Celeste Noche
say wa?
Naomi Tomky blends her own recipes with those from regional chefs.
Bibliophile
A Love Letter to the Fruit of the Ocean Naomi Tomky’s cookbook celebrates local seafood you can make at home interview by Cara Strickland
IT’S NO SECRET that seafood is one of the greatest gifts of the Pacific Northwest. From the beautiful salmon and oysters we recognize to the geoducks we might not have tried, there is something for everyone. Still, seafood can be daunting, and it’s not something we all have a lot of experience with. Seattle-based food writer Naomi Tomky’s new book, The Pacific Northwest Seafood Cookbook, is part love letter to the fruits of the ocean, part guide to choosing and storing, and part cultural analysis of why seafood matters to the region now and in the past. The recipes, a blend of Tomky’s own and those of regional chefs, are designed to help both novice and experienced home cooks achieve delicious success, and it’s beautiful, too. 18 1889 WASHINGTON’S MAGAZINE
OCTOBER | NOVEMBER 2019
How did you fall in love with PNW seafood and what do you think makes it so special? It’s one of those “you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone” situations. I didn’t realize how normal it was to always have amazing seafood as an option until I went to college on the East Coast. When I moved back, I was young and broke and living in a city where happy hour often included 25-cent oysters. I ate a lot of them on the slippery slope into seafood love. How do you hope your book will demystify seafood cooking for home cooks? I think a lot of people think cooking seafood is hard because you can’t cook it just like you would a steak, or whatever they’re used to. Cooking fish is no harder than cooking meat, it’s just that people don’t always know the techniques to do it in easier ways (hint: it’s not pan-cooking!). How did you choose recipes to include and where did they come from? Many of these recipes are the things that I cook at home all the time. But I also wanted the book to show off the diverse cooks around the region who use fish in all kinds of different
ways, including both the people driving it publicly at restaurants— like Bonnie Morales of Kachka, and Tom Douglas—and the folks at home, including an Iraqi refugee and an Indonesian cookbook author. Do you have any favorite recipes in the book, or suggestions for those just getting started? The same recipe for both! My favorite and the very best starting place is the first recipe, for slowroasted salmon. It’s so easy and completely foolproof, you could accidentally leave it in the oven for fifteen extra minutes and it would still be wonderful. There’s no fussiness, no need to pull it out at any exact moment. Just a nice, relaxing dish that can be either a total dinner party stunner or an easy weeknight dinner. How do you hope readers interact with your book? I hope they use it! I’m sure every cookbook author says this, but the book was designed to be hands-on from start to finish—it will tell you where to buy seafood, what to ask, how to store it when you get home, and then, of course, how to cook it. There’s even a recipe for how to use up your leftover cooked salmon.