Jeff Koehler first fell in love with cooking after a four-year backpacking odyssey across Africa, Asia and Europe.
After settling down in London to do graduate work in theater, he started trying to reproduce dishes he had tried on his travels around the world.
“I’d been in
50 countries,” Koehler said. “I found myself using food to re-create certain tastes and certain emotions.”
He didn’t know it at the time, but Koehler was taking the first of many steps down a successful career path in international food writing.
Today, the 1987
Lake Stevens High School graduate and 1991 Gonzaga University alum is a renowned cookbook author, photographer and world traveler.
Now he is returning home for a visit.
Koehler will be in Everett on Friday to publicize his second cookbook: “Rice, Pasta, Couscous: The Heart of the
Mediterranean Kitchen.”
It will be long trip for Koehler, 40, who met his wife, Eva, in London, and later moved with her to her hometown of Barcelona, Spain, where they have lived and worked for most of the past 12 years.
Barcelona is where Koehler’s passion for food, especially rice dishes, truly blossomed.
He became a part of his new family’s food traditions, including his mother-in-law’s get-togethers for paella, a classic Spanish rice dish she has made every weekend since the early 1960s.
“It’s really important,” Koehler said of the weekly family gathering, where he and Eva announced their engagement and other big news. “Everything passes through the paella.”
Koehler, in many ways, has paella and his mother-in-law, Rosa Ramirez, to thank for his career success.
In 2006, Chronicle Books published his first cookbook, “La Paella: Deliciously Authentic Rice Dishes From Spain’s Mediterranean Coast,” named by the New York Times as one of the noteworthy cookbooks of the year.
“Suddenly I was in this culture, and it was the first place I’d ever really lived where food and culture were so integrated,” Koehler said. “To talk about one is to talk about the other. That was my window.”
While traveling for freelance work for magazines and newspapers such as Gourmet, Saveur, Food & Wine, the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post, Koehler noticed profound cultural parallels throughout the Mediterranean in the versatile staples of rice, pasta and couscous.
He discovered rice dishes on the coast of Spain, and also in northern Italy, Croatia, Greece, Turkey, Cyprus, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt and eastern Libya.
He found pasta-based meals in Italy, Malta and Croatia.
When it came to couscous — tiny hard pellets of durum wheat — Koehler pulled deeply from his experiences in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and western Libya.
Koehler’s wife and daughters, Alba, 7, and Maia, 5, serve frequently as testers for recipes in his books.
Koehler’s parents, Bill and Joanne Koehler of Warm Beach, have also been able to sample his food on their regular visits to Spain.
Joanne Koehler said her son had always been inquisitive and an avid journal writer and photographer, but his international cuisine came later.
“He didn’t cook at home,” she said. “He just found that niche with his travel. One thing leads to another and to another.”
In “Rice, Pasta, Couscous,” Koehler shares numerous photos from his life and travels abroad, including scenes from busy urban markets as well as countryside and coastal vistas.
He offer a short history of each starch plus cooking and buying tips, followed by recipes born of his experiences on the road with friends, family and sometimes strangers.
Every recipe is preceded by a short story.
“It’s part travel book, part cookbook,” Koehler said. “I am not an expert in Mediterranean rice, pasta and couscous. It’s impossible.
“I am an interested observer. I go around and pick up scraps and stories. I ask a lot of questions.”
Koehler said he is painstakingly precise in testing his recipes for American cooks, whether it’s his sweet couscous in milk or his elaborate Catalan two-course Christmas soup.
“Everything is weighed, timed, measured,” he said. “It’s all in a kitchen log notebook.”
Koehler’s next book, due out in 2012, will explore the rustic and rural traditions of food in Spain as part of Chronicle’s “Country Cooking” series.
It’s a challenge Koehler was ready for after eating windpipe of ox at a wedding banquet in Kashmir and locusts in Madagascar during his travels.
Koehler said it took a while for his palate to appreciate the simplicity of Mediterranean cooking that honors fresh, seasonal ingredients.
“I found that I really like the straightforward. The flavors are quite bold on their own,” he said. “You find, if you’re not killing everything with spices, how flavorful a piece of fish is just baked with a little olive oil on top.”
Meet Jeff Koehler
What: Jeff Koehler will read from his latest book, “Rice, Pasta, Couscous: The Delicious Heart of the Mediterranean Kitchen.” Afterward, Koehler will talk about his books while three recipes from his book are prepared and served.
When: Book-signing at 6 p.m. Friday. Class from 7 to 8:30 p.m.
Where: J. Matheson Kitchen & Gourmet, 2609 Colby Ave., Everett.
Cost: The signing is free; the cooking class costs $29.50.
Register: Call 425-258-4589
Information: www.jmatheson.com and jeff-koehler.com.
Koehler will also sign copies of his book at 2 p.m. Nov. 14 at Elliott Bay Book Co. in Seattle, www.elliottbaybook.com.
Couscous
1 teaspoon salt
21/2 cups warm water
1 pound couscous (about 21/2 cups)
2 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil
1 tablespoon of butter or smen (a cooking oil, optional)
Dissolve the salt in the water.
Pour the couscous into a very wide, shallow dish and dribble the warm, salty water over it. Mix with a fork. Let sit without disturbing for 10 minutes. Drizzle in the oil.
Toss with both hands, lifting the grains and letting them fall through your fingers. Work out any clumps by rubbing your palms together as if warming your hands, letting the grains drop into the dish.
Before serving, preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
Transfer couscous to an ovenproof dish and bake, turning the grains over from time to time, until steamy, 10 to 15 minutes. Work in the butter or smen if adding.
Fluff with a fork before piling the grains onto a serving bowl.
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