Cooking for Kodiak

Migrating Visions of Spring

2006-04-22T11:15:00.000-07:00

Oh, my friends, you have your asparagus, and strawberries, and bloom of short-sleeved blouses. I live vicariously through your stories and tales of feasts, and thank you for sharing the season's treats with me. And I certainly want to emphasize the Spring jubilance of the Walla Walla Sweets. No doubt, my hometown is awash with its burst of daffodils, the memory of which still evokes a joy that continues to flavour my adult celebrations to welcome the arrival of Spring. And I smile contentedly with the accounts from friends about the D.C. cherry blossoms, the Manhattan updates on the Union Square picnique tables, the fava beans in Firenze and the Seattle markets.

Such signs of Spring are, you may suspect, not so common up here. Up here, we have this:

The first sighting of birds.

Oh, friends. Different visions of the season and yet still the same result: a glee, my friends. It is a glee to be welcoming the arrival of Spring.

Feast

2006-04-20T19:26:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite things about living here is that the word "Feast" is a fairly common word, but it hasn't lost any of the sense of celebration and special gathering that the rarely employed word "Feast" denotes. I've quite happily embraced the privilege of using common vernacular to describe momentous moments. And even after mere months here, I find myself hesitating to resort to my prior descriptions - such as "holidays," "celebrations," "gatherings," "dinners".... they all pale in comparison to the word Feast.

So we didn't have Easter dinner. No, we had an Easter Feast.

And though I may just recently have adopted the privilege of using the word "Feast" to describe our holiday meals (see! how blase is that in comparison to the word FEAST???), I've been preparing them since childhood.

You see I come from a family that loves food and the moments of planning and preparing it. Mom likes to prepare spectacles of food. I like "tasks" and "assignments" - maybe spending the whole day trying to perfect one dish that I've never tried before. My little brother has the traditions - the foods that are the foundations to our feast - which he whips up in quadruple proportions to ensure a sufficient amount of leftovers. And both my little brother and I both like taking turns distracting mom so that we can then take turns sneak butter into the mashed potatoes.

My mom and little brother were far from our Easter table, and undoubtedly enjoying their distance from what turned out to be the Easter Blizzard of 2006 (oh, yes, my friends, we are still very much in the throes of winter up here, albeit with over 15 hours of sunlight a day).

But they were central in my thoughts, and most likely my inspiration for crafting this menu of green things from cans and frozen vegetables:

Amuse
Hot-Cross Buns
Smoked Tillamook Cheddar and Reindeer Salami
Wild Salmon Dip with Dill

Course I
Malfatti in brodo (using broth from my neighbor's chicken)

Course II
Crab salad with lime zest, peas and sparkles of red pepper

Course III
Asparagus Flan (thankyou to Molly of Orangette for the recipe)

Course IV
Smoked Ham with Honey Glaze
Little Brother's Smashed Red Potatoes with Yeoman-Globs of Butter, Sour Cream and Green Onions
Curried Succotash

Course V
Green tea

Course VI
Dark chocolate buttons with cherry ice-cream

Course VII
Homemade Cordial of Willamette Valley Fruits served in wooden goblets carried back from Zimbabwe

p.s. Well, little brother. One of our guests was an old classmate of John McPhee and was out here looking for a sighting of a rare bird that can only be sought here, and in the winter. So I must confess that I felt compelled to open up the bottle of mead that I did so earnestly hide during your visit. But I know you know that a classmate of John McPhee is a rare occasion, and you'll understand. Plus, I want you to know that I made sure to conserve more than enough homemade cordial for when you come up here again. Soon! Come visit soon! This time there will be sunlight - but you'll still get all the snowmachining opportunities you could dream of. Plus, the dogs just got a bunch of new balls and other toys and I just bought myself a banjo and a book of Pete Seeger's handwritten lessons of how to play it. So there will be lots of entertainment. Plus, J. and I finally got our freezer. It's empty, which means that you'd get lots of support for any initiative to assist us in our dream of filling it with a caribou or other staples more appropriate then beef.

And - by the way - I can drive a stick-shift! I just choose not to prove it.

Third Place

2006-04-15T10:08:00.000-07:00

I mushed my first dog-sledding race and scored a third place ribbon.

For the longest time, it looked like I had locked in the second place. But as we got closer to the finish line, I could hear the "pull, pull" from the musher behind me. And then, looking to my left, I could see her lead dog siding up beside my dogs. I kicked the snow beneath the moving sled. I shouted out "good dogs, good dogs" and "pull, pull." And we pulled ahead. Oh, I don't think I'll ever forget the excitement of the dogs. How they were loving this open, exciting sprint.

But then, suddenly, my dogs veered off to the right, towards a ridge of reeds poking out from the sides of the frozen river.

I forgot whether it was "gee" or "haw" that meant "left." So I shouted out both, trying to direct the dogs back to the finish line trail. Unconsciously, I started pointing to the left, as if I could communicate by sign language.

But there was no deterrence.

So I resolved to trust the dogs and, more importantly, enjoy the last few seconds of a race that is undoubtedly one of the top ten highlights of my life so far.

So I finished third and off-the-path. I like this a lot, especially the off-the-path part. I like that I finished on a trail that I followed blind. I guess, all in all, I consider it to be a far more appropriate seat for me to be finishing third and off-the-path than second and on-the-path.

Many thanks to the friends who provided me with pictures of the day!

Addendum

2006-04-01T13:18:00.000-08:00

That last post should be dated today.

But it's not an April Fool's joke. I really am a musher in tomorrow's "rookie" dogsledding race. And I am really adapting my whims to a budget that I voluntarily entered into.

I just lack any technological finesse and don't know how to get Blogger to let me correct the date.

And, as for addendum's, I'm quite excited to say that as soon as I log off I'll be diving into the project of seeing if I can use Mona's recipe for Chocolate - Banana Tea Bread** as a recipe for the chocolate banana cake that I intend to offer as a desert for a "soup and bread" potluck dinner party that we've been invited to tonight. My pantry is absolutely void of any wines, and unless I find room in my budget to have some some flown out from Anchorage, it appears that I'll be spending the next couple of months reciprocating generousities and saying my thank-yous with baked goods forged from the goodies that are in my pantry.

I'm already thinking about saying thank you to the local musher that is lending me his dog-team for tomorrow's race with a cast-iron skillet of sticky buns. But we'll see if time allows me to carry-out the intention.

Hope all is well!

** http://monasapple.blogspot.com/2006/03/chocolate-banana-tea-loaf.html

Employed...and Braising for Sandwiches

2006-03-18T18:59:00.000-08:00

I am employed. Have been, in fact, for awhile. In fact, I've been employed since approximately the date of my last post.

Oh - I can draft contracts. And I can appear in front of a judge. And I'll negotiate. But I still cannot find the way to live with a work-life balance when I'm working. Inevitably something goes. Perhaps it is that I am still under the oddly symbiotic influences of years of Catholic education and my training as a young associate in an old Manhattan law firm....I attempt to redeem myself of my shortcomings (or maybe I'm seeking to masque them) by laboring to minimize their effects on others. In any event, when work cuts into my non-work interests it is always my own private interests (like updating this blog) that get tossed aside first.

I suppose that I'll learn with time how to balance my life to accomodate all my interests, including my goal of improving my communications with friends, family and the community of bloggers. I certainly feel comfortable theorizing that there could be no better place in the world for me to learn this skill than the right here and the right now. Indeed, I can show a vast improvement on balancing in the nearly two years that I've been in Alaska. But, oh yes, there are improvements still to be made. In the meantime, thank you for being patient with me while I've been wretched about keeping up this blog and returning phone calls and emails.

Things here are good. Very good. The ice is still solid and the snow still falls. But the days are long and the sunlight is bright. And direct. Oh - direct sunlight!

Tomorrow, I am in my first dogsledding race! 5 dogs. 7 miles. Down the river. A local musher asked me to race his dogs in the annual "rookie race." I am simultaneously scared to death and exhillerated to life at the prospect of it. I have no idea how to dogsled. I did it once in my life - a $300 trip around the Alyeska Resort, where I was bundled up in my Manhattan concept of what one wears in Alaska and tucked under heavy blankets in the bed of the sled while Dario, the dog-sledder, explained how he spent his summer training his dogs on a glacier. This time it will be me bundled up in the clothes that Alaskans have gifted to me out of pity for the complete insufficiency of my winter gear. And me yelling out "gee" and "haw" and doing all those other necessary, fundamental things that I don't even know what they are. It is quite exciting.

And generally, these past few weeks of non-blogging, I've been busy. The good kind of busy. The working-with-good-people, dog-walking, community volunteering, blog-reading, knitting and quilting, and braising and baking kind of busy. I've even been busy setting up a financial regime to finally sweep some stability into a series of life-changing moves and transitions that pretty much depeleted my financial resources.

