Maybe it’s a little warm-weather dreaming as the snow drifts across my window, but I decided this week, with a delivery of fresh cod, to make a dish that I fell in love with in Barcelona. I have been studying Spanish cuisine for a while now and perhaps my favorite dish is a paper cone of bolas de bacalao from the Boqueria market in Barcelona. Let’s break that down. Bolas means balls and bacalao is salted cod; so, this translates to cod balls.

I couldn’t bring myself to use salted cod in our Alaska recipe. Why bother? It seems the whole world adores salt cod and I personally don’t think we Alaskans need it. We have access to such fresh fish here (and I guess I can throw in the cold temperatures for preservation). In Barcelona, salt cod hangs like prayer flags throughout the markets and you might wonder how there can be any fish left in the sea. It’s not tricky to use salt cod but you have to budget in the time to soak the fish in water to rehydrate it and change the water frequently to wash out some of the saltiness. It does have a particular pleasantly concentrated flavor and it’s worth a try if you are interested.

In the photo essay, you can see that we mashed up boiled potatoes, added in parsley, onions, garlic, and spices. Then, we added in the poached cod, egg, and lemon. At this point, you could use the same batter to make dinner-sized cod cakes, or add the mixture into chicken broth and tomatoes to make a stew, or, add it into chicken broth and cream for chowder.

We portioned the batter into bite-sized pieces and rolled them into a round shape. We then dipped them first into flour, egg, and then Panko breadcrumbs. Some people, my daughter Mandy included, will repeat the dipping cycle a couple of times to create a slightly thicker crust.

I have a small, almost personal-sized deep fryer that I love. There are many models out there but the smaller size allows for less oil waste and easy storage. I like to use canola oil for frying. I heat the oil to about 360 degrees and drop in one test fritter to make sure the temperature is good. I fry the balls for a few minutes until they are golden brown and place them onto paper toweling to soak up any excess oil. I like to sprinkle our fritters right away with plenty of salt.

We made a little sofrito to go along with our fritters, but we often make a garlicky mayonnaise called alioli (In Catalan, it is alioli. In France, it is aioli). Sofrito is easy to make. We heat plenty of olive oil in a sauté pan; add in a handful of minced onion, garlic, and perhaps a hot green pepper. After this is good and sautéed, we add in a can or two of good quality organic diced tomatoes.

I have some cod left over, so next I am going to try a true British fish and chips recipe from Chef Josh Eggleton on the website www.greatbritishchefs.com. He puts curry powder and lager beer into his batter and serves them with smashed peas.

Fend off Alaska winter blues with a strata start to the day

As the wind howls and the snow drifts over our lake, we are wondering when our dramatic winter weather might calm down. The sled dogs are lying on their thick beds of straw, the chickens are huddled in their coop, and we’re in the warm and toasty kitchen drinking hot chocolate.

It’s the time of year when we turn our thoughts to menu planning for the upcoming season. We’ll pull out notebooks and highlighters, calendars and sticky notes and begin the process of deciding what we’ll prepare months from now. It’s about dreaming, really — like picking out seeds from a garden catalog as we look out the kitchen window covered in snow.

No one has been traveling along the trail this week except one hearty pair of young men training for the Iron Dog Race. They drove here from Wasilla in hours — a trip that would have taken weeks or longer in an earlier decade. The people that lived here at the turn of the century were hearty souls. I know there were people here because there is an old cabin buried under the leaves and dirt behind my house some distance from what we call the Frog Pond. Whoever lived there must have had some days of windy and snowy weather like we are having now. I wonder how they occupied their time on a winter day.

We’re dreaming about fruit other than apples and vegetables that don’t hold well in the root cellar for months at a time. We love beets, turnips and parsnips, but we are beginning to dream about tender greens and pea shoots. Summer will be here soon enough.

No airplanes have been able to fly in for days due the high winds, but I am hoping to travel to Anchorage soon. It’s not as arduous a journey for me as whoever used to dwell in that now-buried cabin, or even the Iron Dog racers. I just ride a snowmachine across the lake to our airstrip and climb into a ski plane. In slightly less than an hour, I’m at Lake Hood, pulling off my bunny boots and heading for a hot shower. This week, weather permitting, Mandy is flying in with me to check on her sister who is getting ready to have a baby. Carly’s baby is due on March 3, the start of the Iditarod Sled Dog Race.

When we’re away from the kitchen, we try to make meals for the crew staying here so they don’t have to spend time on meal preparation. Mandy makes the usual suspects for our team — lasagna, makings for taco night, and slow-roasted meats and vegetables. Last night, Mandy made a dish called a strata for breakfast in case the plane came in today (no luck — the wind is still howling). This is a perfect make-ahead dish for a hearty winter breakfast. It involves layers of bread cubes accompanied by meat, cheese and onions.

A hearty Alaska winter snack

This week has been cold where I live, clocking temperatures into the negative twenties, easily. Life doesn’t stop at our lodge when it is this cold, but it certainly slows down.

The crew at our lodge is working on building a new cabin. It’s a project they began in the fall, tearing down the old log cabin that has been on our property since the early 1950s. Our lodge was an old hunting camp in those years, and the Red Lake Trail cabin was one of the original buildings remaining.  The team put in the foundation of the cabin before the ground froze, and now they are working in the bitter cold to get the cabin framed in and finished before our busy time surrounding the Iditarod.

My kitchen table is covered with a pile of clothing: face masks, headlamps, caps, gloves, boots, goggles, and more. It’s a process just to get dressed to head outside. The outdoor crew head out when it is daylight, back in for a warm-up of coffee and cookies, and back out the door again. That repeats all day long with a longer break for lunch, and dinner is after the sun has set. In the kitchen, we are cooking all day to keep up with our hard-working crew’s metabolism.

For many years, my husband Carl and his team have been building our cabins themselves. Carl built my kitchen at Winterlake Lodge. It’s a nice 30-foot by 30-foot room with a big worktable that separates the kitchen table from the working area. The worktable is measured to my height and the counter lies just where my hands come to work. Every bit of equipment in the kitchen has been flown in by airplane, including my walk-in refrigerator and two-oven, eight burner stove.

