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If you’re a longtime consumer of local food writing, you’ll remember Kim O’Donnel. She used to blog and host live chats on The Washington Post. Readers would throw at least seven disparate ingredients from their kitchen into a what-should-I-make question, and O’Donnel, who moved to Seattle in 2008 but was then an Arlington resident, would invariably uncover a fantastical way to use it all up in one meal. I thought she was a wizard.
She was also one of the first writers to promote vegetable-forward cooking, including explaining the now-ubiquitous concept of Meatless Mondays, as well as promoting semiannual cooking-down-the-fridge programs to help cooks be better stewards of their pantry.
Last month she released her third cookbook, PNW Veg: 100 Vegetable Recipes Inspired by the Local Bounty of the Pacific Northwest. The recipes are applicable to kitchens everywhere, and even the ones with esoteric ingredients like fiddlehead ferns (turned into fritters and dipped in an herby ginger sauce) can be made on this coast.
Because the Pacific Northwest’s growing season is longer and, as O’Donnel puts it, has a “very slow, gradual roll out from spring to summer,” vegetables tend to linger in farmers market stalls. This gives the rhubarb, whose season is short-lived on the East Coast, more time in the kitchen out west, which also means tomato season starts later. That’s all to say that O’Donnel found the time to turn rhubarb into salsa (with cucumbers and radishes) and pair it with refried lentil nachos.
Pulses take over the pages in PNW Veg, not only because that area of the country grows lentils and beans but also because “that kind of protein will be the future,” predicts O’Donnel, not lab meat. “Maybe we should all learn how to cook up beans,” she says. When asked if she’s a vegetarian, O’Donnel says, “I’m not, but I really like my vegetables.” She doesn’t use any of the numerous gimmicky terms to describe her flexible diet. “I don’t think it needs to be labeled anymore,” she says.
Since she’s worked on the book for the past few years, she hasn’t been back to the area. Of the things she misses about East Coast living, O’Donnel, originally from the Philadelphia area, lists “the directness of people … I really like it when people speak their mind”; “the sultry air” of summer, but not the humidity; and Lebanese Taverna, especially the market.