Those who know me from my Manhattan days might find that hard to believe. Me - agreeing to a "financial regime"? I admit, it is hard to believe. But it's true. And also true is that I am enjoying it! We had been talking about it for awhile - about getting a handle on the chaos that inevitably follows any move. So, J. and I spent a day cleaning up our hovel on stilts. It was spectacularily clean. (And for those who have visited us, or who can appreciate how difficult it is to make a rented hovel on stilts feel clean, I'm sure you can appreciate the softly jubilant sense of accomplishment that one feels upon the conclusion of the mission.) With our dogs lounging at our feet and taking turns at nibbling on a moose shank bone, we pulled out paper and - for the first time ever in my life - came up with a budget. An actual budget.

Oddly enough, this most wretched of tasks - the formulation of a restrictive budget - produced one of my inspirational bouts of braising and cooking.

For you see, we have decided to forego the $30 a day for lunch (and mind you - that's sharing a sandwich) by making our own. And I decided to take it further by roasting and braising our own lunch meats. This isn't such a surprising move. I do love to roast and braise. And I absolutely can't tolerate paying $10 for 9 slices of lunch meat. So, we've folded this budget-saving move into our Sunday supper routine. Sunday night we have the traditional supper of roast, veg and mash. A hunk of the leftover roast and the veg is saved for hash (with a poached egg from the neighbor's coop). A hunk of the leftover roast and the mash is saved for another dinner. The gravy or jus is saved for soup. But the bulk of the leftover roast is saved for sandwiches.

So far, we've had the pork tenderloin roasted with a crust of garlic and rosemary. We've done the pot roast braised in a simple simmering onion gravy. We did the corned beef (with Molly's carmelized cabbage** - delicious!).

And last Sunday, we did a Honey and Cumin Braised Pork Shoulder. So lovely, that I must break my silence to share it!

Honey and Cumin Braised Pork Shoulder
(adapted from Jaques Pepin's recipe for Braised Pork Roast with Sweet Potatoes - simply because I didn't have any sweet potatoes and truly cannot follow a recipe for the life of me)

1 3-pound shoulder butt pork roast (boneless)
2 tbsp soy sauce
1/2 tsp Tabasco sauce
2 tbsp cider vinegar
1/2 tbsp balsamic vinegar
2 tbsp honey
1 tsp cumin
2 large onions (diced)
6 large cloves of garlic

1. Place the pork shoulder in a cast-iron pot with a lid. (I used our 10 inch "chicken fryer.") Add 2 cups water, the soy sauce, Tabsco, vinegar, honey and cumin. Bring to a boil (uncovered).

2. Reduce the heat to very low. Cover and let it simmer for an hour.

3. Add the onions and garlic. Bring back to a boil, uncovered, for about 15 minutes.

4. Uncover and place it in the center of a pre-heated 375 degree oven. Cook for an hour, turning the meat every 15 minutes. (My goal was to get the shoulder to brown uniformly on all 4 "sides" so that it looks like a roast, even though it was braised.)

5. Pull out the roast and let it rest on the cutting board. Reduce the sauce to the desired consistency. (I prefer a roast to rest longer, serving it warm rather than hot. And because I save the jus for broth, I don't usually simmer it down. Instead I serve it as a light drizzle over the meat and potatoes that hints of gravy, but doesn't result in the post-dinner lull that generally follows dinners with gravy.)

It was a lovely Sunday dinner, served with sauteed spinach,Molly's carmelized cabbage and red potatoes smashed with buttermilk. And it has been a lovely week of sandwiches. Rather than hash, I'm anticipating that the last of the leftovers will be ground for tortellini.

I suppose that most readers are not still under the influence of ice and snow these days. Most readers probably have strong inspirations for asparagus and strawberries and other delicacies of Spring. I'll get there too, eventually. But in the meantime, a good pork roast can take one a long way in appreciating a weather pattern that gives you a few extra months to enjoy the winter delights and perfumes of a braised Sunday supper.

** http://orangette.blogspot.com/2006/01/tender-is-cabbage.html

Crepes in the morning, Caribou before bed - Feasting Like a Tundra Queen

2006-01-19T12:55:00.000-08:00

I continue to be broke. I could lament. I could worry. I could complain. I could get a job. Or, I could delve into the project of finding the entertainments of being broke. Not one to turn down entertainment, I’ve selected this last route. And let’s face it, my pantry was stocked for such pursuits.

I should confess that there is probably a family legacy or legend that I just might be trying to live out myself. If one were to settle down for a long chat with my mother (and, do trust me, chats with mum are rarely curt) about short finances and big hungers, my mother would revel in the opportunity to regale you with the culinary sprees and festivities of the 1970’s when my parents found much entertainment in being able to entertain crowds of buddies with the few pennies they had. College budgets that featured oysters, for example, though no one actually had any money. Widely popular dinner parties centered on the proceeds of late-Autumn and social gleanings of the fertile fields of the Willamette Valley. “Potlucks” in the sense that friends would drop off their contributions in the form of raw ingredients, and return in the evenings for the sculptured feasts that Mom would have elegantly heaped on candle-lit tables. There will be poignant examples. Mom, for example, may open up to you and talk about how she painfully struggled to come to grips with the loss of her first baby…how she made great strides in doing so by using her baby’s unusable baby formula to make a feast of pumpkin custards. Even today, she will undoubtedly tell you, Mom takes much pride and happiness in the impromptu visits of long-time friends with hefty chunks of game meat. She rarely has to buy her own meat, and her social calendar is filled with her own impromptu visits when she drops off a dinner platter featuring the gifted game at the home of the giftor.

Apples don’t fall far from the tree.

I am stretching my pennies by resorting to the grocery store for only a few daily-necessary ingredients: water, milk, butter, eggs. The rest is coming from our friends and neighbors, our pantry and our freezer. The bread – I’m kneading it here at home, and doing my cartwheels of glee as the perfume of baking bread warms up our home on those especially cold days. (As a little side note/question: it must mean that I’m becoming more and more Alaskan with each day, as temperatures above 7 degrees seem to me “especially warm.” The humour of the fact that our house is heated to 70 degrees, yet there is frost on the INSIDE of all the windows, probably extends beyond geographical boundaries.) Meat – we’re dining like kings on homemade elk sausage, moose ragu served up as a homemade lasagna baked in a large cast-iron skillet (in proportions big enough to guarantee that thicks slabs of it will be delivered to neighbors and friends the next morning), ground caribou prepared as Albondigas a’ la Rooney (i.e. mixed with parmigiano, fresh herbs, and pine nuts to form meatballs, which are then braised in tomatoes stewed with Guinness and red wine). Our weekend brunches: eggs and toast, with the elk breakfast sausages we made together and the homemade bread. The snacks that I pack up for J. when he goes snow-go’s up and down, and over and all about, or for when he goes out to one of the villages where he camps out in a school gymnasium (there being no hotels or motels) – homemade bierocks stuffed with stewed meat and vegetables. In fact, I make a point of making sure that J. always has enough stash of homemade goodies to feed 4 people stuffed into the “hotdogger.” And I send J. off to work with a little brown bag of sugared crepes, a little note to say that his girlfriend and dogs are thinking fond thoughts of him as we devise a creative dinner.

Sure – I should probably get a job sometime. I’ve so magically, and with such ease!, gone from work-focused corporate attorney to domestic overdose. And I will. I have to. But in the meantime, we feast likes king and queen of the tundra – and I’ve only spent $20 in the past 2 weeks!

Pot Roast, and its progeny

2005-12-08T19:40:00.000-08:00

Oh - this is a delinquent post. It's maybe a month old - actually, a bit more. Mea culpa. So sorry. Hopefully the entry in which I describe the events and craziness of the past few weeks won't take me so long to post. In the meantime: Congratulations to the dear friends having babies. Hugs and kisses to the dear friends who sent me lovely Christmas cards that I still haven't replied to. Thank you's and smiles of gratitudes to all who have been sending J. and I household goodies and warm clothes - especially to J's parents, who gifted me the lovely long johns that keep me warm every day and the Yak Trax that keep me standing up-right when I'm walking outside; and especially to my mother, who gifted me a ticket for my little brother to fly up and help me deal with the last - and the heaviest -- of my stuff in my old Anchorage apartment, as well as a ticket from Anchorage to here, to be our first guest, to celebrate Christmas with us, and to help J. carry that last and heaviest of stuff home from the post-office!

**********

We had a brief warm spell. A tropical spell, actually. The temperature was up to the 30's and everyone in town was up and about, enjoying the chance to stroll about in a mere sweatshirt. But then it started to rain. And the rain, alas, churned up the snow and built ponds across the frozen lakes. And with each day of rain, the puddles and rain-ponds grew and expanded. Eventually, the temperature dipped back down again. Yesterday, for example, it was 7 below. And eventually, all those puddles and rain-ponds froze into slippery sheets of ice with alternating angles and peaks.

So, it's cold and its treachorous. Which makes it the perfect climate for comfort foods like pot-roast with a very important secondary attribute: a good pot roast will provide enough leftovers to alleviate the need to run to the grocery store.