To keep the guys going in cold conditions, we keep plenty of snacks out at the coffee station. Meals are hearty high-carbohydrate affairs and it seems it is the only time the guys sit down all day long.

Today, we made little handheld meat pies similar to Cornish pasties as a snack to send out to the construction site. These meat-filled pastries are easy to handle in the cold weather and are filling as a snack on the go.

I realize that I have been making these little pies and sending them out to my husband at one construction site or other for nearly thirty years now.

Warm up with Alaska smoked salmon chowder

This week, our New Year celebration will be a quiet affair at Winterlake Lodge. We are deep in snow and the temperatures are well below zero.  We might not have fireworks or a fancy dance planned, but in the dark of night, we can stand on our frozen lake and look skyward towards a million stars twinkling over us. What better holiday decoration can there be?

We’ve had some adventures on New Year’s over the years. One year, the wind became so severe exactly at midnight, we marked the moment by rushing outside to hang on the tie-down ropes holding several planes parked on our lake. We brought out our snow machines and tied them to the airplanes, too, and hoped that the whole mess wouldn’t fly away.

On New Year’s Eve, I like to have a late-night dinner that lingers through the midnight hour. We’ll pull out our stored box of streamers and poppers that have been collected and recycled over the years. Often our hats might have a previous year stamped in glitter — we still have some hats that say “2000” on them. We don’t mind.

We’ll sit down at the table late in the evening and talk about the previous year and make plans for the new one. We’ll recount our favorite highlights of 2011.

For me, high on the list is the small cooking school we started located on an old crabbing boat outside of Homer. From the first thought of the project to our inaugural class, the cooking school has been a rich addition to our lives. I’ve learned far more than I have taught.

Another highlight for me was the opportunity to focus on and learn more about Japanese cuisine. In the wake of the Japan earthquake in March, I began to correspond with culinary educator and author Elizabeth Andoh. Our email messages culminated in a weeklong visit by her to our school. Her inspirational sharing of technique and culinary philosophy made an impact on me. Japanese cuisine is so complimentary to Alaskan food products that it’s a natural fit.

Despite some resistance, more technology crept into our culinary lives in 2011. A new tool for us in the kitchen is a tablet computer. Apps are coming along fast and furious in the culinary category, and I soon discovered there are both truly remarkable and truly mediocre choices. A favorite of 2011 was a culinary app called “Great British Chefs.” I am a huge fan of Chef Marcus Wareing from London, and he is one of the featured chefs in this colorful collection of video clips and recipes.

My cookbook collection grew substantially in 2011. There is just nothing like an old-fashioned brand new cookbook in the hand. One book, “The Food52 Cookbook: 140 Winning Recipes From Exceptional Home Cooks,” by Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs is a homey and fun collection of crowdsourced recipes from people across the country. I’ve enjoyed the emails I get on a regular basis from the Food52 interactive website. Although I have never met these women, I feel like I have frequent morning chats and coffee with them about recipes and food. They are my virtual friends next door.

There are too many moments to recount from 2011: Setting up my own oyster cage at the end of the dock at Tutka Bay, flying out by helicopter to a fly-fishing river to prepare a luncheon at Winterlake Lodge, and sitting in the kitchen long after all others had gone to bed to talk about life with a guest at Redoubt Bay Lodge. On New Year’s Eve, I’ll be grateful for all these memories.

We’ll serve several small courses to keep us lingering at the table. The first course this year will be smoked salmon chowder. My family has practically grown up on this dish.

An Alaskan’s Baked Alaska recipe

I’m visiting my parents in Virginia. I was one of the lucky ones to have most of my family living in Alaska — until recently. My parents have fled our cold, slippery winters for a different climate.

Although my parents didn’t retire to a condo in Florida or a sunny beach in Hawaii, they are not worrying about sliding on ice as they head out the door in the mornings. They bought an historic house built with solid wood and surrounded by chestnut trees that are older than they are. Quaint horse farms and antique stores dot the landscape around their new home outside of Charlottesville, and the roadside is thick with historic plaques. I can’t say I am happy about my parents moving away but I can’t say that I blame them, either. Their house is lovely and their garden will extend into seasons long after the snow has fallen on mine.

We are spending the week touring around locally, playing table games, talking about politics, and cooking.

One of my favorite attractions has been a visit to nearby Monticello, home of Thomas Jefferson. I meandered through Jefferson’s home and imagined what it must have been like to cook boiled mutton and game birds in the glow of the large hearth that must have been always burning in the kitchen.

I asked the historian at Monticello who was guiding us on the tour if it was true that Thomas Jefferson served Baked Alaska. She said it was certain that Baked Alaska (not called that at the time) had been served in the White House. It had, she said, a profound effect on one group of Native American guests who were in awe of the creation and it helped Jefferson’s position in current negotiations.

Jefferson’s cuisine was influenced by his years in France and it is assumed he brought the dessert, amongst many other things, back with him. The invention of our modern day Baked Alaska is generally attributed to an Italian pastry chef named Gasparini around 1720. By the time that Jefferson served it in the White House, found on a menu dated 1802 (along with a pie called macaroni), Baked Alaska had made the rounds of European courts. The name “Baked Alaska” first appears in the Fannie Farmer Cookbook from 1896.

Whatever the origins, we now claim the dessert as our own. In my version, I use a recipe surprisingly similar to Fannie Farmer’s original from 1896. I make small individual cakes cut from a loaf of pound cake, angel food cake, or other.

Next comes ice cream. I have an Italian ice cream maker in my kitchen (best kitchen gadget investment ever) so we make our own and vary the flavors, but of course, there are plenty of options to choose from in the market.

Instead of trying to really bake the cake in the oven as in older variations, I make a meringue on top of the assembled cake and use a small hand-held torch to brown it. Baked Alaska will work fine actually baked in the oven but the entire cake needs to be encased in meringue to insulate it and I don’t think most people really want to eat that much meringue. After whipping eggs and sugar together to make the meringue, you can pipe it using a plastic sandwich bag (snipping one end) or just spoon the meringue over the cake with a spoon.

If you don’t have a small hand-held torch in your kitchen arsenal, it’s an inexpensive investment. You can use it anytime you want to brown the surface of any foods such as cheese or sugar.

