Cook finds the literal “fruits” of his labors both nutritious and rewarding—especially when he’s spent the better part of a day in pursuit of a meal.  Fat of the Land describes foraging, not as a throwback to our hunter-gatherer past, but as a way to reconnect with the landscape, and appreciate the bounties of the water and earth around us.   Whether he’s free diving in the icy Puget Sound in hopes of spearing a snaggletooth lingcod, or tempting fate by eating questionable mushrooms, Cook finds adventure in every attempt.  He strings up a fly rod to chase after sea-run trout, and pulls out the gardening gloves to collect stinging nettle—all in the name of fresh, local, seasonal palate pleasers.  Structured around the seasons of the year, each chapter focuses on a specific food type and concludes with a recipe featuring the author’s hard-won bounty, a savory stop to each adventure-filled morsel.  Langdon Cook left his role as senior book editor at Amazon.com in 2004, to pursue life in a cabin off the grid with his wife and son.  Now a freelance writer and editor, Lang has written for regional and national publications, and his expertise in all matters of foraging has been profiled in Bon Appétit and the Wall Street Journal.