I don't know the exact number of times I flipped past this recipe for Pot Roast. But I know it was more than several, and closer to numerous. And I know that all my reasons for so flippantly dismissing it turned out to be wrong. It is flavourful. It is not too plain. Once I had dismissed what I am now self-diagnosing as a low-grade craving for complication, I allowed myself to embark on a culinary project that reminded me of the hearty satisfaction that emanates from a cast-iron dutch oven filled with humble simplicity. Once the initial culinary project was completed, I then I embarked on a series of them, each intended to further explore that cozy art of leftovers!

Day 1: Pot Roast and Garlic Rosemary Roasted Potatoes
(a/k/a "Schultz Sunday Supper Pot Roast" in The Cast Iron Skillet Cookbook)

1. Heat 1 tbsp of olive oil in a dutchoven over medium heat.

2. Season a 3 pound chunk of chuck roast with salt and pepper. When the oil is heated, place the roast in the pot and brown it on both sides (approximately 5 minutes on each side).

3. Add to the pot 1 onion (thinly slided) and 1 cup of boiling water.

4. Cover with a tight lid and let it simmer gently in a 325 degree oven for at least 2.5 hours.

5. Let the meat set before you slice it.

6. You can make gravy with the juices, but I preferred to serve the jus and onions without embellishment.

7. Around an hour before you want to eat, start roasting your potatoes. I like to parboil my potatoes and refridgerate them so that you can pull them into rustic hunks with your fingers (instead of chopping them uniformly with a knife). The pre-step of parboilling is my trick for achieving those roasted chunks of potatoes with crispy, almost carmelized, outsides and soft interiors that I used to order as my dinner at the little take-out, La Spada, near Piazza Santa Maria Novella in Firenze. Not everyone does this. But the basic recipe is fairly standard: toss potatoes (raw or parboiled, baker or reds) with olive oil, finely diced garlic, chopped fresh rosemary and salt and pepper; put on a roasting pan and place in the oven at approximately 350 degrees, and bake until done.

This truly is delicious. The onions and the water form the perfect broth. And the onions bake down into a sweet deliciousness that makes one want to eat them by themselves with a fork. Actually, I guess it bakes down into the perfect onion soup - needing only a bit of a toast and cheese topping to achieve that famous french onion soup entree.

Day 2: Grilled Beef Salad Sandwiches

When I hear "beef salad," I think of seared filet on a bed of arugala, sometimes with a hint of lemongrass. But this seems like the best name for a beef sandwich spread. Basically, I mixed together: chopped up leftover roast, very finely diced onions, diced celery, a little mayonnaise, a little Worcestire Sauce, a little tarragon, salt and pepper. Then, with just the most minimum of Special Reserve Tillamook Cheddar to keep the contents cohesive and with just the most minimum amount of Tillamook butter to give the bread slices that lovely crunch, we proceeded with making an embellished version of grilled cheese sandwiches: the grilled beef salad sandwich. Next time, we'll make sure to have some rye or pumpernickel bread! But it was delicious!

Day 3: Roasted Onions with a Braised Onion Risotto

I remember eating baked onions as I grew up, but I don't remember why I forgot about them once I had grown up enough to be solely responsible for my own meals. Jamie Oliver helped me to remember them, though he perhaps adds a few more steps than the hearty culinary traditions of the Willamette Valley (in those hearty, pre-Pinot Noir days). He boils them for 20 minutes, lets them cool, then scoops out the middle and stuffs them with a filling. Sounds good to me.

I boiled the onions. I let them cool. Then I scooped out the middle, chopped the scooped-out pieces into a fine dice, and used this (together with the risotto-standards of garlic, etc.) as the basis for the risotto. I think everyone has their own way of making a risotto, so I won't delve into the science of it. But I will add that I flavoured my risotto with the syruppy onions that had braised with the pot roast and, when the risotto was done, I tossed in some of the chopped beef, fresh parsley, and parmigiano. I filled the hollowed-out onions with the "french onion risotto", topped them with a sprinkle of cheese, and set them to bake until hot and bubbly.

Delicious. Fun. And, oh!, how lovely a hot stove is when it is so cold outside that there is frost on the INSIDE of your dilapidating hovel on stils heated to the luxurious temperature of 70 degrees!

Cake Love

2005-12-06T11:04:00.000-08:00

I don't mean to plagiarize, so I must give credit for the title of this blog entry to the reformed lawyer in D.C. who traded a law career for a baking dream. He quit his job and opened up a bakery in Washington, D.C. called "Cake Love". He had no bakery experience. Just a love of baking and a cache of gumption. The best part is that the gamble worked! I hear from friends that his business is growing and expanding!

I like the name "Cake Love." Not just because I think of it as fighting words for breaking one's professional chains. I like it because cake really is a manifestation of love. Especially where, as in my current little hovel on stilts, it can take some planning to find the ingredients and there is no electronic mixer to relieve one's arms from the various stages of creaming butters, and whipping in sugars, and mixing in flours.....Under such conditions, baking a cake requires many of the same ingredients for maintaining a relationship: time, concentration, patience, tenderness, preparation, anticipation, goals, appreciation.....

Okay. That was the sentimental start. Here's the practical blog entry: After the fiasco of the hyper-sugared power-ranger-frosted-to-be-a-snowmachiner birthday cake, I decided to cake love J. with a gingered pear upside down cake.

It took a bit longer, I think, than it would have if I had a mixer handy. But it was a fine opportunity to get a little workout for the arms (without venturing out in the freezing cold to the teen center where I understand one can pay $3 to use the weights), and a fine opportunity to listen to the one radio station. And there is a lot of fine entertainment in watching the ecstactic reaction of one's boyfriend when he enters a home perfumed in the aromas of gingerbread late in the evening after having spent an entire day preparing for his first trial ever, which is scheduled (as luck would have it) in the same week as his 16 other trials.

Credits to Macrina Bakery in Seattle, for the recipe and for that post-collegiate year in Seattle when when I used to sneak out of my p.r. job to enjoy Macrina's rocket muffins and potato loaves, and to Molly, of Orangette, for inspiring me to dig out the box in which the Macrina cookbook was packed.

http://orangette.blogspot.com/2005/11/seattlest-macrina-true-love-and-ginger.html

Celebrations and Lessons

2005-12-04T12:36:00.000-08:00

J turned 30 on the day when it was 22 degrees below zero.

We spent the day rummaging for a bit at the Catholic Rummage Sale. Then we lingered for a bit at the VFW Auxiliaries' Christmas Craft Show. Then I spent a couple of hours trying to teach myself how to frost a cake while J. hopped on the snowmachine and ran down the river with his boss, who was trying out a new helmet that stays de-frosted by some mechanism that plugs into the snowmachine.

Although the helmet appeared to work perfectly, I wasn't such a grand instructor in the arts of cake decoration. J. returned just in time to find me covered in green frosting and lamenting that I had just spent all my money on a sugary dada-ism rendition of a snow-machiner. Fortunately he is a good supportive sport - and gave me lots of encouragement in my fervent efforts to make a power-ranger cake tin and 10 tubes of artifically-flavoured-and-colored frosting produce a likeness of him. The symbolism of my boyfriend assuring me of the value of my efforts, while he himself was "frosted" in a white layer of snow and ice (he even had icicles hanging from his eyebrows and eyelashes) and I was "frosted" in green, was not lost on me. We had some good laughs. And I was so appreciative of the good energies he swept into the house with him, that I did some frosting touches to highlight those big, strong biceps!

But I probably will not ever again spend a day decorating a cake with a battery of store-bought and artifically-flavoured-and-colored frosting. That was my first lesson of the day. I guess every thing has to be tried once - and this was my one time trying to decorate a cake....at focusing on the appearance, rather than the taste, of a dessert. Henceforth, I'm sticking to pies, tarts and the carmelized pear gingerbread that I had originally envisioned would be holding his candles.

Around 7, we shimmied into our winter gear, packed up the hyper-sugared cake and headed over to M's house, where we shimmied out of our winter gear and enjoyed a grand evening of corn and potato chowder and Texas Hold 'Em Poker. Entertainment having a prime value here, our crew of 8 made a show of singing happy birthday twice. And J. did so well at the poker, that he came home with heavy pockets brimming with Canadian coins!

Around midnight, we shimmied back into the winter gear and headed home. Just as we got to our driveway, we decided that we should drive over and see what time a store opened up in the morning. J attempted a U-turn, following almost the identical path for u-turns that he has used over-and-over every time we've left the driveway. This time, however, the truck must have been a few inches off.

We got stuck.

It was midnight and the temperature had fallen to almost 27 degrees below. The truck was stuck well - it wouldn't move forward, it wouldn't reverse. J. tried jumping on the back fender simultaneously with my efforts to reverse. We even put the big, 120 pound dog, in the back to see if a little weight would make the tires less likely to spin. (Puck was allowed out too, but after 10 minutes he fleed back to the warmth of the house.) When our efforts succeeded only in getting us more stuck, J. sent me inside, correctly noting that the symptoms of my cold were getting outrageous noticeable in the cold. He followed me in, changed into his layers of arctic gear (adding a face make to the winter attire) and grabbed a rope.

