Alaska

Tasting history with modern pumpkins.

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Linda B. clued me in to a new pumpkin pie recipe recently. Or, rather, an old recipe, courtesy of “Tasting History with Max Miller” on YouTube. Miller is an engaging young man who turned his passion for historical food and beverages into a pair of YouTube channels.

The recipe, circa 1670, featured sliced apples, currants, raisins, butter, savory herbs and dry sack, but no custard or even milk. This was to be a layered dish, not a smooth and creamy one.

Back in the day, “pumpions” were a big reason that the colonists survived. Not only is it packed with vitamins and minerals, it survived less-than-ideal growing conditions and stored well over the winter. As the old folks used to sing,

We have pumpion at morning and pumpion at noon,

If it were not for pumpion, we should be undoon.

Since we did manage to nurse two pumpkins through a weird summer, and since DF is always up for a culinary challenge, we decided to give this a try. Naturally we put our own spin on the recipe, including the peculiarly Alaska one of substituting rhubarb juice for the dry sack. (I can’t abide alcohol.)

We had no currants, because I neglected to forage for them this year, but we did have raisins. (Fun fact: They were part of a Buy Nothing Facebook food package.) Miller used the savory herbs rosemary, thyme and parsley. But I wanted to hew closer to modern flavors, so I went with cinnamon, cloves and ginger. She who makes the pastry makes the rules. 

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Is fine dining worth it?

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The other night I brought home dinner from Tastee-Freez: chicken strip basket for me, bacon ranch chicken sandwich for DF and curly fries for both of us. This is not most people’s idea of fine dining, but we enjoyed it immensely.

It didn’t hurt a bit that we were both pretty ravenous, but seriously: The food there is good. They get their burger meat from a local butcher, and are “proud to use” Alaskan cod, pollock, crab and salmon.

But there’s another reason. Dipping a chicken strip into the little plastic cup of honey-mustard sauce, I suggested that the reason we were enjoying it so much is that we hardly ever do it.

Once or twice a year DF and I visit a very fine-dining establishment called Kincaid Grill; one of those dinners is an annual tradition with a couple of friends. The rest of the time, “Where shall we go for dinner?” always has the same answer: “The kitchen table.”

Not just because it’s the frugal thing to do, either. We genuinely enjoy our homemade meals. (He says it’s because they’re prepared and shared with love.) In addition, we don’t have to get dressed up nicely, or even get dressed at all; we’ve eaten quite a few meals in sweatpants and T-shirt, or even in bathrobes if it’s been a long day. We don’t have to wait for a table, examine a wine list, tip a server, or figure out which ancient grain is being sauced up and marked up.

Dining out just seems like…a lot of work. I expect I’m not the only one who feels this way, especially since people have become so accustomed to DoorDash et al. bringing them meals in takeout containers.

A recent article on Grubstreet, written by food critic Adam Platt, suggests there’s another reason. Yep, it’s the pandemic, but it’s also a question of “relevance and tone.” 

“(With) people struggling all over the city and fashionable tastes veering – as they have been for years – toward three-star tacos, burgers and bowls of ramen, a fancy multi-course menu feels like the opposite of sophistication to a new generation of diners.

“‘All these places try to tell a story,’ an astute young Brooklyn gourmet told me the other day. ‘But in the end, they’re all the same. …I just feel like the world has moved on.”

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What was your first job?

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I drove my great-niece to her first job interview the other day. They say to dress for the job you want, not the job you have, but right now B doesn’t have any square clothing.

Well, she does have a couple of skirts and a chic black-and-white dress, but the interview is for a very casual food retailer.

“I don’t want to overdress,” she said, deciding to stick with jeans.

Besides, right now the job she wants is at Hot Topic, where you can dress in all sorts of expressive ways. But she’s not yet old enough to get hired there.

Having reviewed the potential interview questions on the company’s website didn’t make her any less nervous, especially since she’s a bit shy. But she tiptoed in bravely with her fluorescent lime-green hair, septum piercing, “Prudhoe Bay Alaska” sweatshirt and white face mask.

Ten minutes later she was back out, with a fistful of paperwork. Apparently the interview went something like this:

What school do you attend?

How far away do you live?

You’re hired. 

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Giveaway: Alaska aurora calendar.

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As I noted recently, it’s high time you started any holiday shopping you plan for the year. Due to supply chain/pandemic issues, it’s going to be harder to find what you want and it will almost certainly cost more than you hoped. 

Here’s one solution: Win your gifts!

I post those e-gift card giveaways from Savings.com whenever I hear about them, in the hopes that one (or more!) of my readers will luck out. Regular readers also know that I give stuff away myself fairly often.

