Food & Wine editor-in-chief Dana Cowin is in town next week promoting her new book, My Mistakes in the Kitchen: Learning to Cook with 65 Great Chefs and Over 100 Delicious Recipes. By her own reckoning Cowin used to be an atrocious cook, so she decided to do something about it. Fortunately she was in the privileged position of having the country’s best chefs on speed dial, allowing her to seek advice from the likes of Thomas Keller, David Chang and Jacques Pépin. The recipes are the kinds of thing you would find in Food & Wine—interesting, but nothing too advanced—while the side panels of chefs’ tips provide the most useful resource. Watch out for the homilies ("Toast offers a life lesson: be hard on the outside, soft on the inside").

Cowin will be at Lincoln Restaurant to cook a five-course meal—she won’t be doing it on her own, though, as she’s enlisted Portland’s food royalty to help out: Jenn Louis (Lincoln), Scott Dolich (Park Kitchen, Bent Brick), Gabe Rucker (Le Pigeon), Naomi Pomeroy (Beast) and Greg and Gabrielle Denton (Ox). That’s a great line up for a dinner, though hopefully it won’t suffer the supergroup syndrome of bloated egos battling for the limelight (Though here? In Portland? Surely not). Cowin will also be at Powell’s in Beaverton for a discussion with local food writer Liz Crain. Lincoln Restaurant, 3808 N Williams, October 28, 6:30 pm, $100 (includes book), call 288-6200 for tickets; Powell’s, 3415 SW Cedar Hills, Beaverton, October 29, 7 pm