Michael Lionheart

After a life insurance company refused to issue a policy for Peter Kaminsky, pointing to a blood sugar level heightened by such gluttonous habits as eating two slices of pizza a day, the food writer spent months drinking red wine, eating steaks and developing a cookbook featuring recipes for crepes and chocolate eclairs - and lost 25 pounds in the process. Sensing his miracle story was the stuff of a self-help book, Kaminsky formalized his weight-loss theories: His newly-published Culinary Intelligence: The Art of Eating Healthy (And Really Well) outlines how eaters can reconcile physical well-being with sensual pleasures.

Kaminsky is not a stickler (which may explain the loose grammar of the title, which recklessly puts an adjective where an adverb should go.) He loves beer, cheese, butter and bacon. But he especially loves them in moderation, which is why he believes that eaters should savor very small bites of very fatty foods, instead of loading their plates with white flour pasta slathered in cream sauce.

It's not a new idea: Viewers of Mad Men know Weight Watchers was preaching a similar message more than 40 years ago. Yet Kaminsky has the culinary cred to float the concept with eaters who would never buy a diet book. He appeals to fellow epicureans by validating their desire to try everything, a quirk that doesn't sound pathological when Kaminsky describes it. And he advocates dietary principles that owe more to Dean & DeLuca than Dean Ornish: Kaminsky suggests readers maximize their "flavor per calorie" count by eating umami-packed anchovies, Brussels sprouts, Parmesan cheese, caponata and dark chocolate cacao nibs.

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If food lovers want to find memorable meals, they need to follow the money, economist Tyler Cowen says.

Cowen, author of the forthcoming An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies, believes eaters are frequently mislead by faulty financial analyses - or by failing to appreciate how economics relates to food.

"If we talk about restaurants, they're commercial products," Cowen says. "Early economics was all about food."

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Slow cookers are usually associated with flaccid pot roasts and bland stews, but a critically-acclaimed cookbook suggests the standby appliances are the perfect devices for producing curried spinach, chicken tikka masala and green lentil porridge.

"A lot of people don't associate flavor with slow cookers," says Anupy Singla, author of The Indian Slow Cooker, who will appear in Seattle this weekend. "Those associations never resonated with me."

Singla's mother purchased a slow cooker soon after immigrating to the U.S., and frequently used it to prepare traditional Indian dishes. "I always thought slow cooker food was fragrant," Singla says. Her mother's recipes served as the foundation for her book, which she wrote in hopes of reaching both non-Indian cooks who haven't previously experimented with curry and cumin and Indian cooks who are reluctant to deviate from traditional preparation methods.

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Chef John Sundstrom is inviting home cooks to serve as recipe testers for a new app and e-book he's trying to fund through Kickstarter.

Backers who donate $10 or more will receive weekly access to recipes developed for the project; Sundstrom plans to ultimately include 90 Lark recipes in the new media cookbook. "We'll ask people to test them out, tell us what they think," he says. "It's a way to engage people throughout the process."

To receive Kickstarter funding, Sundstrom must raise $33,000 by Apr. 6. Sundstrom says the money will pay for the services of professional photographers, videographers and designers.

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Over a century ago, when diners caught between the coasts were often forced to subsist on toast and tinned fish, eaters in Victoria had their pick of the world's bounty.

Consistent with its position as a port city, late-19th century Victoria was considered an excellent eating city, says Robert Griffin, human history manager for the Royal BC Museum. Griffin recently authored Feeding the Family: 100 Years of Food and Drink in Victoria with Nancy Oke, a volunteer who became interested in local foodways after investigating the museum's collection of branded baking power cans and spice boxes. To establish when the commercially-made items reached British Columbia, Oke scoured newspaper archives, which produced a portrait of a city blessed with edibles such as pineapples and inhabited by a scrum of eccentric purveyors.

"Each trade had its own odd person who was a little bit different," Griffin says.

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Henry Alford - who claims to make his living as an "investigative humorist" - proposes to whittle down etiquette to its core values in his new book, Would It Kill You to Stop Doing That?, a collection of essays on how people should treat each other. I haven't read the book, but the chapter which has garnered the most press attention lists a few harmless "misdeeds" that Alford believes fall within the boundaries of good manners, including a game that can only be played in restaurants.

"I play a game called Touch the Waiter," Alford writes. "You see who at the table can touch the waiter the greatest number of times without the waiter's figuring out you're doing so."

Alford confesses his boyfriend is dubious about the game's premise.

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When Memphis Slim sang about troubles with a lady friend who loved her whiskey - "every time I wanna find you, you're laying around some whiskey bar," he wailed in "Whiskey Store Blues" - aged single-barrel bourbon probably wasn't the source of his problems. But Hans Offringa believes the blues and high-end bourbon complement each other in significant ways.

In his new book, Bourbon & Blues, Offringa proposes a dozen blues artist and bourbon brand pairings. "The whole purpose is to use all your senses," says Offringa, who will be signing his book this afternoon at The Pike Brewing Company. "Just as you determine what the bass player is doing, what the lyrics are doing, you take a spirit and enjoy all the flavors. In my opinion, they go well together."

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Americans who think baking is on an upswing have no idea how trendy cake-making is about to become, says a British pastry chef to the stars.

Eric Lanlard, who'll be in Seattle next week to sell his first cookbook published in the U.S., believes the U.S. will soon be seized by the baking club craze that now has the U.K. in its grip.

"The U.K. is definitely brimming with baking mania," says Lanlard, who made the cakes for Madonna's wedding and the late Queen Mother's 101st birthday party. "The TV adverts are all about baking pies. They have good-looking guys rushing from work and making pie for his friends. It's gone crazy. I suppose it's going to hit you soon."

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According to an outline of Shiro Kashiba's daily routine, printed near the close of his new memoir, the Seattle sushi chef wakes up at 9 a.m.; eats miso soup at 10 a.m.; shops for geoduck in the afternoon and drinks a single Bud Light before heading to bed at midnight. What the schedule doesn't include are the biweekly 11 a.m. oral history sessions that resulted in Shiro: Wit, Wisdom & Recipes from a Sushi Pioneer, written with Bruce Rutledge and Yuko Enomoto.

The book, set for release today, is as much a scrapbook as a memoir. Kashiba didn't just share stories with Rutledge and Enomoto: He provided pictures of his teenage hiking trips in Japan; sales statistics for nigiri at his eponymous Belltown restaurant (salmon and tuna outsell every other fish, by a wide margin) and half a dozen recipes for smelt. Together with Kashiba's recollections, the images and illustrations make up a compelling portrait of a chef who crystallized a very specific Seattle food ethos long before the national media had taken note of Pacific Northwesterners' locavore tendencies.

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A lecturer so studiously sophisticated that he prefaces a quote from Voltaire by rhetorically asking his audience "do you know it?" seems an unlikely candidate to engage in a bit of culinary chauvinism. But Adam Gopnik, the New Yorker writer who's now traveling in support of his book The Table Comes First: Family, France, and the Meaning of Food, last week wooed a crowd at Town Hall by pronouncing Pacific Northwest food "better than any other food in the country."

"The reason for that is wine," Gopnik said. "For me, the cooking of this region is buoyed up by wine. I'd rather be drinking Northwest wine than just about anything but Burgundy."

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