When I came out to check on the progress a half-hour later, I found J. coordinating efforts with a young girl in a big black truck and a neighbor who had decide to combine the opportunity to assist with a chance to let his dog out.

The coordinated efforts worked, and the truck was finally tugged out of the snow ditch around 1:20 a.m.

Smiles, handshakes, deeply-felt gratitude were exchanged. And a very important second lesson for the day was learned: always keep a rope in the truck.

We don't know when we'll need it, either to pull ourselves out or to pass forward the favour of two very generous and kind people who voluntarily ventured out into 27 below temperatures to help a stranger.

How many places are there where people would stay out there in a coldness so cold that it slaps to help a stranger? Especially a stranger hidden by a black face mask? Wouldn't most people just leave it? wait till the daybreak? or tell them to call a tow-truck? How many places are there where people would stay out there, and keep on trying and trying and trying? Refusing to give up until the stranger's problem was fixed?

The third lesson wasn't really a lesson. It was a good reminder.

We are lucky to live here and to have so much to learn!

Akutaq: when reality whips the romance

2005-12-03T15:12:00.000-08:00

My grandfather, who loved French Vanilla Breyers, would sometimes wax nostalgic for the "Eskimo Ice Cream" that he and my grandmother would enjoy when they were stationed up in Alaska during World War II.

I'm not sure if he was waxing nostalgic for the Eskimo ice cream, or for the memories of courting my grandmother in a large wild territory amidst the simultaneously alert and tender days of World War II. But I do know that he was keenly appreciative of the experience of both. He and my grandmother married and were later moved to Germany, where my mother was raised. Eventually they came back to the U.S., but they settled in California. Alaska, however, never strayed far from their thoughts. Sometimes the memories popped up in the form of stories about eskimo ice cream. But more commonly, the memories popped up in stories of the bravery and ingenuity and cultural strength that so impressed my Grandfather about Alaska.

But back to eskimo ice cream....Akutaq is what this Alaskan legend is called in Yup'ik, the most predominant language in town.

Grandpa used to tell me about how, in Alaska, ice cream is made from whipping rendered seal oil into grated reindeer fat. Snow was added to make it cold. Sometimes mashed potatoes or whitefish would be added. But, always, berries would be added to sweeten it.

I have been meaning to try it. And today, while Christmas shopping at a local craft fair at the VFW hall, I finally did. Seeing a woman offering paper cups of akutaq next to the offering of seal mittens and beaver hats, it seemed like the perfect time to transform one of Grandpa's stories into a part of my own story. J. and I bought a cup to share.

But times have changed since Grandpa's day.

Halfway through our cup, we ran into a friend who has been here for 30 years and asked him to settle a debate. J. thought I was joking about ice cream being made from seal oil. He maintained that there was no seal fat in our akutaq. I maintained that there was.

Our friend had a laugh. It appears that we were both kind of right. 30 years ago, akutaq was made from whipping rendered seal oil with reindeer fat. Apparently, however, it is made today by mixing berries with Crisco.

Yes, J. and I had been eating Crisco by the spoonful.

It was delicious .... but .... I just can't help feeling that what was so memorable to my Grandpa, that icecream that kept my Grandfather waxing nostaligic for Alaska, wasn't made with Crisco. But I guess I am also glad that a seal wasn't hunted. So I really don't know where I'm left with my first introduction to Akutaq.

Perhaps my ambivalence is best described as an admiration for a culture that has thrived and survived for thousands of years in the harshest of conditions, and a sad sort of acceptance at how quickly less-admirable influences have seeped in. But I can't help but think that my recent arrival to Alaska, with no winter gear and a headful of romantic notions about living in the last frontier, isn't a bit of an allegory to Crisco itself.

Maybe I'm not going to be eating the akutaq of my grandfather's day, but I guess I'm also not the "pioneer" that he was. I do however get the benefit of my Grandfather's story, as well as my own memory of my own astonishment at realizing that I was eating Crisco by the spoonful....and enjoying it.

Akutaq
(this is a copy verbatim of the recipe originally published by Alice Smith in the local newspaper, the Tundra Drums, and then reprinted in Cooking Alaskan by Alaskans)

"If you use fresh seal oil you don't get the strong taste. Put a handful of Crisco in the bowl. Work it with your hand and add a little cold water. Put in the seal oil and work it more. The real Eskimo way was to make it with reindeer fat, chopped in small pieces. They put it on the stove to melt it. They never used to put sugar in. They used no sugar, just berries. Then later we used to put sugar in. Stir in the sugar. If you keep your hand working it a long time all the sugar melts, it dissolves. It will just fluffy up, now watch. You keep adding water, more water. Every time you put sugar in it will fluff more. Keep working it and you can't smell the seal oil. Then put in the salmonberries. There should be blackberries too. And then I put it up in my little freezer up there, let it coll off and eat it. If you just want to have a little spoonful now, you may."

Yoga and Leftovers

2005-12-02T11:19:00.000-08:00

I went to a yoga class.

Three of us showed up last night at the little log cabin (as compared to the bigger log longhouse where the local band is currently setting up a dance floor for their "concert" on Saturday night), shuffled out of our boots and carhartts, and hung our coats and mittens up to dry. While we pulled our hair back into pony tails and rolled out our mats, our instructor stuffed the yoga class into the community-available dvd player.

It was the first yoga class I've ever taken that was free of charge. And it was in a log cabin, with a ceiling so low that I was prevented from doing the positions that required me to stand up too straight. Even the transportation had a first-time flavour to it. J. and I rode over together on the snowmachine - the first time we had attempted a transportation "coordination." One of those understated moments of couple-significance. He dropped me off, swung around to see if he could pick up our friend who was walking over (which he could, and did), and then spent the hour sporting about outside while M. and I tried to contortion off some off the "extra warmth" we are accumulating. When he returned to pick us up, we decided to pile three on the machine instead of dropping off M. and then returning for me. To add to the comedy, M. was given the driving honour. It was her first time on a snow-machine. So there we were, the three of us, clutching on to each other, laughing and lurching all the way home.

By the time J. and I got home, I was cold. And hungry. Quite a combination with which to enter into a kitchen. I was so cold and hungry, in fact, that I didn't even take the time to shimmy out of my carhartts and boots before I started pulling out pots and pans. I gave only a token greeting to the dogs and didn't even linger to help J. tuck the snowmachine under its cover. Rather, still dressed in full gear (which includes, lest their be doubt, a face mask) I was immediately engrossed in the task of heating up a dinner of leftover meatloaf, mashed potatoes and gravy.

Now I know that meatloaf (especially leftover meatloaf) has the 50's housewife reputation. It isn't something we ever had in our family growing up. In fact, I had never made it before. But I guess I have a familiarity with it that started in college. I was a hostess the summer after my first year of college at a local restaurant that specialized in meatloaf sandwiches. And, later, meatloaf was a specialty of a family that I lived with in Firenze. And, even more later, I discovered its haute potential while dining in New York. And, now, meatloaf has the kudo's of being one of my cozy favorites as well as fitting right square into my current budget of life-wealth, but monetary-poor.

Despite my appreciation for it, I hadn't really thought about "meatloaf" recently. That is, I hadn't thought about it until I went out for a brunch with J. on Sunday. My two eggs and two pieces of buttered toast cost $6. I thought that steep. But, J's heavily-nuked plate of thin slices of commercial meatloaf, heap of instant mashed potatoes, and steaming globs of powdered gravy cost $15. And I thought that was a steep travesty.

Meatloaf and mashed potatoes with gravy shouldn't be nuked - and it should never be whipped up from powder. That just seems......tragically unnecessary. The cozy comfort of this dish comes from the fact that it is made from humble ingredients for people with whom one has an overwhelming connection of familiarity. Not powder for strangers. I couldn't help but sit there watching this steaming plate of artificial convenience, imagining how glops of glunk had been globbed onto a plate and stuffed roughly into a high-powered commercial microwave. But it was that wide chasm between J's eager expectation and his dissapointment, more than the artificial origins or price of J's meal, that left me thinking that I should set out to see how I could incorporate meatloaf into our culinary fayre here.

And it worked! I used a base recipe from a cookbook I adore for cozy comforts. I adapted it to fit the ingredients already contained in my pantry. I filled our house with the warm welcoming perfume of a homecooked supper on one of the colder nights yet. And a few minutes of mixing produced a big hearty skillet of meatloaf - that has been feeding us dinners, and lunches, and sandwiches, and quick snacks. It was warm, hearty, perfect for leftovers and guaranteed to make us smile with cozy comforts. Where the weather gets cold, and feels even colder because you are scooting around in it on the back of a snowmachine, warm and hearty and cozy are just what is needed.

