Smoke & Pine — Where wild things get remembered.
Fire.
Flavor.
Control.
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.
I've been cooking for twenty-five years. Self-taught. No culinary school. A lot of fire and a lot of failure. What I learned is that most people cook scared — scared of the wrong ingredient, the wrong technique, the wrong result.
Smoke & Pine exists to fix that. The Global Pantry teaches you what ingredients do. The Working Kitchen teaches you what to do when time, energy, or your body is limited. The essays are honest about all of it.
You are not selling products. You are selling clarity. You are not teaching recipes. You are teaching control.
Three Ways In
Everything Here
Teaches One Thing.
Thirty-five ingredients. Eight flavor profiles. Every one teaches you a move. Acid. Fat. Heat. Smoke. Umami. Learn what they do and you stop needing recipes.
Explore the PantryWhat to cook when time, energy, or your body is limited. Four systems — Pan, Bowl, Broth, Fire — that produce real food without drama. Adaptive cooking for people who actually cook.
Enter the KitchenFood, 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.
Read the EssaysThe Global Pantry
The Ingredients
That Change Everything.
Eight flavor profiles. Thirty-five ingredients. One pantry that teaches you how flavor actually works.
It doesn't taste like fish. It tastes like depth you can't identify.
AcidKeep a jar by the stove. It's the answer to "it needs something."
SmokeThe smoke is real — cold-smoked over oak for weeks, built into the spice.
HeatThe two minutes matters. That's where the flavor lives. Don't rush it.
UmamiThe one rule: never boil it — boiling kills everything you've been building.
EarthyDon't throw out the soaking water — it's the fastest umami stock you'll ever make.
FatThe fat that makes Indian cooking taste like itself — and butter's better version.
AromaticSix berries, flat of a knife — the smell of Idaho winter in a jar.
The Essays
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 rehearsed.
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.
The Working Fire
Cook With
People Who
Give a Damn.
A membership for serious home cooks. The Global Pantry library. Live fire sessions. A community that actually cooks. Founding rate while spots last.
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
50 founding members · Then $20/month
The Book
Smoke in the Pines
Essays from the wilderness, the kitchen, and the long road between them. Available now on Amazon.
Get the Book on Amazon →