Chefs Together

With friends, fresh fish and all the trimmings, a meal to remember

I USED TO CLAIM that I was not a competitive person. Never particularly enthusiastic about sports, and lukewarm at the card table, I am neither devastated by loss nor exactly thrilled to win. Put me in a professional kitchen, though, especially with a few of my colleagues, and I am as reckless as a weekend warrior on the basketball court.

Cooking with other chefs makes me want to cook my best. It's not that I want to show them up it's just that all the constraints are off. Cooking with friends or family in a home kitchen or even in a cooking school has a different agenda. There, I want to demonstrate how very doable everything is, so I tend to keep things overly simple. But with yards of stainless steel counters spread out before me, and a range of gas burners pumping out the BTUs, and people beside me who speak my language, people who don't get nervous about a big mess, there's nothing to hold me back.

Last summer I was among a handful of chefs invited to a culinary adventure at the Willows Inn on Lummi Island with John Sundstrom from Lark, Danielle Custer and her chef, Christopher Conville from the café at the Seattle Art Museum, and Laura Dewell, who used to own Pirosmani restaurant on Queen Anne Hill and now works as a consultant with Honey Bear Bakery in Seattle and Wood Stone Corp. in Bellingham. Under the watchful eye of Riley Starks, who owns both the Willows Inn and one of the last 11 reefnet fishing rigs in the San Juan Islands, we spent the day harvesting wild sockeye salmon and the evening inside the kitchen and dining room at Willows Inn.

On the water, we worked beside a team of young people who were on the rig as a summer job. I learned that reefnet fishing is an incredibly sustainable way to catch sockeye salmon. A net slung between two anchored boats is drawn in only when the fish are seen swimming in, so there's virtually no by-catch. Since the fish are bled immediately and transferred within minutes to a tote filled with icy brine, the technique also produces some of the cleanest-tasting fish imaginable.

With the fish in hand, we headed back to the inn to cook and eat. There, we had at our disposal the considerable resources of Stark's garden and larder. Sundstrom fashioned a delectable carpaccio of zucchini with a drizzle of truffle oil and curls of aged Skagit Valley Gouda. Custer and Conville collaborated on a dish of clams with sausage, also from Skagit Valley. As for me, I had eyes for a host of live spot prawns swimming in a tank on the porch outside the kitchen door. From their heads and shells, I stirred up a bisque; from their meaty tails, I made puffy quenelles to float in the bisque.

Dewell took charge of the fish, which was baked to perfection under a veil of garlic and oil. She drew on the traditions of the former Soviet state of Georgia. It was Georgian cooking that informed the fare at Pirosmani, but the same flavors work beautifully in the Pacific Northwest.

Greg Atkinson the author of "Entertaining in the Northwest Style." He can be reached at greg@northwestessentials.com.