By
Special to The Seattle Times

OUR DAD, TOM STOCKLEY, wine connoisseur and epicurean, was The Seattle Times’ wine critic and food features writer, and at the epicenter of Washington’s emerging wine industry from the 1970s until his untimely death in the Alaska Airlines crash of 2000, along with our mother, Peggy Stockley.

It was a devastating time for my sister, Dina Moreno, and me and our families, but as the years passed, we found among his papers a handwritten cookbook journal of recipes he collected and enjoyed in his various travels and wine dinners. It was a wonderful gift from him, and we began to cook his recipes and share them with friends. Through the encouragement of local publisher Elliott Wolf, we published “A Collection of My Favorite Things to Cook: Plus Notes and Comments on Culinary Travels Everywhere” this year.  

Dina and I wrote a story earlier this year for Pacific NW magazine about publishing the book. We have been thrilled by the reaction. More than a dozen bookstores asked to stock the book after getting calls. We have driven all over town, and cruised on ferries with cases in our car trunks, delivering the books.

People we didn’t know wrote to us, telling us how much the book meant to them. Our father’s devoted readers loved the casual, elegant style in his writing, echoed in his recipes and his influential wine columns. Recently, someone referred to him as “the People’s Wine Critic.”

Our dad’s book is not a collection of our family recipes, but rather his notes, and recipes that caught his eye from his life as a wine critic and food writer, and on travels to Italy and Greece and Napa. But it became our family story, and we know others have their own.

Someone said to me recently after reading the book, “You must have had a great life!” I pondered that for a second and then said, “Yes, I think I did!” Growing up with someone who loved to discover and share new recipes and wines really did contribute to a great life. And to that I say, “Cheers,” as our father loved to say.

Paige Stockley: lives in Eastlake in a 110-year-old house with her husband, Steve; her 16-year-old Garfield student, daughter Daisy; their Cavalier dog; and two cats. She is a professional cellist, a community activist, loves traveling and cooking, and weekends at the family’s Hood Canal house where they harvest oysters and sip wine. Her sister, Dina Moreno, lives with her husband, Mario, in Wallingford (daughter Luisa is a teacher at Seattle Amistad School, and the other daughter, Julia, is a college freshman at UBC). Dina works as a digital archivist at Densho, the archive of the World War II Japanese American Incarceration. She spends time cooking, talking about food and planning dinners. To order the book, see tomstockleycookbook.com.

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