And when you are coming home from a grand evening of yoga classes in log cabins and side-splitting transportation stories, the access to warm and hearty leftovers is certainly a sign that one is enjoying la vita dolce.

We took our steaming plates of homemade convenience to the couch, plunked Lonesome Dove into the dvd player, and made an evening of it.

[Here's where I confess that I was so enamoured with the ease of eating well without stove time, that I paused the dvd for 5 minutes after we ate to jump up and make a pie plate of brownies from a Duncan Hines mix. Not all cozy comforts, I guess, have to come from scratch - at least not when time can be better spent enjoying the company of cherished ones!]

Pantry Meatloaf
adapted from The Cast Iron Skillet Cookbook

butter
a chopped onion
1 cup bread crumbs
a small handful of oatmeal (in deference to a reference from J. about his mother's recipe)
1.3 pounds of lean ground beef
a couple elk bratwursts (freed of their casings)
1 can of diced tomatoes
2 eggs
1 cup of shredded parmesan or romano cheese
some hearty glugs of worcestire sauce
seasonings (salt, pepper, rosemary, sage, basil, cumin, creole seasonings, Old Bay, whatever you have and/or feel like using)

1. Pre-heat the oven to 350 degrees.

2. Heat up a cast-iron skillet, and saute the chopped onion in butter until just golden (around 3 minutes).

3. Mix all of the ingredients in a big bowl. When the onions are done, toss them in too. Mix well.

4. Shape mixture like a football in the cast-iron skillet. Sprinkle with salt and pepper and drizzle with some olive oil. And bake until it is cooked throughout and all sizzly and crisp on the outside (around 1.5 hours).

enough shrugging

2005-11-30T15:44:00.000-08:00

Enough shrugging!

I'm currently in the middle of that clarity of being over a week's distance from a work-week. My ast day in the office was November 15. On November 17, Puck and I boarded a plane and moved to our new home with J. and his dog, Clyde. And in the days between the move and today, I have been baking, sauteeing, roasting and braising. J and I took a sausage-making class together - from which we came home with over 30 homemade elk bratwursts (which made for a fine, fine Thanksgiving meal - all cooked on the "hotdogger" attached to the muffler of the snowmachine when we celebrated the day of Thanksgiving by making our first long-distance voyage to a village down the frozen river). Next week I'm taking a mask-making class. J and I are thinking about doing a weekly radio show on the one local radio station. I'm motivated to unpack, if only to clear space to bring out my sewing machine and start finishing up years-old quilting projects and to sew some Christmas stockings. I make my grocery shopping a daily adventure, and in doing so am slowing improving my snow-machining wherewithall. I guess my habit of losing the trail is also contributing to the fact that I'm learning new snowmachine trails each day. I'm bundling up and taking the dogs out to romp around in snow drifts. And I'm reading. And thinking. And, oh!, I love this: I'm free and available and motivated to socialize and to listen to the local band and to attend the local fiddle dance and to 'machine to the houses of friends for dinners and to meet people and to talk about things. Any ole' things.

In other words, the day-to-day thoughts of "work" seem a world away, and the world seems at my doorstep!

Don't get me wrong, I have much professional items on my to-do list. And I am thinking about how I should go about such professional items as being able to pay my bills and keeping my health insured. But the difference of thinking about these things in my current situation, as compared to thinking about them while I'm in a mental escape from my tasks of perusing contracts or researching briefs, is that the potential for "something different" feels exhilleratingly viable. A breakfast cook? A home chef that delivers soup? A manager of a radio station? A cashier at the grocery store?

It's all possible. It could all be done!

But, here's what I'm committing right now to do: start recording again what I'm cooking! and start recording the stories and sources that are making our meals so memorable.

I can't catch up from the past week and a half, which is quite a shame as J. and I have been dining on some fine recipes. But I can promise to start recording them going forward.

As a bridge, here's a pantry recipe for baked apples:

Half an apple, and core each half. Drizzle lemon juice over each half, and sprinkle the center of the hole with a spritz of cinnamon. In a separate bowl, mix together cinnamon, brown sugar, chopped walnuts, chopped dried apricots, and butter. Put a mound of the mixture into each apple half. Drizzle with birch syrup. And bake in a 350 degree oven until the perfume has filled the house (approximately 30 to 40 minutes).

sisyphus shrugged to sup on stew

2005-11-04T12:16:00.000-08:00

I'm simply not a good mover.

I am, quite honestly, atrocious at it. I can distract myself - dissuade myself - tire myself. I'm a pushover, as far as succumbing to even ridiculous excuses to put off (again) the packing of boxes.

But let's face it: packing and moving and relocating - it all sucks. Even if someone comes walking through the door and does it all for you - it still sucks. It might be a less exhausting experience, but the ease doesn't reduce the discomfort and chaos of having your possessions tucked into cardboard boxes wrapped tightly with duct tape. In my case, I'm doing it - and in the most time consuming way: everything I pack has to be packed to survive the ordeal of being mailed. I can't just pack it for a trip in a U-haul. Nope. It has to be packed with caution and forethought, as well as in accordance with federal postal regulations. Ugh. In any event, no matter how much has been accomplished, by anyone and under whatever circumstances - it always feels like there remains an endless, infinite amount of packing left to do!

So after one good solid day of packing, I decided to reward myself. I went to the store and bought a bottle of Oregon pinot, a can of Irish Guinness, a big thing of beef, and some Matanuska carrots, traceless onions and a bag of Alaskan red potatoes.

And then I unpacked a couple of boxes to dig out my castiron dutch oven and my bay leaves, and embarked on a recipe for a dish that I shall endearingly call "Rooney Stew."

Elise of Simply Recipes, who inspired it, calls it "Irish Beef Stew." http://www.elise.com/recipes/archives/001414irish_beef_stew.php

It is a unique recipe for Irish stew, because it calls for red wine AND Guinness. Highly recommended!

Because I made a few minor changes to incorporate an Oregon girl's education in stewmaking (i.e. three times more meat and triple the pour of "tenderizers," hours more of stewing, concerted attention to using leftovers in lieu of listed ingredients, reserving the potatoes to make a bed of stoemp** upon which to ladel the stew instead of stewing them with the meat, and serving it by simply hoisting the castiron dutch oven to the table and giving the guest the honour of ladeling his own), and because I have a very dear friend who shares my Oregon roots and with whom I spent a lot of time in Florence drinking, alternatively, Irish pints of Guinness at the Fiddlers' Elbow or red wine from backpack-sized cartons which - in our collegiate lingo - we called "Buzz in the Box", I named my version after this Irish, red-wine drinking Oregonian: "Rooney Stew." I served it to J. on his 24 hour trip to Anchorage to see the debacle of my packing "progess" and to attend a CLE.

Delicious! Triple the exclamation!

*** Stoemp is the version of mashed potatoes that I learned to love when a poor student in London. Belgo, a Belgian restaurant, had this special where a dish of bangers and mash cost, in pounds, the hour you arrived. So, if you arrived at 3:30 p.m., for example, your bangors and mash only cost 3 quid and change. Instead of typical British "mash," Belgo served those bangors with Belgian stoemp. Now that I live in Alaska, and it is winter, and I never could follow a recipe no matter where I am - I make it by frying some bacon, lifting it out when its crisp, pouring out most of the grease, and sauteeing some onions, carrots, and garlic. I also add something green - preferring savoy cabbage, but using regular cabbage with parsley or kale. Sometimes I use spinach. In any event, when the potatoes are boiled soft, I mash them like normal. (I like boiled red potatoes, skins on and mashed into clumps - not whispy uniformity.) Then I mix in my sautee and add the regular butter, sour cream and bit of milk. It makes a colorful and hearty base for bangers - and for stew! I know that you have to take my word for that - I still don't own a digital camera. But trust me, it's pretty, hearty and delicious!

The only trick to this simple heartiness is to time carefully the sautee of the green ingredient - too early, you lose the vibrancy of the color, and too late you the potatoes get gummy in waiting for them. This trick becomes particularly relevant when the green is spinach.

first snow

2005-10-30T11:31:00.000-08:00

Breathtaking is the morning starlight of the North skies reflecting first up, off the first snowfall of the winter season, and then back down, off a drifting cloud cover.

And taking a stroll in such a sparkling landscape, before anyone else has gotten up to mar the perfection of the fresh snowfall, is quite exhillerating.

Playing catch with your dog in the perfection of a fresh snowfall - well, it's a very pleasant slice of utopia. For me as well as for Puck. He was so pleased with his ability to race around the Park Strip, off-leash and in chase of a frisbee.

It was probably a good thing, however, that Puck and I were out playing catch before anyone else was up. I had to scramble to unpack all the winter things I had packed. And I guess I wasn't too inclined to do so.

So I ended up in a rather ridiculous dog-walking attire. A smorgasboord of winter-appropriate and dog-walking ridiculous. Dress boots, ski-sweater, long-black Italian dress-coat, and stocking cap. I think what ultimately pulled the outfit together was the fact that I had finally decided to stuff my hands into a pair of Iowa wool socks that wick after several minutes of unsuccessfully looking for my gloves.

