Smoke & Pine: Adaptive Cooking, Wilderness Food Essays, and the Global Pantry — Where Wild Things Get Remembered
Smoke & Pine — Where wild things get remembered.
Twenty-five years behind a knife. A wheelchair. A wilderness. An honest pantry. This is what cooking looks like when you stop following recipes and start understanding food.
Twenty-five years. Self-taught. No culinary school — just fire and a lot of failure. What I know about cooking came from burning things, breaking things, and starting over. It came from a sled dog trapline in the Wrangells and a commercial kitchen in Boise and a Middle Fork canyon in June.
Most people cook scared. Wrong ingredient. Wrong technique. Wrong result. Smoke & Pine exists to fix that. The Global Pantry teaches you what ingredients do — how acid wakes a dish up, how fat carries flavor, how smoke tells a story. The Working Kitchen teaches you what to cook when time, energy, or your body is limited.
The essays are honest about all of it. The wilderness. The wheelchair. The twenty-five years of professional cooking that taught me what no recipe ever could.
Everything Here
Teaches One Thing.
The Global Pantry
Thirty-five global ingredients. Eight flavor profiles. Every one teaches you a move. Acid. Fat. Heat. Smoke. Umami. Learn what they do and you stop needing recipes. You start cooking by feel — the way it was always supposed to work.
Explore the Pantry →The Working Kitchen
Four systems — Pan, Bowl, Broth, Fire — built for the days when time, energy, or your body won't cooperate. Adaptive cooking for real people who actually cook.
Enter the Kitchen →The Essays
Food, wilderness, memory, grief, fire. Writing that doesn't play it safe. From a sled dog trapline in Alaska to a Middle Fork canyon to a kitchen in the Treasure Valley. Nobody gets out clean.
Read the Essays →
The Ingredients
That Change Everything.
Eight flavor profiles. Thirty-five ingredients. One pantry that teaches you how flavor actually works — not what to cook, but why it tastes the way it does.
It doesn't taste like fish. It tastes like depth you can't name — the thing missing from every dish that needed one more move.
AcidKeep a jar by the stove. It's the answer every time something needs brightness and you don't want citrus.
SmokeCold-smoked over oak for weeks. That smoke is real — it's built into the spice before you ever open the jar.
HeatTwo minutes in hot oil. That's where the flavor lives. Most people skip it. That's why their mapo tastes like nothing.
UmamiOne rule. Never boil it. Boiling kills everything you spent the last twenty minutes building. Take it off the heat first.
EarthyDon't throw out the soaking water. It's the fastest umami stock you'll ever make — pour it into anything.
FatButter, cooked down until the water burns off and the solids go gold. What's left doesn't smoke. It sings.
AromaticSix berries, flat of a knife. The smell of Idaho winter in a jar. Game, braises, anything that needs the woods in it.
Cook Real Food.
Whatever the Day Brings.
Some days you've got an hour and a full tank. Some days you've got twenty minutes and nothing left. The Working Kitchen is built for both. Four systems — Pan, Bowl, Broth, Fire — that produce real, honest food without requiring more than you have. Adaptive cooking for the days that don't cooperate.
Enter the Kitchen →High heat. Fast. One surface does the work.
Cold builds. Grain, acid, fat, protein. No heat required.
Low and slow. Time does what energy can't.
Outside. Smoke. The oldest system there is.
Smoke in the Pines
Essays from the wilderness, the kitchen, and the long road between them. The book that started all of this. Available now on Amazon.
Get the Book on Amazon →
Writing That
Doesn't Play It Safe.
Memory & Wilderness
Elk, Juniper, and the Way Memory Tastes
The elk was down before I heard the shot. That's how it goes when everything finally goes right — quietly, without the drama you spent years rehearsing.
Food & Culture
The Pan
Every kitchen has a culture. Most of them are abusive. Nobody talks about it because it's just how it's always been done.
Wilderness
Sixty-Five Below
The temperature at which spit freezes before it hits the ground. I learned that in the Wrangells. The dogs knew it before I did — they always do.
Cook With
People Who
Give a Damn.
The Working Fire is a membership for serious home cooks. The full Global Pantry library. Monthly live fire cooking sessions. A private community where people actually show up and actually cook. No tutorials. No twelve-step carousels. Just a pantry that works, a community that shows up, and fire.
Join The Working Fire- Full Global Pantry library access
- Monthly live fire cooking sessions
- Private community — real cooks only
- Adaptive cooking resources
- Early access to new content & essays
50 founding members · Then $20/month