Thai, French, Italian: Versatile cook not afraid to try anything.

Byline: HOME COOKING By Jim Boyd The Register-Guard

Doris Keith-Hoitt lives on a 20-acre farm in the Jasper area near Springfield in a house that was designed around its kitchen.

"I'm one of those people that has, easily, $3,000 worth of groceries in the house at all times," she said. "I could go home right now and cook a five-course Thai meal, a six-course Italian meal, an eight-course Russian meal, forever courses French. I, basically, can cook in any language.

"I have this gift/curse," she said. "I can go to a restaurant and eat something and go home and replicate it - in almost any language. And I love doing that."

She is married to Bob Hoitt, a retired manufacturer of rock-crushing equipment, and is the mother of two grown children.

She grew up in Oakridge where her father, an Oglala Sioux, worked for Pope & Talbot Inc. However, when Doris and her identical twin sister, Delores, were 15, their grandmother decided they should finish their last two years of high school on the Pine Ridge Indian reservation in South Dakota.

"She was every inch the matriarch, this little 4-foot-11, 300-pound woman that, when she braided her hair, had to wrap the braids around her neck to finish the braids, because her hair was so long," Keith-Hoitt said. "She decided we needed to finish our high school education on the reservation, so off we went. It was fabulous!"

Specialty: "I like cooking everything," she said, but she singled out Asian foods as being a special interest.

"I had a wonderful teacher. Her name was Kim Moy," Keith-Hoitt said. "Kim and her son-in-law, Austin Colcord, had a little restaurant over on Alder called the Bamboo Pavilion. My kids grew up in that restaurant.

"Kim was always cooking something for herself that she didn't serve to the public. She would sit there and eat salmon heads and I would eat my food like this ..." Keith-Hoitt demonstrated how she would avert her eyes. "... Because I just couldn't watch somebody eat salmon heads.

"But she taught me a great deal. She taught me the basics. And the main thing she taught me was to never be afraid to try anything."

How she began cooking: Keith-Hoitt's aunt in Poulsbo, Wash., served as a role model.

"My mother's side of the family are all Norwegians," Keith-Hoitt said, "and Auntie Bernice was a fantastic cook and she really inspired me to want to cook a lot - exciting stuff, try anything. And Kim really reinforced that."

Keith-Hoitt received formal training in cooking from a Franciscan nun, Sister Annella, at Holy Rosary Mission on the Indian reservation.

"She was from Alsace-Lorraine," Keith-Hoitt said. "Sister Annella really taught me about new things. See, I grew up in Oakridge. Meat and potatoes. Deer meat. Fish. That was it."

Students at the Holy Rosary Mission were expected to perform a two-hour job every day, and Keith-Hoitt's task was to assist Sister Annella in the kitchen that provided meals for special visitors.

Her competitiveness also played a part in her culinary education. Joe Huntoon, her husband's uncle, was chef at the Eugene County Club at the time of her marriage in 1965.

"I decided that I not only had to become as good a cook as him, I had to be better," she said, explaining that she "asked him a million questions."

Her biggest cooking success: "I would have to say helping young women realize that cooking isn't as tough as they thought it was," she said. `I teach cooking in the aisles of grocery stores. I'll see some young woman standing there staring at all this stuff and you can just tell by the look on her face that she's thinking, `What the hell am I making for dinner tonight?'

`And I say, `You know, have you ever taken a pork tenderloin and cut it about this wide, pounded it flat and breaded it and made an Iowa pork sandwich?'

"And I keep it simple for them and help them understand that cooking can be fun. It can be exciting."

Her biggest cooking failure: "Making a batch of peanut brittle one time. It burned up. Almost caught on fire when I turned my back," she said.

Another time, a friend got a phone call and had to leave suddenly while she was in the middle of making a batch of fudge. Her friend asked her to come over and keep stirring the fudge until just the right time and then get it into the pan.

