Armed with "The Here List" and a Type-A personality, Seattle-based writer and cookbook author Jess Thomson sets out to spend a year exploring the food of the Pacific Northwest with her family. Planning to revel in the culinary riches of the region and hoping to break her son, Graham, of his childhood pickiness, the adventures into the great nearby include building a backyard chicken coop, truffle hunting in Oregon, and razor clamming on the Washington coast. Her plans to spend "a year right here" are complicated by efforts to help Graham overcome some of the mobility limitations of cerebral palsy, and thwarted further by her own limitations that come to the fore when she attempts the "Gourmet Century," a hilly one-hundred-kilometer bike ride with gourmet food stops along the way.
With touching, funny, sometimes devastating stories that we all can relate to, Jess pulls the reader in as she abandons "The Here List" and learns that letting go can be just as important as holding on.
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Staying Put
1. January
-The House That Jack Built
-The Rarest Breed
2. February
-Digging Deep
3. March
-You’ve Got to Be Kidding
4. April
-Spoon-Fed
5. May
-On Parking-Lot Barbecue
6. June
-The Other Western Wine Country
7. July
-The Gourmet Century
8. August
-The Manhattan Project
-Trial by Fire
-The Opposite of Ilwaco
9. September
10. October
-What Would Jesus Brew?
11. November
-Chronicles of a Coffee Lover
-Slow Dog Noodle
12. December
-To Market, to Market
13. January, Again
-Found in Translation
Epilogue: A Year Right Here
Index of Recipes
About the Author :
Jess Thomson is a freelance writer and the author of Dishing Up Washington, Pike Place Market Recipes, and Top Pot Hand-Forged Doughnuts; and coauthor of A Boat, a Whale, and a Walrus.
Review :
"Reads like a five-course meal for the mind. . . . A Year Right Here is a genuine pleasure to read, as refreshing in its localism and eclecticism as it is in its universal soul-searching and earnest attempt to redefine one’s relationship with home."
"We all know what happens to the list you make at the start of the year. But if everything had gone according to plan, Thomson’s book would be as straightforward as her original list. The twists and turns are what makes it — that and a solid recipe for fried chicken."
"While readers have front row seats to razor clamming on the Washington coast, truffle hunting in Oregon and a winery tour in British Columbia, it’s the way Thomson’s preparations are thwarted that make this book an interesting read."