I like to include berries (blueberries and black currants are my favorite) around the base of each cake and crème de cassis is a favorite addition for an elegant touch. In the summer, we press torn wildflowers around the sides for festive color.

The cellar is in bad shape at the moment — A bear has ravaged the log door that seals the entrance to the small earthen room lined with wooden shelves. The room stays pretty much at a perfect forty degrees all year round.

For the past 30 years, I have always lived with the benefit of a root cellar in or near my kitchen. In our first home, the root cellar was a trap door in the floor just to the left of the kitchen counter. The entrance to the basement-style root cellar was flush with our homemade cottonwood flooring with only an embedded brass ring to reveal the fact that it was a door. Once the hatch was lifted up, that root cellar had several stairs that led down to an underground chamber where I could keep vegetables cool and dark year round. Shelves were built out of earth to hold potatoes, carrots, cabbage, onions, and beets from my formidable garden.

I made some mistakes early on. One year, I lovingly lined all my shelves with extra dry sawdust from a project Carl had been working on.  The humidity shifted and all my carrots went limp as moisture was drawn out of them into the sawdust. I have since learned to use slightly dampened sawdust to keep good moisture in the air (or have another source of moisture in the room).  I prefer earthen floors rather than finished ones to help promote humidity.

It’s important to include good ventilation if you are considering a root cellar. I have two small vent pipes sticking out from the top of my root cellar past the snow. One vent pipe is placed low in the room to move cold air around and one vent pipe is higher to move hot air.

This time of year, the vegetables of choice in my kitchen are mostly winter root varieties. We are roasting beets, braising cabbage, and cooking carrots in buttery chicken stock. I like to fry potatoes in a little duck or goose fat and salt and pepper for morning hash browns.

Not all root vegetables in our kitchen are grown in the garden. When I usually have big boxes of sweet potatoes (which don’t grow in my northern garden) left over from holiday meals, they go into cold storage to be reinvented into festive dishes such as cookies, pies, and breads. Sweet potatoes like to stay at around 55 degrees in temperature – the same as wine. A colder temperature might encourage sweet potatoes to soften. They will last about a year if they are stored properly.

Why did the bear rip off the door of my root cellar? It was filled with stinky French cheese and Red Bull specialty drinks. I wonder which he enjoyed the most.

We are making cookies this week — in all shapes and flavors. We’re also baking breakfast breads (my favorite so far is sweet potato-pecan), a few cakes, and even a few pies. My daughter Mandy and I are preparing edible gifts to give to friends and acquaintances throughout the holidays.

Today is “blueberry-raspberry bar” day. We make a different cookie each day of the week so ingredients on the countertop don’t get out of control and we don’t short-circuit halfway through a recipe.

To reinvent our recipe to represent something a little closer to home, we took out some of our coveted wild blueberry and raspberry stash from the freezer. We slow-cooked the berries with a little sugar and lemon to make an impromptu jam.

Next, we made egg-enhanced cookie dough — basically, butter, sugar, eggs and flour. We combined melted butter with brown sugar and beat in the eggs and vanilla. We added in the dry ingredients, chilled our dough for about an hour, and rolled it out to create our blueberry bars.

Our recipe calls for both baking powder and baking soda. I learned from food scientist Shirley Corriher that one teaspoon of baking powder will raise a mixture of one cup of flour, one cup of liquid, and one egg. If the mixture contains an acidic ingredient (like buttermilk, yogurt, or surprisingly, brown sugar), the baking powder won’t completely react all the way. The end result is a kind of soapy bitter taste. So, we add in a little bit of baking soda to interact with the remaining acidic ingredients to balance out that flavor. Baking soda also helps to brown baked goods (some chefs rub baking soda on pork or beef to brown the skin). Baking soda is about four times as strong as baking powder, so a little goes a long way.

We used all-purpose flour in our recipe and just a little bit of whole-wheat flour. You could substitute all whole-wheat flour if you prefer. Conversely, for a super-soft cookie, you could use low-protein cake flour. Experiment with different flours to find the right combination for your palate.

You can substitute the filling in this cookie for nearly anything: apple pie filling or strawberry jam, for example. You can add instant oats to the cookie dough to make a kind of breakfast bar.

Tyrone, a fly-fishing guide by profession, has been a great addition to our family. On his first visit to Alaska while Carly and Ty were still dating, they flew out to Winterlake Lodge during the Iditarod. Winterlake is the Finger Lake checkpoint along the race and it’s always a hectic time at the lodge. Due to severe winter weather and extreme snow, we spent most of Ty’s visit shoveling the roofs of our buildings so they wouldn’t collapse. Ty learned how to ski, to snowmachine, and how to run sled dogs. He cut firewood with a chainsaw and ax, learned how to unload an airplane in blowing wind, and he experienced lodge life when thirty people were stuck at our house for four days due to bad weather.

In turn, we learned how to call a car trunk a boot and a cookie a biscuit, and that not everyone wants coffee in the morning. My garbage can became a rubbish bin. We tried to learn how to pronounce Ty’s last name – Potgieter. It has a kind of little guttural swirl in the middle of it that I am still not quite getting right.

Fast-forward a few years. Ty and Carly are happily married and living in Anchorage. Ty has built a cabin, he has fished for salmon and trout, he’s gotten a Coast Guard captain’s license, and he’s taken helicopter lessons. He owns Carhartts (the good kind with the double knee patch) and a Leatherman, bunny boots, and he has duct tape on his jacket. Sound familiar?

Just as some of Alaska has found its way into Ty, a few South African influences have found their way into our family in Alaska. We all seem to drink a little bit more tea these days. Jill, Ty’s mother, gave me a book on South African cuisine when she came to visit. I’ve learned to understand what biltong is – South African jerky made predominantly with the spice coriander and some kind of meat, like antelope or ostrich. I’ve tried bobotie, a pie made with ground meat, turmeric and other curry spices with a kind of egg custard on top. We’ve started calling the barbecue a braai (South African word for outdoor grill).

My entire family travelled to South Africa over the past few weeks. They saw plenty of wild animals, went swimming in the ocean, and toured the countryside. They brought back some biltong, South African wine and a few other exotic treats for me to try. One South African specialty that I have come to enjoy is peri-peri, a kind of hot sauce served with fish or chicken.

