WHEN LIFE hands you lemons, make lemonade. Marine biologist Sandra Salazar faced down funding cuts to her environmental-consulting business with sweet revenge: She put on a cook’s hat and baked cookies.

Mastering artisan cooking of hand-crafted shortbreads, mixed in small batches with all-original recipes, was hardly a stretch for this Kirkland biologist-turned-baker. Baking has yielded such good returns that, for now, Salazar has turned in her wetsuit, regulator, and dive tables for aprons, cutting knives and cookie trays.

Trying recipes is like a scientific expedition, she says, pushing her regulation hairnet up off her forehead. (Anthony Bourdain, are you listening?)

“I used to love poring through cookbooks to find recipes for things I’d never heard of,” Salazar says with a smile.

She credits her mother Irene Peterson with encouraging her passion for cooking from the age of five or six. Pinned to her bulletin board for daily inspiration is a slightly-yellowed 1985 cover story from a Salt Lake Tribune food-section featuring her mom, surrounded by platefuls of culinary confections.

Salazar's Outrageous Shortbreads began as a sideline to catering gigs in 2005, when the Bush administration’s cuts to environmental protection took a bite out of her science consulting. Now it’s a thriving business serving dozens of wineries, wine-shops, breweries, pubs, boutique cheese chops, and catalog distributors like Made in Washington. The business expanded to include seasoned nuts -- and will soon break into the world of crackers.

“There is a real science to cooking, of course,” she notes, “and sometimes timing is very critical.  In fact, timing is even more critical in a bakery.”

Those of us more familiar with the Lucille Ball School of Baking can relate. Picture it: Lucy opening her oven door, only to have a huge loaf of bread that’s risen so fast -- it pins her to the counter on the other side of the room.

By contrast, in Outrageous Shortbreads’ immaculate workspace of stainless steel equipment and organized cubicles at her Finn Hill home, order reigns. So does enchantment.

When her timer goes off, Sandra opens the oven door, and an indefinable aroma fills the room with a tantalizing mix of savory flavors. E voila: Chili Chipotle! Six trays of evenly-spaced, perfectly roasted nuts.

Her original catering business, Outrageous Offerings, started in San Diego about 25 years ago, before she moved up to Seattle with husband and business partner Michael Salazar, a marine biologist working for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

They moved here for their ‘real jobs,’ as biologists, she says, working for government agencies and private clients, testing lakes, streams and rivers for industrial toxicants -- heavy metals, polychlorinated biphenyls and dioxin.

In 1997, Michael started Applied Biomonitoring, which Sandra joined in 1999, making expeditions into Puget Sound’s waters and to Canada and the East Coast, often with scuba gear. Using a method of planting caged mussels deep in the water, they’d later test the bivalves for toxic chemical "uptake."

But the government cutbacks to water-quality monitoring cut into their practice. “It took a good year to get some of that work back,” she says. The couple weathered the ups-and-downs of contract work by catering, but that had a downside. Customers often try to extract a deal, she complains: “One lady wanted us to do their wedding for $5 dollars a person!”

Creating a product-line offered more stability. Fortunately, too, orders of shortbreads have marched in tandem with the heady boom in Washington’s wine industry during the last decade.

THE INSPIRATION for creating shortbreads came over a glass of wine. “We really loved the unique sensation of blue cheese with Pinot Noir,” she remembers. Someone said it made her taste buds dance.

Soon her first shortbread variety, Blue-cheese Walnut, designed to be paired with red wines and enhance and prolong those flavors, was born.

Outrageous Shortbreads now makes about two dozen varieties of shortbreads, from Apricot Mango to White Chocolate Lavender-- and several more types of biscotti. A line of coated, seasoned Outrageous Nuts appeals to beer drinkers especially.  Next to be rolled out are Outrageous Bites crackers, including “Lime Chillers,” and “CinnFul Cocoa Shots.”

These tangy treats provide “a nice, densely-packed, nutritious snack” for her customers who stop for a tasting “and want a little food” as they drive across the Olympic Peninsula, says Kathy Charlton of Olympic Cellars in Port Angeles.

Richard Sorensen of Port Townsend’s Sorensen Cellars raves about the  “quality and freshness” of these baked goods but also appreciates the company’s “great suggestions for pairing” them with wines, beers, artisan cheeses and pates, fruit, and other beverages, like coffee, tea, and cider.

Outrageous morsels ship all over the country, but there’s nothing like getting them fresh out of the oven. Salazar would like local merchants in Kirkland -- not to mention those in Bellevue, Redmond, Woodinville and beyond -- to carry her goodies, giving local customers a convenient way to get them (while saving shipping).

“Don’t be shy,” she says. “Give them a try.”

So here is one of her recipes.

Apricot Walnut Bars

 
Crust - combine in food processor until well dispersed:

• ¼ c sugar
• ½ c butter
• 1 c flour

Pat into bottom of 9 x 9" pan. Bake at 325 degrees for 25 minutes. Combine in mixer:

• 2 eggs
• 1 c brown sugar

Slowly mix in:

• a c flour
• ½ t baking powder
• ¼ t salt

Then add:

• 8 oz dried apricots (chopped in food processor)
• 4 oz chopped walnuts
• ½ t vanilla

Spread over crust, bake at 325 for 35 minutes.