Greg Atkinson is and has been many things: chef, restaurant owner, chief instructor at the Seattle Culinary Academy, and writer. In Season has 70 seasonal recipes featuring the bounty of the Pacific Northwest. Equally lovely, the book is peppered with essays about Greg’s life in the Northwest and about his discoveries in the fields, forests and mountains that surround him.
Originally published in 1997, this reissue of In Season is even more pertinent than before. We have intensified interest in “fresh and local and seasonal.” That is just the context of this book.
Greg grew up in Florida so when he moved to the Seattle area, I can only imagine the shock he experienced. I grew up in Portland and the two cities have similar climates and geography. [No, there is no Puget Sound in Portland but there are the Columbia and Willamette Rivers.] Mountains seem to be everywhere and forests creep up to and then seem to invade every neighborhood.
Leave either of those cities, drive 30 miles and just stop the car by side of one of the forests. Walk into the forest for one minute, carefully threading your way through the brambles, bushes and ferns. After that minute, you can turn around and realize something important: you are almost lost. The only sound is the cascade of water dropping from the trees to the shrubs to the leaf-and-needled carpet at your feet. You don’t see dirt anywhere. The ground feels spongy. You can bounce up and down. The ground is peat, rich and organic.
In that environment, things grow. Mushrooms and ferns for fiddleheads. Berries is a dozen shapes and flavors. The forests are a bit foreboding. They can also be a supermarket.
Greg has recipes for each of the four seasons, although in my recollection they were all rainy. Summer in the Northwest means “less rainy” and not “days and days of sun.” But it is just that growing environment that lets Greg offer recipes like:
- Green Pea Soup with Minted Cream
- Oven-Broiled Fillets of Salmon with Morels and Cream
- Ragout of Forest Mushrooms
- Spring Greens and Potato Soup
- Raspberry Butter Sauce for Salmon
- Rhubarb Butter Sauce for Halibut
- Risotto with Asparagus, Saffron and Morels
- Gingered Rhubarb Meringue Tart
- Oatmeal Cookies with Dried Tart Cherries and Crystallized Ginger
Visit Greg’s wonderful Restaurant Marche on Bainbridge Island, just a ferry ride from Seattle, and you encounter more of his fare —local foods with French flair:
http://www.restaurantmarchebainbridge.com/menu.htm
With skill and precision, Greg’s recipes are those “local, seasonal” gems that you long for. There are ideas here that you can adopt to stay “local” if you desire. Or you can accept that “local” now means that non-farmed Seattle salmon travel by jet freighters to fish markets in New York City. It can be confusing: if a salmon is not farmed but is flown, is it still “green.” You might debate that, but there’s no debate about the quality and creativity of every page offered by In Season.