The very first recipe Tiffany Haugen made her own was a barbecue sauce she copied down from a PBS cooking show at the age of 9.

“My mom let me experiment in the kitchen, so I went and made it. They happened to be having friends over that night and people were just freaking out over this barbecue sauce,” Haugen says one recent afternoon over tea at her family’s home in Walterville.

Although the recipe for Haugen’s famous barbecue sauce was lost in a move, she says she still tries to recreate it to this day.

While some people might have forgotten about a recipe they learned at the age of 9, Haugen still loves tasting, testing and tweaking recipes.

In fact, when she isn’t hunting, fishing or gathering food with her family, she’s writing cookbooks. The latest, titled “Cooking Seafood” (Amato, 2014) — which she co-authored with her husband, Scott Haugen — is her twelfth and due out Jan. 1.

“I was constantly making crazy creations,” Haugen says of her childhood as a curious cook. “I’d have notes everywhere and all my own creations and substitutions and whether it worked or whether it didn’t. And that’s how I learned to cook, that whole trial and error and making stuff up in the kitchen.”

Haugen says her curiosity really started to come in handy when she and Scott moved to the most remote part of Alaska after accepting teaching positions in a small village.

“There were no roads, no stores, no nothing. You bought nine months’ worth of food at Costco and that’s what you cooked with. I taught myself how to make ice cream out of pudding and Coffee Mate,” she recalls with a laugh.

A few of the locals gave them some caribou meat to get started and Scott began hunting, a hobby he had enjoyed since childhood.

“I had cooked blacktail deer, salmon and trout growing up,” Tiffany says, “but all of a sudden there’s caribou and dall sheep, arctic ground squirrels, ptarmigan and grizzly bear, and I have all these animals and I thought, ‘What am I going to do with these?’”

Unfortunately, there was no Google for searching “how to cook a moose,” so Haugen relied on her curiosity and creativity to get them through the next seven years spent in Alaska.

Indonesia became the next teaching post for the Haugens and with it another set of obstacles in the kitchen for Tiffany to tackle.

“I was always experimenting with different flours and different things to cook,” she says.

Sharing her gathering excitement

The Haugens moved back to the United States in 2003 and in 2004, Tiffany published her first cookbook, “Cooking Salmon and Steelhead.”

“Scott started writing first and a publisher in Portland that he was writing for asked me if I had any fish recipes,” she says. “I thought, oh yeah, seven years in Alaska and you get a lot of fish recipes.”

After “Cooking Salmon and Steelhead,” Haugen went on to write “Cooking Game Birds,” “Cooking Big Game,” “Grill It! Plank It! Wrap It! Smoke It!,” “The Power of Flour” and more.

“I write for hunters, fishermen and families, teaching the idea that gathering is exciting,” she says.

The prep for “Cooking Seafood” began nearly five years ago, with the serious recipe editing, testing and photos all happening over the past year and a half.

Divided into sections titled “River Fish,” “Shellfish” and “Ocean Fish,” the book is for every level of skill in the outdoors as well as in the kitchen.

“It’s not like you have to go dig your own clams or go catch your own trout to use the recipes in this book,” Haugen says. “I want people who go get their fish from a fish market to be able to use this book.”

All-mouths-on-deck endeavor

Haugen and her family spent the summer deep in test kitchen mode.

“There was clam chowder for breakfast, clam strips for lunch and lobster tails on the grill in the afternoon,” the author says.

While for many that may sound divine, Haugen admits there were occasions when her two sons, Braxton and Kazden, protested.

“There were days where the kids were like ‘I’m not eating octopus for breakfast,’” Haugen recalls with a laugh.

As part of her development process, after cooking a recipe herself a few times, Haugen has friends and family taste each dish and offer feedback. Additionally, Haugen’s mother and a few other cooks of all skill levels cook each recipe, following directions and reporting back to Haugen.

“I try to get a super cook to read through and then a novice cook to read through, because I want everything to be really simple,” she says. “There’s nothing truly gourmet in this book. Nothing you can’t do in a short amount of time.”

On this day, Scott is busy at the kitchen table, sectioning antelope meat from a recent hunting trip in Wyoming.

Haugen proudly mentions they do all their own butchering, in addition to any and all preparations from smoking to jerky.

Seeing the meat and thinking of all the months just spent testing seafood recipes, it’s reasonable to wonder whether Haugen was over seafood by the time her new cookbook went to the printer.

“You almost think you’re sick of seafood,” she admits, “but as I was going through the editing process and looking through all the photos I’d be like, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m so hungry for this I want to make it right now!”

Her favorites include recipes for paella and bouillabaisse.

“And something super simple like oysters on the grill with citrus butter,” Haugen says. “It’s so simple and so fresh it just makes me want to grab the clam buckets and go to the coast.”

What’s next for Oregon’s wild game and fish cookbook writer extraordinaire?

“I’d love to tell some of my food memories with a few recipes at the end (of each chapter).”

Here’s to hoping she’ll include everything from her tale of Crock-Pot eider ducks in the Arctic Circle to banana-leaf pork in Indonesia.

Writer Jackie Varriano can be contacted at tastings@registerguard.com.