In any event, I was so inspired by the crisp beauty of this fine Alaskan morning that I made a little trip to the grocery store and purchased a pair of gloves and a roll of duct tape.

Postmodern Frolics in the Last Frontier

2005-10-24T11:46:00.000-07:00

I took myself out on a day long date on Saturday.

I used to do this when I lived in New York. I guess, actually, I've always been doing this, wherever I'm living. Some mornings I just wake up and walk out the door, not knowing what I will be doing - only that I'll be going with the flow of events, and dining with myself, and coming across good reads, and restoring my independence, and nurturing my quirks, and probably stopping somewhere for a Hemingway'esque crisp class of white wine with oysters (ahhh, for the Seattle dates! it's so easy to sweep me off my feet in that town!) or a Dylan Thomas mid-day pint in a dark local with a band of loyal regulars (the most glorious such mid-day pints being Fiddler's Elbow in Florence or, oh!, that one[s!] in Belfast) - until I'm replinished with my necessary doses of randomness, characters, good books, flaneuring, and journal-capturing. I usually come home around midnight, brew a cup of tea and crawl into a fluffy bed to flip through one of the new cookbooks I inevitably picked up at some point during the day's events. And the next morning, waking up from a sleep of blissful contentment, I usually wax poetic about the adventures and the people I met in a group email and then set off to a grocery store to purchase the ingredients for the dishes I fell asleep contemplating.

But, it being now and it being an opportunity to sweep myself off my feet with Anchorage, here's how this girl entertained herself on one cold Saturday at the start of winter:

Brunch of dim sum at a tiny bakery in a commonly-overlooked stripmall, wearing black boots and reading Wittgenstein's Poker at a little table next to a bigger table of young men in their Alaskan khakis (i.e. carhartts), skilled in the arts of slurping noodles without interference from their mature beards and versed in the arts of comparing favorite dumplings. Bustling hum of Asian languages and the clatter of a kitchen spilling out to a room packed with a spicy cross-section of Alaskans, mixed with the chirping queries of toddlers learning the dexterity of chopsticks, and teenagers feigning disinterest in the lively conversation with their parents, and cross-dressers exchanging Friday night stories, and tables of women wearing boots and pearls (with coiffed hair and brazen wit). Strangers leaning over to inquire as to the name of particularly intriguing dish. http://www.anchoragepress.com/archives-2004/eatingoutvol13ed11.shtml

Coffee at a little shop in another, albeit more popular stripmall, with brick walls, mis-matched tables and chairs and a clientele of loyal locals that is nurturing the next generation with "freshly flown-in" gelato. Alaska's roaster since 1975.

Tour of Title Wave - a bookstore with the glorious gift of offering the books that Alaskans have traded in. Lots of second-hand insights into how to build a cabin. Lots of dog-eared tips on homesteading. Cookbooks with hints written into the margin. A poetry aisle that exudes the warmth of a winter stove. And, of course, the constant memory of having watched and listened to John Haines, himself, reading his poetry here last Spring. http://www.wavebooks.com/catalog/events.php

Tour of the Alaskan-authored books at Cook Inlet Books, which has recently been restored from tourist throngs to local customers supporting homegrown writers. They just got a new shipment of the most requested book, so I understand that there is no longer a waiting list for Amanda Brannon's homegrown treatise on rhubarb. http://www.adn.com/news/alaska/matsu/story/6609802p-6494416c.html

Contemplate a glass of wine at Club Paris, but decide that it is to dark there to read my newest acquisition (The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood) and this might be the perfect chance to finally try out Taste of Russia and sup on a bowl of butter-brothed pelmeni, with fresh dill and sour cream.

Opening night of Kafka Dances at Cyrano's Eccentric Theatre Company, attended by the freshly-imported Australian playwright, opened by a band of highschoolers playing traditional bar mitzvah music on a quartet of wind-instruments, and audienced by a diverse crowd of enthusiastic patrons. Some dressed with fashionable attention. Some in jeans. Some in flannels. Some in eye-catching flairs. Of course, there were the requisite young men with mature beards, and older man with trimmed ones. Cyrano's offers Pacific Northwestern wines by the glass, which you can drink throughout the show and replace with a refreshed glass at the pre-order table during intermission. Like attending the opera, or the symphony, your glass at the pre-order table is marked simply by a slip of paper with your first name. No matter how big the event, in the year and so of living here, I've never heard of a pre-ordered drink being lost. And the audience is close and animated, checking in with each other on their new projects and exchanging updates on their kids in New York, Chicago, London, San Francisco. http://www.cyranos.org/whoER.html

Last-hour dash to Barnes & Noble to buy the soundtrack for Fiddler on the Roof and The Man of La Mancha - because I can't be in a hometown theatre company that thrives on local committment without thinking of my father, which of course leads me to buy the Broadway soundtracks for the musicals that he once years ago produced with a bunch of fellow New England accents in the Willamette Valley of the 1970's. To dream, the impossible dream....

And, home, to end my adventure with the dolce of a long, latenight phonecall to J comparing and relaying our days' bounties of tales and characters.

[as a side note, my cookbooks and my pans are all packed in boxes (except, of course, for the skillet in which I am making my daily dinner of poached eggs) - some still in Anchorage, but some already shipped out - so there was no new cookbook nor any morning foray to purchase the ingredients for a new recipe. soon, though. soon. soon, my belongings will be unpacked all in one place, and i'll be able to cook and post.]

a dash of clarification

2005-10-10T12:46:00.000-07:00

I was a bit misleading in my last post about the approach of winter's darkness.

Re-reading it, I realized that I make it sound sudden or ominous. It's actually more of a gradual process. In the Spring, each day is marked by the number of minutes of daylight gained; in the fall, the number of minutes lost. It's a part of the early morning news, as well as the weather. And therefore it's a part of my morning ritual of caffeination and NPR. Throughout the year, there is a daily update about what time the sun will rise, what time the sun will set, how many hours and minutes of daylight there will be total, and how many minutes of daylight will be lost/gained from the day before.

The loss of daylight is gradual - just a matter of minutes each day. One would think it would be a matter of adjustment, not shock. But shock is how I seem to register it. First, comes the shock (sometime around August) that it gets dark at all. Then, comes the sound of the geese leaving again. Then comes the realization that it gets dark by 11 p.m., then by 10 p.m., then by 9 p.m., then by 8 p.m., ..... And sometime, around December, the sun will start setting around 3 p.m. It was right about that point that I started to wonder whether it would come back before I permanantly became a biscuit-baking herit with bad hair roots.

But, at that same point, others are rejoicing. I have a good friend whose mood becomes giddy and gleeful with the return of the dark. After the months of sunshine and dourness, the cold and the dark bring back her jovial, playful and mischievious nature to the forefront. I have to assume this cause-and-effect is not unique to her. Maybe it's the extra personal space after all the tourists have departed. Maybe it's the chance to catch up on sleep after the months without nightfall. Maybe its the upcoming holidays.

But there's just too much joviality, playfulness and mischief in these days of frost and sparkling stars for me to make insinuations of ominous darkness.

The Start of a Winter and My New Love of the Softly Scrambled

2005-10-06T18:13:00.000-07:00

If it was just a matter of identifying that new chill in the air, or trying to explain this sudden urge to embrace it with caramel colored sweaters, I'd tell you that it is Fall in Anchorage.

But the ground is definitely much too cool to be walking barefoot, even over those parts of the lawn that get the day's brightest beams of sun. The ground is cold - ice cold. Gloves and hats are a standard accroutement for mornings and nights, and I suppose even a lot of the days. Tour busses have disappeared. Bars have been restored to their core of regulars. Stores are restocking shelves with goods that are more likely to entice locals than thrill tourists. The price of everything is just a little bit cheaper. My neighbor has mowed his lawn for the last time this year. The picnique table has been moved back to its seasonal perch under the overhanging protection of a big Spruce tree.

But even more than that - it can't just be Fall because there's also the realization that we are well into that time of the year when we are waking up in the dark. We know that in a matter of time, we'll also be spending most of our waking hours in the dark too.

Some say that this is the toughest part of living up here - the dark. Part of me agrees. It is tough to wake up and drag yourself to work and know that the 3 hours of sunlight will be long gone before you get to go anywhere near home. It makes you tired. It makes me addicted to bacon. I'll be honest - it's a bit worse than a mere addiction to bacon. There was a time in the depth of my first winter that I was really scared that the sun would never return and that I might permanantly remain a biscuit-baking hermit with bad hair roots. But part of me loves the dark season - and the chance it gives you to slow down, and breathe, and engage in hobbies, and hone one's wit and read your books, and cook big simmering castiron pots of stews, and write long entries in journals. It's a period of nesting, I guess. Building up the reserves of independence and personality.

And, of course, another part of me sort of realizes that the dark makes everyone just a bit crazy, and it's nice to have that kind of license.

