FOOD

Who but Nancy Leson could utter the phrase "The dog ate my carrots"? Was there no homework in the house that day?

One look at Deb Perelman’s Smitten Kitchen recipe for Salted Peanut Tart convinced me that I was in the presence of a large, circular version of my favorite candy bar. It was PayDay pie and I would bake it!

As soon as we got our hands on Andrea Nguyen's new "Vietnamese Food Any Day" Nancy Leson and I went right to work. The book focuses on recipes for Viet food using ingredients available at most American supermarkets and Nance and I each cooked off several of them..

Nancy Leson says that adds up to 550-plus Food for Thoughts. Which is a lot more thought than I normally give to anything other than food. On this week’s we talk about just a few of our favorite episodes, recipes and food sites.

Not my own personal pork belly. That seems to be a lost cause. But I did have pretty good luck celebrating the Year of the Pig last week with the kind that comes from the underside of a hog. "Stein, it's been a very long time since I've seen you so excited about a recipe," Nancy Leson said. And I was. My usual random food surfing had brought me to a site I'd not seen before. Woks of Life. "Sounds like a soap opera," Nancy cracked. But it was there I found the recipe for larou, Chinese cured pork

That would be James Beard Award-winning cookbook author Samin Nosrat, coming to Seattle on March 10, and the Netflix documentary made of her bestselling " Salt Fat Acid Heat." "It's my favorite thing I've ever seen foodwise on television," Nancy Leson told me. She explained Nosrat started out with an interest in books, just not the kitchen kind.

With weather conditions too extreme for my usual gyrocopter commute, I was forced to hitch up Yukon King to break trail for the mush into snowbound Fort KNKX. It was a hard slog, but I arrived in time to connect with Nancy Leson, calling in from her Edmonds Fortress of Freeze to trade our snow dining experiences.

The more colorful the origin story of a recipe, the less likely it is to be true. But that doesn't make them any less entertaining. One of Nancy Leson 's favorites is the account in James Michener's novel " Chesapeake " of how humans got the idea to eat oysters by watching seagulls drop them onto rocks. How else would they have known what was in those shells? From there we moved on to other bits and pieces in this grab-bag edition of Food for Thought.

I recently made Daniel Gritzer's Swanson's Hungry Man style Salisbury steak recipe from his Serious Eats blog for the second time, and it came out every bit as satisfyingly savory as the first. When I told Nancy Leson, she told husband Mac, who exclaimed "My all-time favorite TV dinner!" So, Goodwife Leson made it, too, and we compared notes.

Nancy Leson returned from her London vacation telling tales of the wonderful hole-in-the-wall Ethiopian restaurant her son Nate had found. It's been a while since I've had Ethiopian food, so I thought it would be fun to make my own dinner, including own home made injera. Injera, a sour flatbread/crepe/pancake kind of thing made with teff flour and used to scoop up the food, is central to Ethiopian cuisine. The recipes I found online looked straightforward enough. What could go wrong?