About

When she’s not squid jigging, fishing, or cavorting through the woods picking wild things for her next meal, Becky Selengut is a private chef, an author, a humorist, and a cooking teacher. A regular instructor for PCC Natural Markets since 2004, Selengut is also an adjunct professor in the culinary/nutrition department at Bastyr University in Kenmore, Washinton. Selengut is the author of Good Fish: Sustainable Seafood Recipes from the Pacific Coast. In the near future, Selengut hopes to clone herself so she can find the time to do more fun things that other people call “work”.

April Pogue discovered her passion for wine while working with the Fifth Floor restaurant in San Francisco and its award-winning wine list. She has worked for Spago Beverly Hills, Seattle¹s Cascadia, Earth & Ocean, and Wild Ginger. Currently she is the sommelier and dining room manager of Loulay in downtown Seattle. April teaches classes on food and wine pairing for charitable functions, PCC Cooks, and has taught students from the Culinary Institute of America. She also contributed the wine pairings for Selengut’s first book.

Clare Barboza is a Seattle-based food photographer with a passion for documenting how food goes from the farm to the kitchen to the table. She has photographed over a dozen cookbooks and regularly shoots for various publications, restaurants, and chefs. Clare also leads a variety of photography workshops out of her studio in downtown Seattle.

The button mushroom better make room on the shelf. Home cooks are now buying previously obscure mushroom species from supermarkets as well as growers and gatherers at local farmers’ markets, and adventurous chefs are collecting all manner of edible mushrooms in the woods. But now that they have these uncommon mushrooms, home cooks and chefs alike are asking themselves, “What do I do with them?” Chef Becky Selengut’s SHROOM is an educated guide to the basics of cooking everything from portobellos, morels, chanterelles and the increasingly available maitake, oyster, and beech mushrooms.

Information packed, friendly, and down-to-earth, SHROOM is for cooks who want to begin adding mushrooms to their diets, find new ways to use mushrooms they already love, or diversify their repertoires with mushroom-accented recipes inspired from Indian, Thai, Vietnamese, and Japanese cuisines, among others. Interesting flavors include Maitake Tikka Masala, King Trumpet and Tomato Sandwiches with Spicy Mayo, and Hedgehog Mushrooms and Cheddar Grits with Fried Eggs and Tabasco Honey. The level of difficulty of the five recipes in each chapter progresses throughout the book.

Becky Selengut delivers fifteen species-specific chapters on mushroom cookery with the same levity and expertise she brought to the topic of sustainable seafood in her IACP-nominated 2011 book, Good Fish. Selengut’s wife, sommelier April Pogue, once again teams up to provide wine pairings for each of the seventy-five recipes.