Hank Shaw

Hank Shaw is a former commercial fisherman and line cook who has written extensively about seafood. Over the years he has cooked and eaten nearly everything that swims, crawls or grows under water, from blowfish on Long Island to eels in Virginia to burbot from under the ice in Minnesota.

Although he has fished with rod and reel since he could walk, Hank's serious interest in seafood came as a deckhand and clam-digger during his college years, followed by stints on the line at restaurants in the Midwest. He has since spent the better part of two decades as a journalist for daily newspapers ranging from the Free Lance-Star of Virginia to the St. Paul Pioneer Press in Minnesota to The Record of Stockton, California. His writing on seafood has appeared in magazines across the country, and he currently writes a food blog called Hunter Angler Gardener Cook.

Although he's been writing and cooking for two decades, the education of a seafood cook never really ends. So many fish, so little time...

My culinary roots are split between my mother's New England Yankee tradition and the Italians and Portuguese I learned from in my native New Jersey. I have been a student of Mediterranean seafood cookery first and foremost, and many of the recipes here will reflect that.

But the world is larger than Europe, and I will present my culinery forays into Southeast Asia, Japan, India and even South America and Africa from time to time.

Seafood is like jazz, where old standards are endlessly taken up and made unique by cooks in their own time, their own place. My goal is for more home cooks to take their turn on the stage.