Lately I’ve been trying to focus on locally made items. This week’s giveaway is the Aurora 2022: Alaska’s Northern Lights calendar from Fairbanks-based Greatland Graphics. 

Who’s in?

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Attack of the greenhouse tomatoes.

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Most of the year we don’t eat tomatoes, because we know what they should taste like. Oh, we’ll buy a few Roma tomatoes to cut up into salads, but they just plain don’t taste like much.

I once described the flavor and texture as “ketchup-tinged oatmeal,” and I stand by that description today.

At this time of the year, though, we can have all the tomatoes we want. In fact, we have trouble keeping up.

Even eating them up to three times a day does nothing more than keep us from losing love apples to rot. The horror.

Which is why I’m thinking of it as an attack, a la “Attack of the Killer Tomatoes.” (As an Amazon affiliate, I may receive a small affiliate commission on items purchased through my links.)

My niece and great-niece came over for a lunch of Black Prince and Cherokee Purple tomatoes on DF’s fresh rustic bread with mayonnaise, some of our Red Sails lettuce and crisp bacon, plus fresh cucumber slices on the side. (More on those in a minute.)

This has been a year for some weirdly shaped tomatoes. That one in the illustration was uglier than sin, and twice as satisfying. Some of them look normal, but we’ve had quite a few gnarled behemoths that are hard to slice, but completely worth the effort. The flavor just knocks us out.

It’s hard to describe the taste of these heirloom varieties: sweet as sugar but with an underlying tomato tang. There’s a reason they charge $10 a pound for them at the farmers market here in Anchorage.

And there’s a reason we refuse to buy them. In part it’s because we don’t want to pay $10 a pound for meat, let alone tomatoes. It’s also because we can grow these beauties ourselves, and for a few short weeks we can gorge ourselves. More than a few short weeks, actually, because when the weather gets too chilly we’ll bring in all the greenies and let them ripen. Usually we finish them all by the beginning of December, at which point we start to dream tomato dreams once more. 

 

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Imprinting summer.

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August got here somehow, without neither my notice nor my consent. I was shocked the other day when DF mentioned its being the eighth month of the calendar. Seems just the other day it was summer solstice.

Then again, time has become weirdly fluid since the pandemic began, and especially since the pandemic killed my dad. Some months feel endless and others disappear almost without a trace.

This has been an odd, mostly cool summer save for a stretch of high-70s and at least one 80-degree day. The thermometer in the illustration is on my niece’s back porch – and it was in the shade. Obviously people in the Lower 48 are struggling with much hotter temperatures. All I can say is that 80 degrees up here feels hotter than it sounds.

Today it’s supposed to hit the low 70s. This morning DF and I did our usual tour of the back yard, to water greenhouse plants if needed, check on the progress of the plants and see if there are any strawberries we could have for breakfast. That’s another weirdness about summer up here: We get strawberries into late summer, whereas when I was a kid the berries were finished by early June.

The berries here are bigger, too:

The sun was warm (it was almost 60 degrees at that point), and the gentle breeze lifted up all sorts of fragrances. Not sure how much actual aroma can be had from fireweed, poppies, and pea and strawberry blossoms but taken together with big swatches of clover, they made an irresistible and intoxicating mix. I smelled growth. Life. Sustenance. 

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Extreme frugality: Putting food by.

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We spent parts of yesterday and today putting food by. Specifically, we turned seven or eight pounds’ worth of rhubarb into fruit leather.

First we chopped and simmered, then let the soupy stuff drain through a pair of colanders before glopping it into the dehydrator. We saved some of the juice to drink as a tonic; anything that tart has to be good for us, right?

The rest of the juice was frozen into chunks (which I insist on referring to as “Rhubik’s Cubes”) and set aside for my homemade smoothies. Made with free rhubarb and raspberries, marked-down “red band” bananas, half a cup of bulk-bought rolled oats, an egg and a big scoop of my homemade yogurt, these things are cheap as well as healthy. (And since I’m having the second part of my dental implant work done next month, I foresee a few liquid meals in my future.)

The last of the fruit leather finished dehydrating this morning. Like the other batches, it was rolled up inside paper scavenged from two sources: cut-apart cereal box liners and waxed paper saved from my sister’s annual tin of homemade peanut brittle. Flavored with sugar and a bit of ginger, the leather is a tangy, chewy treat that I must stop sampling or there will be none left for winter.

