Cooking on two fronts
Chefs don’t tend to cook much at home, says Alexa Wilson, executive chef at Wild Sage American Bistro, a downtown restaurant known for an innovative and eclectic menu with dishes as beautiful as they are yummy.
Wilson, a Spokane native who graduated from Le Cordon Bleu in Portland, works 80-hour weeks and has a busy family with three hungry boys and a husband to feed between their far flung activities, so cooking at home has to be efficient.
“It’s crazy; my family is going like this,” she says, spreading her hands wide to show how hard it is to pull everyone together for meals.
For many families, frequent fast-food is the time crunch fix, but fresh, healthy meals are important to Wilson. It helps that her boys and husband share meal preparation duties and Wilson makes good use of every minute by keeping things simple and doubling up meal prep steps whenever possible.
If she is peeling garlic, she’ll peel the whole head, popping the unused cloves in a sandwich bag for the fridge, to be used later that week.
“Clean up is huge. Why do that three times when I can do it once?” she says, adding that she is “big on leftovers – but not like half of a casserole with soggy cornflakes – leftovers that are prepped to become something else.”
When barbecuing chicken on their much-used gas rotisserie, she’ll barbecue two. Or when cooking steaks, she’ll cook extra, using them in stir fry, tacos, or packed lunches, the meat a foundation for a different dish entirely.
In her home kitchen, Wilson says she couldn’t live without her chef knife and tongs, which she uses daily. She still uses the same set of knives she purchased when cooking and running meal service for 300 crew members on a fishing boat in Alaska 20 years ago, having them repaired and sharpened when needed at Crown Foods.
And her most useful and time saving appliance is her rotisserie, followed closely by her rice cooker, which she uses for both rice and vegetables. That’s because both appliances enable her family to get healthy food on the table with minimal time, effort or clean up.
The common denominator between cooking at home and cooking at Wild Sage, says Wilson, is her reliance on fresh, healthy ingredients.
“This is so much like a polar opposite of what I do for my guests,” Wilson says of cooking at home, explaining that at the restaurant she has a fully equipped, prepped kitchen to play in all day long, and she doesn’t have to clean up afterward.
It is there where her culinary creative juices flow and it is there where she blends color, texture, dimension and flavor, serving food with both style and sustenance. And at the end the day, when she is finally home, it’s nice to make that easy barbecue chicken her mother taught her so many years ago.