Culinary artist whips up another batch of recipes in latest book

WASILLA — Suzette Lord Weldon was only about 8 years old when she helped run her parents’ burger business in California and Nevada.

“I was a bit of a prodigy, I guess,” the Wasilla resident said Thursday when talking about her new cookbook “Suzette’s Alaskan Cooking.” “I was a very strange kid.”

Weldon said her mother could taste a dish from any culture and go home and duplicate it perfectly for her seven children.

Weldon’s innate love of food and exploring creative ways to tingle the taste buds has since blossomed into a 30-year culinary career involving teaching classes at Allen & Petersen, holding cooking parties, running her own Rent-a-Chef business and publishing her own unique recipes in what will soon be her third cookbook.

She’ll even go camping with you and show you how to make tundra tandoori chicken on a rock. Or you can read her recipe for it on page 60 of her new book and try it yourself.

“One time we were on a camping trip and we forgot to bring a grate for the fire pit,” she explains at the top of that recipe. “I had a plastic container full of tandoori chicken, so I looked around and found a large flat stone. We made coals in the fire, set the rocks right onto the coals and then cooked the chicken sizzling away right there on those rocks. It turned out really good too.”

An energetic, grab-life-by-the-horns spirit exudes from Weldon as she explains how she ended up in Alaska about 10 years ago after growing up in the melting pot of the San Francisco Bay area.

“Alaska had the food we coveted the most in the Napa Valley,” the mother of two said. “Alaska wild salmon was the star of the show down there.

“Plus, I love the people here and I love to hunt and fish and figure out what to do with the plants.”

Sharing her love of cooking with others is her greatest passion, she said. She loves to show all those people who claim they can’t cook that they really can.

That’s why she loved teaching cooking classes at Wasilla’s Allen & Petersen and why she now seeks to hold more informal workshops during in-home cooking parties.

“I love teaching people how to preserve food like mushrooms and how to make jams and jellies,” she said. “I also teach people how to set up for a banquet and how to set up a buffet table. Anything they want to know, I am ready to help them.”

Her first cookbook, “Suzette’s International Cooking,” has sold an estimated 10,000 copies, she said. Her most recent book, “Suzette’s Alaskan Cooking” published last year and already is even more popular, she said.

“This one is selling 10 times as fast as the last one,” she said. “When I do a book-signing in a store, I probably average 70 books in three-and-a-half hours. It’s amazing. I feel so blessed.”

It features Mat-Su potato salad, which she likes to make from pickings out of a potato farm at Point MacKenzie, salmon egg rolls, ptarmigan kabobs, “golden nugget empanadas,” halibut timbales and blueberry bread pudding among its mouth-watering 90 recipes.

She said she’s already working on part two of the Alaskan book. But it takes a lot of testing of recipes on friends and family members before she’s satisfied with the results, she said.

What’s the most fun for her is when she can change someone’s mind about a certain type of food they are either afraid to try or have sworn off.

“I love to win people over with food,” she said. “If someone tells me they’re sick of salmon, I love to delight their senses by preparing it in such a way that they fall in love with it again or realize it’s not so bad when prepared a different way. I love to educate people’s pallets.”

Weldon said she will be at Alaska Imagery on Bogard Road from 6 to 8 next Wednesday night giving massages and providing samples of her food during a mammogram party.

“Oh, yeah, I’m a massage therapist, too,” she laughed.

For more information on Weldon’s cookbooks or Rent-a-Chef service, call her at 357-CHEF.

Contact K.T. McKee at kate.mckee@frontiersman.com or 352-2252.