Episode 52: Discovering seasonal secrets and looking ahead

In this final episode of the second season of Check It Out!, hosts Ken Harvey, Jessica Russell, Paul Pitkin and Jim Hills relate their personal holiday dreams and nightmares and dive into library resources that may just help set a tasty dinner table.

Hills, not beset by the piled-plate, food-touching phobia, shares that a holiday meal is best perceived as a single entity, the sum of its parts as measured both horizontally and vertically. The description, however, takes Russell back to a time in her life when space between menu items was required and the queasy realization that she may not have moved as far past those days as thought.

Russell describes her southern roots by painting the mental picture of deep frying turkey in a Louisiana front yard. “Deep-fried turkey is the best,” Russell proclaims with no dissenters. The pot, she goes on to say, is the same one used for the crawfish boil.

“In Mississippi, that (pot) is called a washtub,” Harvey says.

Pitkin allows that as a child his family finally rebelled at his mother’s cooking to the point that they chose to have the holiday dinner delivered. From Nordstrom.

The Sno-Isle Libraries collection, Russell points out, has thousands of cookbooks and other resources available to help make any holiday celebration memorable.

Pitkin, executive director for the Sno-Isle Libraries Foundation, points out that there is more to the holiday season than eating.

“I encourage everyone to make a year-end donation to the foundation,” Pitkin says, adding that foundation donations support a variety of programs at the Sno-Isle Libraries.

“The third-grade reading challenge is coming up,” Pitkin says of the program that includes thousands of students across Snohomish and Island counties. “The reading challenge helps third-graders improve literacy at a time that very important to their development level.”

The foundation is also the primary sponsor of TEDxSnoIsleLibraries, which is returning after a hiatus on May 9, 2020 at Edmonds Center for the Arts, Pitkin says.

Speaker videos from the 2015, 2016 and 2017 events have been viewed more than 3.5 million times, Harvey says.

“The foundation has always been the main sponsor and we could not be more excited that it’s coming back,” Pitkin says.

Finally, Harvey offers a peek at what’s coming in Season 3 for the podcast.

“We working on getting Everett Community College President Daria J. Willis,” Harvey says. “And, the head of IBM’s Watson project is going to talk to us about artificial intelligence and quantum computing.”

And books? What about books?

“We are working on a slew of authors, some nationally acclaimed, some just getting started,” Harvey says.

Episode length 37:26

Episode links

Holiday and winter resourcesTEDxSnoIsleLibraries

Sno-Isle Libraries Foundation

EvCC President Daria J. Willis

IBM Watson

Deep-fried turkey recipes

Paula Deen

Alton Brown

John Lovick