Peri-peri sauce is made from minced small red chilies, oil, garlic, and lemon juice. The amount of chilies you use can vary depending on how hot you want your sauce to be. For two cups of oil, use between 4 to 10 red chilies to vary the heat of the sauce.  And, nearly every other ingredient in this sauce can be adjusted up or down – lots of lemon juice (or try lime) or just the lemon rind; lots of garlic or just a hint.

Try a little peri-peri marinated crab or other seafood on crackers for a holiday appetizer – or toss into pasta with chicken or fish for a main course.

Holidays in Alaska can be complicated. Many people living here are from somewhere else, and extended families can be thousands of miles away. We bring traditions from our past lives and create new traditions that make sense in our new lives. When I first moved to Alaska, I attended a Thanksgiving dinner with twenty people, friends and extended friends, gathered around a makeshift table in the living room of my future husband. It was pretty wonderful.

This year, it will just be our small family group. We’ll chat and eat, play games with the kids, maybe we’ll play a dance video game and everyone will laugh at my feeble attempts to keep up with my nephew Henry.

I want to create a menu that will appeal to all of us — my husband’s Midwest meat-and-potatoes palate, the kids who prefer pizza over oysters, and the rest of us who are more adventurous.

I settled on something a little different this year. I am going to make turkey potpie rather than the whole bird-in-the-oven option. I’ve gotten the idea from the dish coulibiac, or Russian potpie, which I’ve made for many years. Coulibiac is a layered pie filled with rice, egg onion, and salmon. I’ll make a bottom layer of mushrooms, roasted herbed turkey, and a chunky cranberry sauce. I’ll serve stuffing and gravy on the side.  I’ll let you know how it goes over.

Everyone seems to agree on Brussels sprouts in our house, so we’ll have a big bowl of shredded and baked Brussels with bits of bacon, shallots, and splashed with a little hot vinegar.

This year, I’m going to make kale crisps, which I am particularly fond of. I just take washed and dried kale leaves, rub them in oil, salt and pepper and I bake them at 375 degrees for about 30 minutes. I spritz the kale leaves with a little lemon juice and garlic and serve them hot.

There’ll be plenty of vegetables and sauces, cranberries, potatoes, and a little buffet of desserts that will get hammered hard by the kids and Carl.

And, as in every year since I have lived in Alaska, we’ll have salmon and crab at the table. These have become touchstones for me in celebratory moments.  I have somehow come to believe my little crab cakes are symbols of good luck and I serve them whenever I want to express that sentiment.

Each year during freeze up, we decide either to travel or stay at Winterlake Lodge. The choice is usually to be away from our lodge during the multi-week process of weather transition from fall to winter.  The ice on our lake has to freeze solid and become thick enough to hold the weight of an airplane before we can travel in and out. Soon, we’ll all pack up and fly back to the lodge for the winter season.

Winter is a favorite time of year for us at the lodge. The tempo is peaceful and quiet — except when we are feeding or harnessing the sled dogs. In the morning, Carl and J, our winter caretaker, wake up early to stoke fires and start the coffee. They usually sit around the woodstove in darkness, reading books by headlamp and sipping their coffee. A little later on, one of them will turn on the generator so we can have lights and running water. That’s when I get up and the morning kitchen gets going.

This comforting and simple morning routine, repeated day after day throughout the winter, balances our frenetic pace of summer. We linger over meals, talking about anything and everything. We shut out the world, essentially, letting only what we want in.

Breakfast at the lodge is a hearty affair. The crew needs fuel to tackle their day and embrace the snow. The work at the lodge is predominantly shoveling snow, cutting firewood, and running the sled dogs during the winter. Staying warm is constantly on the to-do list.

I am preparing batches of granola to take out to the lodge with us. It’s kind of like our summer trail mix — always great to have on hand. It’s easy enough to buy store-bought granola, but why should you? It’s not difficult to make, endlessly customizable, and there is just something wintery and charming about having your own granola sitting on the shelf waiting for those long, lingering breakfasts.

I use rolled oats primarily as a base for my recipe but since we always have steel-cut oats (oats that haven’t been smashed flat by a roller) on hand, I mix the two together. We make a couple of varieties of granola but a favorite of mine is a mixture of macadamia nuts, dried blueberries, and dried mangoes.

Most recipes call for a little bit of oil and some sweetener. How much sweetener you put into your granola determines if it is sticky and crisp or more dried and toasted. I opt for the dryer side. We sometimes use only honey, or sometimes a combination of brown sugar and honey or maple syrup. I advise you to use honey only from Alaska (or a known source) so you know it isn’t imported from China. I sometimes add in a little liquid, like lemon juice or unsweetened blueberry concentrate (I buy this in the health food section of the grocery. It’s handy for sauces and other uses).

I add in any fresh fruit or delicate dehydrated fruit after the granola is baked (so these bits don’t burn).

The following are some suggested variations on the recipe:

• Nuts: slivered almonds, whole almonds, pecans, macadamia nuts, walnuts, or cashews.
• Dried fruits: cranberries, blueberries, cherries, unsweetened coconut, figs, or apricots.
• Seeds: flaxseed, sunflower seeds, and pumpkin seeds.
• Sweeteners: honey, maple syrup, rice syrup, birch syrup, or brown sugar.
• Flavoring: lemon juice, blueberry juice concentrate, apple juice, cranberry juice concentrate, cinnamon, ground ginger, orange zest, ground cardamom, or nutmeg.

Chicken soup has been a famous cold remedy since forever and there has been much written about what true therapeutic qualities it could possibly possess. The hot steam rising from a bowl of chicken soup can clear the head. The fat in rich chicken stock can coat and sooth the throat. And the ingredients in chicken soup offer healthful nutrients. But, I think we can all agree that the biggest benefit of a nice bowl of homemade chicken soup is the TLC that comes along with it.

In our house, a bowl of chicken soup might not be the typical chicken stock, carrots, onion and noodles. It is more often Tom Khaa Gai (sometimes spelled with slight variations), a classic Thai soup made with chicken, coconut milk and herbs. This word in Thai means “boiled galangal”, a Thai root that is like a citrusy, soapy version of young ginger. Galangal is used often in Thai cuisine and it adds a particular authentic flavor to dishes. It is readily found fresh in Anchorage.