Maybe it's the chill. Maybe it's the dark. But it's definitely the start of winter and it's inevitable craving for warm and substantial foods.

This morning I brightened up my pre-sunrise hours with milky tea, Vogue, and two eggs on toasted Alaskan sourdoug - softly scrambled eggs, with a gentle fold-in of my neighbor's last harvest of parsley, fresh pepper, and romano cheese.

It was a very simple breakfast. Eggs on toast. But these were "softly scrambled", in accordance with a trick I read last night in French Food at Home by Laura Calder: lowest possible heat and stirring in the milk (Oregon organic) and a dollop of Tillamook butter just as the eggs were about to set.

One would think that this mid-set addition of milk wouldn't make such a difference from my habit of adding the milk to the eggs before I pour them in the pan. But it did. Such a difference. I also added some of my neighbor's last-harvest-of-the-year parsley. Laura Calder suggested that the heat be so low that it takes 20 minutes of stirring for the eggs to set. And I was enjoying the Vogue so much that I hoped it would take 20 minutes of patiently stirring and eagerly reading. It took a little less, which I suppose is a good thing as it allowed me plenty of time to properly relish the eating part of this morning.

And with my belly warmed up with a new and improved favorite winter traditions of the "softly scrambled" egg on toast, I was delighted to then discover on my way to work that the neighbors have already started turning on their Christmas lights.

[P.S. Note the language - up here, it's a matter of "turning on" the Christmas lights. The neighbors don't take them down in the summer months of perpetual daylight, they simply turn them off until we go back into the majority months of escalating darkness when its the "fairy lights" (I love the British term) that are perpetual.]

And the Fox Jumped Over the Divider

2005-10-05T10:44:00.000-07:00

"Commuting" in Alaska is never dull.

This is so despite the fact that there are very few roads over which one could commute, as well as the fact that all of these few roads will always end up either (a) nowhere - they just stop, or (b) back where you started - they just go around in circles.

On my commute to work today, for example, a red fox jumped over a divider and past the South-bound traffic on Minnesota. Just as happened a few months ago when a moose and her calf ambled over that same divider on their way from the lake on the one side to the lagoon on the other, traffic respectfully stopped both ways until they passed. He was such a deep red color, with a big bushy tail. And a deep, rusty-red color. And he was quick and smooth as he bounded away.

On my commute to work a few weeks ago - on the first day of my first trial, in fact - J. and I had to maneouver around the parking lot of my skyscraper office building to avoid the moose that appeared to suspect that my little subaru was getting too close to her twin calves. Trust me - it is not easy to dodge an irritated mama moose in reverse, especially when the baby moose[s] that she is trying to protect are nibbling on the decorative shrubs next to each potential escape route. Fortunately, J. was driving!

And a few months ago - on my 31st birthday, in fact - J. and I had to emergency-maneouver ourselves and our two dogs into his pickup truck when we were surprised to find a Kodiak Brown Bear ambling towards us. We had "commuted" down a gravelled Kodiak road to a swimming spot for our dogs. (Are there enough words to profess the kind of love that a girl feels for the man who so patiently endeavours to teach a lapdog who dodges puddles how to swim in rivers of glacier melt?) On our "return" commute, we pulled over to the side of the road and watched another Kodiak Brown Bear diving for salmon in the fishing hole from which he had just chased off a bunch of fisher-girls. The chased-off girls weren't angry, just a little wet and muddy. When the bear took over their hole, they just scrambled up a bank and joined us as we admired his underwater fishing skills from the back of J.'s pick-up.

Alive

2005-10-04T16:26:00.000-07:00

Oh, dear friends, don't give up faith on me.

I am alive. I am intending to keep on writing. I do have plans for those 50 pound bags of beans and rice. I'm just a little slow on the type-up and a little too inundated with practicalities for the fanciful flourishings of words.

But I did get to spend a week working remotely. And while there, I did have moments to craft leftover cornbread into a bread pudding with blueberries and carmalized bananas and a ragout of pork braised in milk and rosemary.*And I did get to send J. off to work in the mornings with some old family favorites: hot cornbread, peanutbutter and jam crepe roll-ups, and omelette sandwiches. I welcomed him home with hot "Irish soup" (potatoes, broccoli and onion). I spent a day simmering a bolognese sauce, and we spent a Friday night rolling out pasta dough and baking a lasagne. We spent Saturday night trying to teach ourselves through trial and error how to make a chicken fried steak.

The fete of these moments is that we did so with very little kitchen equpment. J's suff is still "on the barge" and mine is still in Anchorage. So each of our meals were prepared with only a hunter's knife, a $1.50 dollar skillet, a very flimsy pot**, and a box of plastic spoons.

While there, I attended a local art auction - where an entire table was set out with platters of smoked wild salmon. Free and as much as you could eat. But coffee, cookies and slices of cake cost $1 to $5 each.

I went to a poker tournament among friends at a house that overlooked a wide and open vista of tundra - oh, the tundra at fall is an exceptional feast of colors.

And I doubt that the miracle of watching our road be "plowed" will ever stale. The road is a path of mud. Maybe it was once paved. But now it is a wide, pot-holed swathe of traversible mud. Once a week, a tractor drives down to plow it up. Then it turns around and goes back over it to smooth it down. No more potholes....for at least a day.

* No fresh herbs to be had. And only a few to be had dried.

** "Flimsy" is not an understatement. I would have added to the list of meals a blueberry cornbread crumble, but the pan split as I was pulling it out of the oven. A sad end to a dessert I had looked forward to. But I doubt I will be forgetting anytime soon the mad rush of happiness and laughter as blueberries had to be wiped off every wall and counter space in our little kitchen.

Remote Alaska

2005-09-15T15:54:00.000-07:00

J. and I are moving out to The Bush.

He's already there. I'm working my way there....as of today, I have a HUGE bag of rice, a HUGE bag of beans, a HUGE bag of bread flour, and a case of evaporated milk in the trunk of my car, just waiting for me to the find the right box to mail them, and I've got 1/3 of my cookbooks packed into approximately five, quite heavy, boxes that I just need to drag to the post office.

This morning I mailed off to J. a box of cookies, a box of cleaning supplies, a box of J's favorite foods - like Kraft Maccaroni and Cheese, a "yard of beef,"* and six cans of creamed corn, and a box of staples for me - diced tomatoes, olive oil, vanilla extract, tampons and wool socks.

For those dear readers that know me and the way a sudden, two-second, glimpse of a good "reaffirmation of humanity" can thrill me for weeks, there should be little surprise at how much mirth I derive from sending out a 50 pound box full of day-to-day surprises, at the bush mailing rate of $9, to the following address:

[J]
General Delivery
[Remote Town], Alaska

I'm also starting the transition at work to working "remotely." I have to say, that I have never had better water-cooler conversations than those of these days when discussing with colleagues the ins-and-outs of living in a place where roads don't exist and rivers freeze up, where milk costs $9 a gallon and water is tasteless but brown. I get advice on what kind of a snowmachine to buy - as well as advice on what kind and color of snowmachining attire will be most flattering. And because this is Alaska, I also get caribou recipes and lots of advice on how to help my dog transition into a household where he is no longer the only dog. I won't lie. I also get much advice on how to avoid my dear little Puck from getting eaten or frozen. There is little surprise that I am contemplating purchasing for him an artic fleece body suit. Nor is there a surprise that the only reason why I haven't yet done so is because I haven't yet definitively decided whether to buy it in hunter green or midnight blue, as well as because I'm still hoping that I'll be able to persuade J. to allow me to get one in x-large for his dog.

There are also more serious talks. I don't want to be misleading. Talks of scheduling and logistics, like whether or not I can get fast-speed internet hook-up and the best way to get a printer hooked up for Westlaw. But, all in all, I'm quite confident that the opportunity to work "remotely" (in the entire sense of that word) as a corporate/finance lawyer is my slice of utopia. I get paid. There is no professional set-back. But I get to keep hot stews simmering, and keep dogs entertained, and ride snowmachines to grocery stores to pick up mightily-priced, but specifically-selected, ingredients. In fact, I am forced by the most unbendable of budgetary restrictions to have to start making my own bread every day. I even get to ride snowmachines to deliver lunch to the love of my life, perhaps stopping by the airport to pick up a copy of the freshly flown-in newspaper. And, every now and then, I hop on a plane and fly to Anchorage for a litigation appearance at a hearing before the judge or transaction appearance at negotiations.

I am having much fun researching the ingredients that will keep well, and planning and plotting the kinds of meals that I'll cook from them. And I'm even having fun with the fact that we will have few spare pennies for splurging. I think even fresh cabbage may have to be saved for special occasions. I'm reading the old books, with recipes and stories of the gold rush days, and pouring over books about Alaskan native traditions and the wild ingredients that can be foraged for. I'm just really excited, in no small part because I'm looking forward to seeing what I can accomplish when success requires creativity, and humble appreciation and patience and tolerance and, generally, so much more than mere access to cash.