A previous batch of rhubarb had been turned into a compote sealed in pint jars, to be added to future dishes of yogurt. Not sure how many hours it took to do all this, but to us it doesn’t matter. We don’t put a dollar value on our gardening and food preservation, for two reasons: 

  • We don’t get paid for every minute we exist, and
  • We enjoy the process of turning home-grown produce into something we can enjoy next winter.

Some people would rather buy their veggies than grow them. I get that. Not everyone has the physical ability, the time or the real estate to garden. And fact is, the average person buys most of their stuff. We pay someone else to raise meat and produce, bake our bread, sew our clothes, build our homes.

For us, gardening is entertainment – and we don’t have to dress up or drive anywhere to enjoy it. Watching tiny green shoots grow into delicious foodstuffs is a reliable annual miracle. If you’ve ever grown so much as a pot of herbs on the windowsill, you understand what I mean.

Preserving the results is a natural progression. Making raspberry jam, cutting up carrots for canning, picking peas to freeze, plucking greens to dehydrate, slicing beets to pickle, peeling apples to cook into sauce – it’s all fun for us, even when we get tired toward the end.

The greeny smell of dehydrating kale, the sneezy scent of cloves, the sharp bite of vinegar, the soothing aroma of slowly simmering apples all keep us going: This is sustenance. This is satisfaction. This is safety.

 

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Bringing in the weeds.

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We had a cooler-than-usual May, which made us reluctant to put things out early. It’s only in the past week that our planted lettuces were big enough to start semi-harvesting.

(Why “planted” lettuces? Because we’ve been startled by rogue lettuces – and Asian greens and quinoa – popping up everywhere. More on that in a minute.)

Longing to eat something, anything, that was fresh, I started bringing in the weeds in the first week of June. Some were actual weeds, such as the fireweed in the illustration. Epilobium angustifolium was consumed by Alaska Natives long before we got here. I’d been reading about its edible qualities and decided to give it a shot because nothing else was fresh at that point. (Except dandelions, and I find them too bitter.)

So I picked some of the smaller plants, sautéed them in olive oil with garlic and ate them on some of DF’s amazing rustic bread. They tasted mostly like oil and garlic. No surprises there. Underlying it was a slight sweetness, similar to cooked spinach.

Here’s an amuse-bouche view of how they turned out:

At first glance, my friend Linda B. thought it looked like an insect. It does, kind of.

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Giveaway: Alaska-made chocolates.

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The other day I learned about a most, um, interesting confection: a dark chocolate bar (70 percent cacao) with Alaska sourdough and Alaska bee pollen.

I am not making that up.

Haven’t sampled it yet, but I will soon: DF and I plan to take it over to our beekeeping neighbor, thinking it will intrigue him as much as it did us.

What I did try was a unique specialty at Chugach Chocolates: “bean to bar” chocolates, made with single-source cacao beans from Vietnam, Fiji and Madagascar. The tasting took place after a tour to see how this small-batch chocolate company cracks, roasts, grinds and tempers its beans before flavoring and molding them into smooth, rich, delightful sweets.

This was dark chocolate unlike any I’ve previously tasted. I’m not sure I have the vocabulary to explain the different flavors, but I’ll give it a try: earthy, fruity, ever-so-slightly spicy and, mostly, dark. It made me think of the Mayans and how they drank their chocolate without sweeteners.

Not that this chocolate is bitter! It’s just that the reigning flavor was intensely chocolatey, rather than sugar-with-chocolate-added.

I’ve featured Chugach Chocolates before in my “support the local economy” giveaways. Now I’m ready to do it again, because I learned that they use ice packs and insulated covers to keep their delightful products safe for summertime shipping.

Wanna win? Keep reading.

 

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Giveaway: Alaska soap and such.

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My friend Linda B. and I took a field trip today, to a small store called Blue Market AK, where the motto is “Refill, not landfill: Unpackaged for a healthy planet.” (Just FYI: “AK” is the postal designation for “Alaska.”) We prowled among shelves full of oils, honey, salsas, spices, organic produce, soap and other personal-care products, non-toxic household cleaners and other interesting items.

To be honest, I felt like I was back in the ’70s. In a good way.

The vibe was friendly, caring, healthy-but-not-insufferable-about-it and, more to the point, intensely Alaskan. About 45 percent of the shop’s vendors are from the Last Frontier, and all of them focus on reducing the environmental impact of producing their delightful products.

The store offers free space for “local makers” to do pop-up sales each week, and donates 1 percent of proceeds to Alaska groups that emphasize sustainability.

With all that emphasis on Alaska, it seemed like a great way to keep my “support the local economy” giveaway streak alive. Consider it a belated Earth Day giveaway. Here’s what you’ll get if you win: 

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