I lived in Thailand when I was a young girl and certain flavors still haunt me. We would most often have in the morning for breakfast a half of papaya sliced and squeezed with lime and sprinkled with herbs. We ate fresh fish often. And, one dish that was repeated over again was chicken soup, Thai-style.

I have an old Bangkok YWCA cookbook in my collection from my childhood. Half of the book is in English and half is written in Thai (presumably so the cook could communicate with the lady of the house). I love the old fashioned hand-drawn illustrations and some of the encyclopedic descriptions of Thai fruits and other indigenous ingredients. But, oddly, the recipes are pretty bland and westernized, typical of many cookbooks from that era.

The go-to book for Thai cuisine on my shelf is Thai Food written by Australian chef and restaurateur David Thompson. Thompson’s writing is clear and his coverage of Thai cooking and recipes is comprehensive. I decided to try his recipe for chicken soup.

Thompson’s recipe calls for palm sugar, a specialty ingredient perhaps not worth seeking out unless you have other needs for it. Palm sugar is made from palm or coconut rather than sugar cane.

I made this soup in a snap. Mandy ate one bowl, and she is now already feeling better. It’s a miracle!

You can rethink your own house-blend therapeutic chicken soup. The options are many (Mexican-style chicken soup or Greek lemon and chicken soup are two off-the-cuff examples).

See Kirsten’s bio page for a list of her recent posts. Her inaugural post shares her crab fishing experiences in Tutka Bay.

Alaskan adventure video slideshow.

One memorable Halloween, Carl decided he wanted to set up something of a trick-or-treat opportunity for the girls. We hid small treats around the house. Carl cut holes for eyes and mouth out of a black garbage bag and crouched behind the worktable in the kitchen. When I walked into the room with the girls, he leapt up to scare them. They responded with blood-curdling screams and both began crying furiously and wouldn’t stop for about an hour. So ended our homespun celebration.

We tried a few other lame attempts at, say, a dress-up dinner party or in some years a sledding trip. But, for the majority of years that our daughters were young, it was just the four of us and not quite the same festive occasion as it might be shared with a crowd.

Carly and Mandy are long grown now and they both live in Anchorage when they aren’t working at one of our lodges in the summertime. They are big world travelers and have experienced Halloween in such notable locales as the streets of Los Angeles and San Francisco as the random opportunity has provided it. This week, Carly is attending a costume party at a friend’s house in Anchorage and she has asked us to make some homemade treats for her to bring.

We’ve decided to make popcorn balls. Easy enough, but we wanted to make a variety of flavors that Carly might not try normally.

First of all, we went to the store and bought organic popcorn. About 50 percent of all pesticides used in farming are consumed in corn growing. Corn (and, by default, popcorn) is one of the ingredients my family insists on being organic. Organic popcorn is easy to find these days. I don’t recommend using microwave popcorn. There are too many artificial ingredients added.

We like to make popcorn on the stove the old fashioned way, with a little oil and salt. Many people use an air popcorn maker and I know these are fantastic. We’ve just never had access to many electric appliances (like popcorn makers or microwaves) in my kitchen over the years, and that tradition has carried on even in our more modern life.

In our Halloween popcorn collection for Carly, we made several batches. We sprinkled on Furikake, a Japanese seaweed condiment in one batch. We used curry and coconut in batch number two, and fruit, nut and chocolate in our third. Finally, we just made a simple caramel popcorn ball. All were delicious but I ate two popcorn balls.

Here’s the basic recipe for popcorn balls. You can add spices, herbs, and other ingredients, as you prefer to dress them up for Halloween.

Deepak Chopra, an Indian-born physician, has become a heavyweight superstar on the subject of Aryuvedic practice and New Age health and wellness. Ayurveda is a 5,000-year-old practice of mind and body medicine that incorporates yoga, massage, food, and other lifestyle practices. I am perhaps here for “Ayurveda-light” — how I might offer cool massages to our guests after they have spent a day hiking in the Alaska Range.

I’m taking a program entitled Perfect Health, which is also called Panchakarma in Aryuvedic terms. We start our day at 6:45 with yoga and meditation, take some classes, have some massage, eat Indian food like lentils and rice, and take herbal supplements with strange names that aid in our week-long purification. I’m in a group of twelve students, people from all over the world including several Canadians, one young man from Singapore, and two women from Australia.

A premise of the program is that all of us have doshas: defined body types. There are three main doshas and the central concept of Ayurvedic medicine is the theory that health exists when there is a balance between these. The three types of doshas are called Vata, Pitta, and Kapha. If you want to find out what your dosha is, you can go here and take a small quiz. So, much is done culinary-wise in relation to what type of dosha you might have – what foods you should eat, even what spices you might use on particular foods, to enhance the balance of your dosha.

I am a Pitta (that’s my dosha and that’s how I might describe myself to someone I meet this week). But, I have a Vata imbalance. I know, it’s confusing for me, too.  In general, it means I should eat comforting foods — phew, I lucked out there.

I asked Chef Greg Frey Jr., chef de cuisine at the La Costa Resort (where the Chopra Center is located) to teach me a comforting fall Vata-balanced recipe. He grabbed a red kuri squash from the counter and showed me how he makes squash gnocchi.

Red kuri squash is interesting. It is a thick-skinned Japanese winter squash that has a deep orange flesh that doesn’t fade in cooking. It’s also not quite as stringy as, say, butternut squash. It is not as pumpkin pie-tasting either. It makes a beautiful soup and, in our case, beautiful gnocchi. It has a rich, deep flavor that is characterized as nutty, as in hazelnuts.

Chef Greg first roasted the squash. He cut it in half, removed the seeds, salted and peppered the halves, and placed them cut-side down so they retained moisture and didn’t dry out. Then, he pushed the squash through a piece of 1/4-inch by 1/4-inch screen. The meat fell through the holes of the screen and the skin was left to discard. Pretty slick.

Next, Greg took the squash and mixed it with an egg yolk, a little bit of oil, salt and pepper and some herbs. He stirred the mixture together and then added in about two handfuls of flour to the squash.