"So I'm stirring it. You have to keep stirring it until it just starts to lose its shine. All of a sudden - Wham! - that thing was a brick and here's this spoon stuck right in the middle of four pounds of fudge."

Her favorite cookbooks: "Paul Prudhomme's Louisiana Kitchen," "The Commander's Palace New Orleans Cookbook" by Dick and Ella Brennan, and her favorite is a 1963 edition of "Betty Crocker's Cook Book."

Why this recipe was chosen: Keith-Hoitt said she eats this spicy, Egyptian-style hummus called "ful" to combat high cholesterol by using the olive oil in the dip to replace animal fat. Ful (pronounced "fool') is eaten for breakfast in Egypt, Keith-Hoitt said. The bean dip with a banana or half a peach or orange is her breakfast, too.

Ful

2 pounds dried garbanzo beans plus 1 teaspoon kosher salt

1 pound dried pinto beans plus 1 teaspoon kosher salt

4 diced jalapeno peppers, seeds removed

2 diced habanero peppers, seeds removed

4 diced serrano peppers, seeds removed

1 head garlic, peeled and pressed

1/4 cup finely sliced red bell pepper

1 cup olive oil (Spanish preferred)

2/3 cup lemon juice

1 pint tahini (sesame paste), heated in a kettle of hot water

2 teaspoons kosher salt

1 teaspoon fine white pepper

Cayenne pepper (optional)

1 thinly sliced green onions (optional)

Extra-virgin olive oil

Paprika (optional)

Kalamata olives (optional)

Marinated artichokes (optional)

Lavosh bread (available at Trader Joe's), cut into triangles for dipping

Lawry's garlic salt

Soak the garbanzo and pinto beans separately in unsalted water. Drain and cook them the next day in separate kettles. Add 1 teaspoon kosher salt to each kettle and enough water to cover the beans. Cook until tender. Drain and save the juice from the garbanzo beans for when you puree the hummus.

Wear rubber gloves to devein and remove the seeds from the peppers. Slice them into fine julienne. Add the garlic and bell pepper.

I puree these ingredients in three batches:

Place a third of the garbanzo beans in a food processor and puree them until they are as fine as you can get them. Add half the olive oil to make them liquefy; use some of the garbanzo bean water if you need it.

Do this again, adding the pepper and garlic along with the garbanzo beans and olive oil. Add lemon juice to liquefy.

Puree any remaining garbanzo beans, using garbanzo bean water to liquefy.

Do not puree the pinto beans.

Dump the batches of puree into a large bowl and stir in the whole cooked pinto beans.

Heat the tahini in hot water until it is warm and runny. Stir this in and mix well. (Do not heat tahini in a microwave. It will get hard and dry.)

Season with 2 teaspoons kosher salt and 1 teaspoon white pepper (or to taste). Add extra cayenne pepper, if you like an extra-hot dip.

(At this point, the dip can be frozen in containers for later use.)

Just before serving, mix in thinly sliced green onions, if they are being used.

To serve, put the hummus in a serving dish and drizzle extra-virgin olive oil on top. Sprinkling on a dash of cayenne and paprika is an option. For company meals, top with more sliced green onion or perhaps sliced kalamata olives. Marinated artichokes also can be stirred into the dip. As a healthy food, a 4-ounce serving is the correct size for an individual meal.

Make chips for dipping from lavosh bread. Cut the whole sheets into 4 strips and then cut the strips into triangles with flat tops. Place the triangles made from half a package of sheets into a large plastic bowl and drizzle with olive oil.

Sprinkle lavosh chips with Lawry's garlic salt and toss. Do this twice.

Place on 2 cookie sheets and bake at 300 degrees until chips are crisp, about 40 minutes. If your oven does not heat evenly, stir the chips gently midway during the baking.

Makes about 2 quarts hummus.

To nominate a cook for this feature, send mail to Home Cooking, P.O. Box 10188, Eugene, OR 97440; or e-mail [e-mail].