Pork Steak, Roasted Corn and a Little Fire in the Belly

The audience didn’t know it, but Celebrity Chef Kevin Gillespie was likely giving them a taste of his upcoming cookbook during his food demonstration at Gig Harbor’s recent .

In addition to competing in a cook-off challenge with ’s Thad Lyman, Gillespie prepared a summer cookout menu of marinated pork steak and roasted corn for the Aug. 6 festival attendees. Those recipes are slated for inclusion in Fire in My Belly, the first installment of a two-cookbook deal that the Woodfire Grill chef/owner signed last year.

Due out in late 2012, the book promises to be atypical from other cookbooks, both in content and organization, said Gillespie. While promoting farm fresh and seasonal foods, the book’s larger message will be that good cooking stems from knowing about your ingredients.

“We address this idea of how you bridge two ingredients that you don’t necessarily believe go together,” said Gillespie. “There is almost always some linking factor, and educating yourself to determine what that is can actually make you grow as a cook and create a lot of new things that you don’t need recipes for.”

A little known fact about Gillespie is that he was planning on pursuing a degree in engineering at MIT right up until a week before he graduated from high school. Today, he said that affinity for science is at the foundation of his talents as a cook.

“Science drives a great deal of what I do. Most people would not assume that because the style of food that I cook is one that seems oddly unscientific,” he said. “The reality is that my understanding of [the chemical reactions between ingredients] makes me a better cook.”

It also makes him better able to cook from the gut rather than from written recipes. Gillespie hopes readers of Fire in My Belly will ultimately feel more confident about doing the same.

With chapters that are theme-driven, the book will also give readers a glimpse into how Gillespie thinks about food. The first chapter is entitled "All the Foods You Think You Hate."

"It's my obsession," he said. "When I find out someone doesn’t like an ingredient, I feel compelled to make them something with that in it because I’m convinced it's not ingredient, it’s the cook."

Gillespie's free-wheeling style was evident during his cooking demonstration at the wine and food festival. The chef put together two easy-to-prepare dishes designed to cook simultaneously on the grill: mojo-marinated and glazed grilled pork steak paired with sweet corn roasted in the husk with lime, jalapeño and cotija cheese.

With the ingredients for both adjustable to suit individual tastes, Gillespie’s instructions were light on specifics. For those of you who are more comfortable working with measurements, we asked the chef’s publicist for copies of the recipes. Check out the PDF's we included with our story.