Greg used a small pastry scraper, a hand-held piece of plastic used to cut through dough, to blend in the flour with the squash. He did this to keep the squash meat light and airy.

Greg let the dough rest for about 10 minutes. The dough is so soft he showed me how he can sink his finger into it. While resting, Greg brought some salted water to boil on a stove nearby. He cut off a piece of dough and rolled it and slightly stretched it in plenty of flour. Then, he cut the roll into small pieces. Greg rolled each small piece of dough up and down a small wooden gnocchi board. These little wooden grooved boards create ridges in the dough to help trap and hold sauce. A gnocchi board only costs a few dollars.

Greg dropped a handful of gnocchi into a pot of simmering water lined with a strainer. When the gnocchi surfaced, he dropped them into a small saucepan lined with olive oil. Greg sautéed the gnocchi for several minutes until each was crispy and brown on the outer edge.

To serve his red kuri squash gnocchi, Greg made a sauce from parsnips: simply slice peeled parsnips and cook them in vegetable stock and a small amount of cream. Puree the mixture and the sauce is done. A smear of sauce down onto the plate, a few pieces of prosciutto, a few shaves of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, and a sprinkling of herbs finished my dosha-approved dish.

This week, looking at pumpkins everywhere reminded me of it. I took a spin around the Internet and saw that our recipe is still alive and well out there, in some unusual places but with few variations on that old original formula. The old pumpkin cake recipe called for using shortening as the fat component to the cake. Someone asked me what the difference was between using shortening, butter, or oil in cakes.

Making a cake is pure chemistry and a cake recipe is a chemical equation. To answer the question properly, I felt I needed a few good resources. I looked to two go-to books on my shelf. First was my ragged and stained copy of “The Cake Bible” by Rose Levy Beranbaum. The second was “Cookwise: The Hows and Whys of Successful Cooking with over 230 Great-Tasting Recipes” by Shirley O. Corriher. Both books are fantastic for explaining the complicated components of basic cake making, as well as other things.

The original pumpkin cake in a jar recipe called for shortening and sugar creamed together, and then eggs and pumpkin beaten in. Next, the dry ingredients (all-purpose flour, baking powder, baking soda, and spices) were added to the wet ingredients. Those are the basic characteristics of a category of cakes called “shortened” or “butter” cakes.

I learned that shortening, butter, and oil can be used virtually interchangeably in cake recipes.  The big difference is in aeration. Shortening by nature creates fluffier cakes and cookies. It doesn’t have the same negative health connotations these days as it did when it was loaded with trans-fats. Since 2007, most shortening has been reformulated to be trans-fat free. When shortening is used in baking cakes, it creates a light and airy product. One problem with using shortening is it doesn’t add any flavor. But, if you use it in flavor-dense cakes (like a pumpkin cake), the end result is positive. Bottom line: beat cake batter for longer to aerate it more when using oil or butter.

I decided to make two styles of pumpkin cake: our old recipe using shortening and all-purpose flour and another using oil and cake flour. I used a recipe from Rose Levy Beranbaum’s book for inspiration. In her pumpkin cake recipe, she used cake flour instead of all-purpose flour.

Cake flour has much lower protein content than all-purpose flour and changing this will help to make a more tender cake. Cake flour is chlorinated so it is slightly acidic compared to all-purpose flour. There are some advantages to that. The acidity enhances the flour’s ability to absorb water and fat sticks to chlorinated flour better, and that all means a finer texture to the cake.

If you prefer to use fresh pumpkin rather than canned pureed pumpkin, you’ll need to do some extra work to get the texture nice and smooth. Basically, roast cut-up pieces of pumpkin in the oven for about one hour or until the flesh is tender, scrape off the meat, and run it through a food mill. I have a nice, sturdy hand-operated food mill that I love for getting textures smooth.

The cake made with shortening was lighter and fluffier, for sure. The cake made with oil was a little denser and more pound cake like with a nice walnut oil flavor. I asked every person in my office which they preferred — the answer was split, equally down the middle.

Here are both recipes. Give one or both a try. Perhaps serve these little cakes with a chocolate sauce or a dollop of ice cream. You can screw the canning jar tops on, wrap with ribbon and they make nice gifts.

I was driving down Lake Otis Parkway in Anchorage a few days ago and there was a young male moose gliding down the centerline of the road, just like he belonged there. Traffic was respectful and several people had stopped to get a shot of the moose with their cameras on their phones — another moose photo added to the collection.

From the viewpoint of an outsider looking in, it might seem we’re obsessive about moose in Alaska. We have moose key chains and wind chimes. We have moose T-shirts and notepads. We have ice cream stores, bed and breakfasts, bars and doormats all emblazoned with moose imagery. And of course, we have moose in our freezers.

My friend Chris came over yesterday and brought a gift of moose roast meat and some ground meat as well. I’m in an enviable position to often receive gifts of meat from friends. Ptarmigan, buffalo, caribou, sheep, reindeer, ducks, moose, bear, Spruce grouse, and goat have all graced my table as offerings to my kitchen. We aren’t a hunting family anymore now that our children are grown so having friends who hunt for food and share their bounty works out nicely.

Oddly, moments before Chris came over, there was a moose in my yard looking for a few straggling apples lingering on high branches. I grabbed my camera and took a few images, of course. And even though we are talking about cooking here, I am including my gratuitous moose photo.

Irony noted: for the roast meat Chris gave me, I decided to make moose with apples. I made moose ravioli with caramelized onion, sage and apple cider. I knew I had some great Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese from Italy in the fridge and I have some nice wide bowls that ravioli look beautiful in, so I was all set.

The most common way I cook moose meat that isn’t ground is to braise it slowly in liquid to tenderize the meat. I seared off the meat in a hot pan with a little oil. First, I trimmed the meat carefully of any fat or silver skin (that tough band of sinew that follows along some muscle groups). I think this helps with flavor and some of that characteristic gaminess in moose can be found in the fat. I washed the meat and patted it completely dry with a kitchen towel. I salted and peppered the moose pretty well. I seared the meat in the hot pan on both sides, removed the meat, and set it aside.