This is the kind of perk that makes it worth a stint in the sweatshop indentured servitude of a large lawfirm. This is a million times more desirable than a partnership at one of those places, and the guarantee of a lifetime of indentured status that comes with it. This is also one of those reassurances of Fate - yet another example of how she likes to remind me that Alaska was the best thing that ever happened to me.

* I don't really think that a "yard of beef" actually constitutes one of J's favorite foods, but it was fun to buy, fun to mail, and certainly fun to blog about. And it's also practical. No refridgeration required until opened.

Insomnia and its Culinary Daydreamings

2005-08-28T14:58:00.000-07:00

My insomnia has returned.

I crawl through my days, my eyes heavy-lidded and framed with dark circles, until I get to finally crawl into bed. I'm so exhausted that it literally is painful to keep my eyes open. And by 10 p.m., I'm out. Exhausted. Sometimes not even making it into pyjamas.

And at 3 a.m., I'm up again.

Still exhausted maybe, but completely and utterly unable to sleep.

I've taken to reading my cookbooks and planning my pantry recipes for when J. and I move out to the bush.

And I think I'm getting some inspiration from the brief glances in the newspaper at the giant vegetables being showcased at the Alaska State Fair.

In any event, I've been employing my Insomniac Hours reading up on Hungarian recipes for cabbage, and marking those ones that I will be likely to find ingredients for when we move.

O mundo da voltas.

2005-08-02T21:17:00.000-07:00

Life is really just a twirling series of batons, isn't?

Suddenly, here I am again - working much and eating out every day, every meal. And yet I somehow manage to always have a stack of dirty dishes in my sink. I pay a doggy daycare to keep my puppy socialized. I go out, I guess,with co-workers and I call these social endeavours "work." I nightmare about briefs, and motions and courtroom deadlines. I wonder how I'm going to make it to a drycleaner. God knows, some magical perpetuation of crisis keeps me incessantly unable to pay my rent on time. I can get cross over the misplacement of a comma. And worse, oh, the worst sign is that I try to squeeze in time to hear how the day is going for the love of my life - and this fundamental aspect of the genuine life is my luxury.

But it's not so bad.

Oh, I have my raging moments with this new professional endeavour.

But somehow even two hours of reprieve can freshen up my enthusiasm and motivation with a spectacular efficiency far greater and more permanent than two months of reprieve with the Manhattan lawyering stresses.

Somehow this stress, here, is always doable.

One year.....I've been here one year. Well....more than a year. A year and change, I guess. Emphassis on the change. Have I just changed? Or is this a maturity? Or is this an epiphany?

Or is this just life?

Oh. Who knows.

I'm working a lot and cooking nothing. (Well - I take the odd middle of the night moment to practice the art of poached eggs and getting more adept at it.) But I hope - and maybe that's what makes this twirl of the baton greater than all the twirls and pizzaz of Manhattan a year and change ago.

Actually, this current twirl is infinitely improved from the whirls of them in Manhattan. I'm madly in love with a man that sends me over-nighted boxes of fiddlehead ferns he foraged during a hike to view bears. I'm contemplating life changes that will require J. and I to invest in a snowmachine so that we can do such day-to-day things as pick up the mail, buy groceries, etc.

I haven't been cooking.

2005-07-27T20:52:00.000-07:00

I haven't been cooking. At all, really. Not even noodles. Not even tea or coffee. Really. No cooking.

My fridge is pretty much empty of edible foods, but quite full of the non-edible kinds that were once edible but now need to be deposited in the garbage. I don't so deposit, I guess, because I haven't gone to the grocery store enough in the past two months to replenish my supply of grocery/garbage bags.

My house? It's a pit.

My dog? Neurotic.

My spirit? Alternating between scared and exhillerated.

I left BigLaw, maybe for good this time. And decided to see just how much gumption is left in me after, in effect, 8 years of feeling enslaved to it. So I'm busy - but it's the good kind of busy. The superficialities of my life are in complete disarray - but J. and I talk fun developments and upcoming adventures, I like my job, I like my co-workers, and oh! do I like freedom. And I even like that I'm busy - maybe because this is the voluntary kind of busy, not the indentured kind.

And what makes it all sort of laughable, is that amdist the squalor of the superficialities of my current existence, I have had non-stop guests. Every night that I've been home, with the exception of maybe one or two brief respites to quickly wash a few towels and the spare sheets for the next entourage, indeed - even on the mights when I wasn't home because - I have had guests. J's friend, that told me how to make a beaver roast on my engine when I drive to Barrow and showed me how to roast a camus bulb. British guests travelling in a 70's camper picked up down in Seattle, that arrived in Anchorage as friends of friends and left as treasured friends of mine. J's parents (for whom I shuffled all aside to be able to greet them in my home with a cast iron skillet of chicken and dumpling at 1 a.m., after their 7 hours of travel, but who work prevented me from really visiting and I do express an undiminishable amount of guilt for the fact that I dropped them off on the sidewalk outside of the airport....or actually, the fact that I did so for work reasons). The old college crush of a dear college friend, travelling with a different girl who arrived in Alaska as his girlfriend and, I hear, left it as a finacee. Lawyers from Seattle who waited too long to reserve a hotel room. Friends from Alaska who needed a temporary place to crsh.

It has been a very busy summer.

But it wasn't a cooking one.

Having said that, I did go to Kodiak twice during the month of July.

First, I went for my birthday - I turned 31 on Abercrombie beach, in J's arms, in front of a roaring bonfire made out of driftwood, eating Chinese takeout, and watching our dogs engage in a playful game of tag with a roving band of otters. This trip to Kodiak included, actually, many momentous moments - including a very close, scary in that post-event exhillerating kind of way, encounter with a Kodiak Brown Bear and wonderful decisions made jointly with J.

Second, I went out the other weekend with a big bag of beef hash that I had made for J. before the professional madness kicked in. J's friend came over for brunch, and we made a day of gorging on beef and sausage hash (last minute need to extend the portions), poached eggs, and coffee; resting from the feast of it; donning borrowed crab fisherman gear to take the dogs out for a rain-drenched romp on the beach; watching a $5 matinee of War of the Worlds; napping; and dining on halibut sandwiches at Henry's.

And I did get to make chicken and dumplings for J's parents - the leftovers frozen overnight and packed with some scones, bierocks and moose ragu for them to deliver to Kodiak.

So....little on the cooking front, but much on practicing other arts and necessities of living.

Introducing Puck

2005-06-28T19:12:00.000-07:00

.....whilst teaching myself (through trial and error) how to blog.

p.s. Hopefully I've just uploaded a picture of Puck. And with the assumption that I've managed to do so successfully, I feel like I now need to explain that having a picture of my dog taken with Santa Claus was an impromptu opportunity, not a planned-out and scheduled whim. Although he is lap-sized, and even though he is seen here on Santa's lap, I'd like to assure all dear readers that (a) he is quite a solid, rugged, yeomanly Alaskan dog, and (b) no - I am not one of "those" kinds of dog owners. I just happened to be passing by a place that was taking pictures of dogs with Santa at a time when I was getting a lot of requests for pictures of Puck and Alaska but didn't own a camera. (For what it's worth, Puck was quite irate that he had to be dragged away from the huskies and newfies to sit on this stranger's lap while a woman stood in front of him clicking away at a camera and squeeking random dog toys to get him to look away from the dogs standing in line.)

Now that's Puck's yeomanly status, and my rational dog ownership, have been established and defended, I have to say that I'm looking forward to adding pictures. I think this is going to be fun!

Impromptu Dog Parks

2005-06-23T11:06:00.000-07:00

Around midnight, Puck woke me up with an urgent whine. I tried to ignore him. He licked my face. But I rolled over. He hopped out of the bed, sat on the floor and stared at me. I knew he was staring, but I kept my eyes squeezed closed so as to avoid encouraging his determination to wake me up. He just kept staring for awhile. Every now and then he'd give a little whimpering wine of frustration at my refusal to get up. After several minutes, he finally barked. Just once or twice. Just enough to make sure that I was aware that he was serious about getting up.

So I got up, put on a sweatshirt, and kind of stumbled my way up the stairs.

He dashed out the door the second I had turned the doorknob to the front door.

It took me awhile to dash out after him. I think I was still half asleep and I had to find a pair of sandals. But once I did, I realized the reason for the urgency. The neighbors were out. Their frisbees were whirling back and forth. The dogs were in control of the street. And there was no surprise that Puck was part of their antics.

It was a Wednesday night/Thursday morning. Around midnight. And Puck was frolicking about in the sun with a gaggle of big, big dogs chasing frisbees and getting his encouragement and praise from neighbors who knew exactly who he was.

I'm pretty sure he doesn't get the game of frisbee, having only been "socialized" to catch balls and twigs, but there certainly is a sense of elated contentment standing under the Midnight Sun chatting with the neighbors about their summer solstice hikes and parties and watching one's little dog sporting about as athletically and eagerly as the neighborhood's big Alaskan dogs.

We'll be working on the frisbee catching though.