I added carrots, celery and onion into the pan (my pan is deep with high sides that can accommodate a lot of liquid) and I cooked these down a little bit. I put the meat back into the pan and I covered the whole lot with a liquid mixture of two-thirds beef stock and one-third apple cider. I covered the pan with a lid, turned it down to a low simmer, and cooked it for several hours until the meat was tender. Exactly how long this process takes may depend on the toughness of your moose meat, but it is usually a couple of hours.

Next, I removed the meat and shredded it into a medium bowl. I added in a handful of cheese, some sautéed mushrooms, an egg yolk, some slow-simmered onions, a few garlic, and chives from my garden (the only thing remaining in the garden at this point).

I made some homemade pasta (the same recipe I used in a blog on June 18 of this year). For this particular batch, I chopped up a little sage and added it to the dough. I rolled it out paper-thin, dropped about a teaspoon of moose filling onto one sheet of thin dough in two-inch intervals, and laid the other sheet of dough on top.  I trimmed and pressed the dough into medium-sized ravioli. I dropped my ravioli into just barely simmering water and cooked them ever so briefly. I laid them into my nice wide bowls and drizzled over a little brown butter and sage. The moose filling, however, could be used just as successfully with store-bought sheets of wide pasta as a sauce rather than a filling.

I always work hard to honor and respect the food I receive from the wild, to never waste anything, or take it for granted. I feel in some way it’s the least I can do.

“Fancy Pantry” was something of a touchstone for me when it first published. My daughters were just babies, I wore my hair in long braids, and we lived at a remote fishing lodge in Southcentral Alaska. I was making the effort to garden and preserve things in a much more vigorous subsistence style than I do these days.  Mrs. Witty’s book introduced me to potted meats, homemade cheese, chutneys and relishes. So many recipes in this collection are still great today. That’s a sign of a good cookbook.

I’ve decided to re-introduce some of the “Fancy Pantry”” recipes into my fall repertoire. Today, I am starting with a recipe for potted mushrooms. If you have never tried a thick spread of rich mushroom paste over a piece of crunchy toast, you should give this a try.

First of all, I bought a variety of fresh and dried mushrooms. I found fresh brown mushrooms, white mushrooms and shitakes for a good price. I bought a mixture of dried mushrooms that added a nice variety to my collection.

I removed the stems from the shitake but left the stems on the brown mushrooms. The whites were so big, I snapped off the bottom part of the stems that were too thick.

Next, I soaked the dried mushrooms in warm water until they were soft, about fifteen minutes. I pureed the fresh and rehydrated mushrooms in a food processor, added in minced shallot, some garlic and salt. I added in a bay leaf, some cayenne pepper, and a splash of Madeira wine and pureed the mushrooms a little bit more.

I spooned the mushrooms into two small ramekins (small heat-proof round cups) that fit inside a loaf pan. I covered the ramekins individually with aluminum foil so water wouldn’t condense onto the top of the mushrooms. I added a little water to the loaf pan to make a water-bath. This prevents the mushrooms from scorching or burning on the bottom. I used another loaf pan to act as a lid. I cooked the mushrooms in a 300-degree oven for two and a half hours. From there, I deviated from the “Fancy Pantry” recipe, which recommends stirring a large amount of butter into the mushrooms to create a more buttery paste. I prefer the mushrooms just as they are.

As I was spreading my mushroom paste over a piece of toast, my daughter Mandy walked into the kitchen.

“You should make Mushroom Conserva. It’s so good,” Mandy said.

She told me she made it often when she worked at a restaurant in Napa called Ad Hoc. I had plenty of mushrooms left so we heated up some good quality oil, added in herbs and paprika, and brought the oil up to 170 degrees. We dumped in about 2 pounds of mushrooms and waited until the oil heated up to 170 degrees again. Then we turned off the heat and added in some sherry vinegar, salt and pepper.

This recipe definitely has a Spanish vibe. By the way, a trick I learned in Spain for sherry vinegar (which can be very expensive) is to combine sherry wine and white vinegar together to create your own blend. It’s more affordable that way.

Here’s a YouTube video of Chef Thomas Keller preparing this recipe if you are interested. You can also check out the Ad Hoc At Home cookbook.

All in all, I had a nice day in the kitchen – one old recipe to remember and one new one to try.

Gardening, farming, and farmer’s markets are all beginning to wind down for the season. I took advantage of a little free time this week to peruse late-summer open market offerings. Bushels of beets and cabbages caught my eye, and as I stood in line to buy my bounty, I realized I wasn’t dressed quite warm enough. I felt cold for the first time in months. With beets, cabbage, carrots, and potatoes in hand, I had most of the makings for a hearty and warming fall soup.

Borscht, the iconic Russian beet soup, seems to be one of those personal family recipes that people have strong opinions about. It wasn’t a part of my family food heritage so I don’t have any grandmother memories of beet soup simmering on the stove.  But, since I’ve lived now in Alaska for nearly all of my adult life, beets have become a big part of my children’s food memories. We make beet cake, roasted, salted and buttered beets served in a big bowl in the winter, pickled beets, even beet chips as snacks. It’s a vegetable that grows well here.

Borscht has been documented in culinary literature since medieval times. Although perhaps we think of borscht as a Russian or Jewish soup, it’s widely accepted to be Ukrainian in origin. It has become an important family staple for diverse cultures and ethnic groups around the world. There are as many variations of borscht as there are kitchens it is found in. Almost all recipes include beets, cabbage and beef stock. The rest is open to interpretation. Onions, apples, beans, carrots, the spice coriander, a soup comprised mostly of broth, a soup made up mostly of chunky vegetables, a soup loaded with meats and garlic — these are all variations that are perfectly acceptable as far as tradition goes. Also, how many beets you put into the soup can be adjusted according to the beet lovers at your table.

For my soup, I first wrapped unpeeled beets into aluminum foil. I baked them for one hour at 375 degrees. I have found over the years that this is the easiest way to cook beets, no matter what their end purpose might be. Keeping beets unpeeled beforehand eliminates bleeding. I used deep ruby-red beets for my soup but golden beets are in the market now also. Golden beets are beloved by chefs because they taste just like other beets but they don’t bleed red all over a dinner plate.

Next, I used a beef stock I already had prepared. I know if I had a Ukrainian grandma, she would start the recipe out with a knuckle of beef to make the stock. But, I heated my prepared stock to a boil and added in a handful of small garden potatoes from the market. I prefer small potatoes in almost any kind of cooking, and Alaska Red “B” (the letter B indicates the size) is the potato used most often in my kitchen. I dropped in some chopped tomatoes.

As the potatoes and tomatoes simmered in the beef broth, I chopped up and sautéed some carrots, onion, shredded cabbage, and green pepper. I wonder what a Ukrainian granny would say if I told her one green bell pepper cost me $2 in Alaska. I am sure she’d probably say to leave it out. These all went into the soup.

I took the beets out of the oven and rubbed the skin off with a small kitchen towel. I have a dedicated “OK to stain” towel I keep for this job. I diced up the beets and mixed them with some fresh-squeezed lemon juice. I added the beets and lemon juice into the soup.  The color of the soup turned deep claret. The color of the soup is almost as luxurious and warming as the soup itself. The lemons brighten the flavor and they help keep that red beet color of the soup.

I added in a small handful of diced dried prunes. That’s the first time for me to include prunes into a savory soup but I like the idea. The prunes add a little sweetness without adding sugar.

I decided not to add in any beef or ham into my borscht. I think I have a friend with some moose meat hanging in his garage. Perhaps I’ll ask for some and make my soup a true Alaska version of borscht. Why not?

Leaving Alaska is always complicated for me. I love to travel, learn new things, and meet new people – but I am always reluctant to leave my home. Last week, I was invited to cook on the “Today” show in New York City, which of course just doesn’t come along every day. So, despite my last-minute yearnings to finish covering the garden with leaves and straw, make sure the roses I bought in pots this summer were safely in the ground and ready for the long winter, and the honey bees were doing OK, I packed my suitcase and headed for New York.

A flurry of emails from and to Deb, a “Today” show food stylist, crafted a reasonable and organized battle plan. Thinking of an iconic recipe that might express my cuisine and the soul of the food of Alaska is not an easy choice. There’s too much to say. In the end, I decided to go with something I know well. I settled upon Alaska king crab beignets — small, deep-fried fritters.  We’re heading in to crab season and guests at my lodge always love this recipe so it was a good choice.

I have learned from past experience to always bring along my own fish when I travel for culinary events. Picked crabmeat to someone in New York City can be a very different thing than picked crabmeat to an Alaskan. With the help of the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute, I tracked down a whole king crab from the Bering Sea to bring along and be the star of the show.

My beautiful king crab and an arsenal of crab legs left for New York City on Monday morning. They arrived on Tuesday and I arrived on Wednesday.

On Thursday, we headed to rehearsal. We picked out bowls and platters and pots from a literal warehouse of choices. Large rolling shelves opened to display shelf after shelf of any kind of kitchen prop that might ever be needed. We laid out the dishes and a strategy for the segment.

“Four minutes and 30 seconds is what you have for air time”, Aysha, the producer tells me. “That’s really great. Most chefs only get only about two minutes.”

We practiced our demo and it timed out at four minutes exactly. I was feeling pretty snug and comfy.

On Friday, I got up at 6:30 in the morning. Mandy made some coffee in our hotel room and we sat on the edge of my bed.

“Just don’t screw up”, she offered as advice.

We did a practice run with each other in the hotel room, Mandy acting like the host. When Mandy’s telephone timer started, my brain disconnected and took over in some kind of autopilot way.

“So then, take the shell out of the crabmeat”, I say. Mandy looked worried.

We walked to the “Today” entrance. The street was jammed with people holding signs and babies. We pushed through the door and the security guard already knew who we were. He showed a co-worker a cellphone photo of Charlie Sheen he had just taken. Inside the inner workings of the “Today” show, there are shoes and jackets and other clothes hanging everywhere. We weaved our way up a narrow set of stairs to the kitchen studio and it was transformed into a real kitchen. The ovens were on and at the right temperature. Herbs and squash and every ingredient I asked for had appeared and were in place. People bustled around and arranged or cleaned. I opened a crammed drawer full of utensils and pulled out a wooden spoon for the demo.

I went down to the make-up area and green room. It was filled with people getting ready to go on air, all in various stages of conversation with each other. I was transformed from a granny-bun and no-makeup chef from Alaska to someone who looked a little bit more put together. Adam Rapoport came by and chatted with me. He is the new editor-in-chief for Bon Appétit magazine.

I walked up the stairs back to the kitchen and passed Jenna Bush along the way. She smiled and said hello.  The off-camera area of the kitchen studio was jammed with people – cameramen, producers, others with coffee cups. I stood at my spot near the King crab. He (or she) was looking fantastic. My knees were beginning to shake just a little. One minute before going live, the Today Show hosts, Savannah Guthrie and Natalie Morales, came in. They smiled warmly and reassured me everything would be just fine. Forty seconds to go and I took a deep breath. And then, we were live.

It was a blur through the recipe and somehow our segment had been shortened to only two and a half minutes. It might have been nice to know ahead of time, but as Natalie said, “Hey, it’s live TV.”

After the segment, the camera crew descended on the beignets and they disappeared. The hairdresser came up to try one. The crab legs vanished. I felt happy to have been able to share my crab with all of these people. I felt happy to honor Alaska commercial fishermen. Phew. It was over.

We had to catch a plane back right away to Alaska. We have late fall guests at Tutka Bay Lodge and I wanted to be there to cook for them. I want to take them to see my crab pot up the bay. In the Newark airport, a lady walked up to Mandy and me. “Were you on the Today Show this morning?” she asked. We said yes. “It was way too short. They should have given you more time,” she said.

Kirsten prepared Alaska king crab beignets when she appeared on NBC’s TODAY show.

Variations for baked gougère and poached dumplings are included below.

It’s been kind of a rough summer for my tomatoes. They were started in Palmer, brought to Anchorage, driven to Homer in a hot van, took a breezy boat ride over to my lodge, and then they were transplanted into large tubs in the greenhouse. Just as they are coming into their full potential, the first fall frost is knocking at the door.

There’s always a little wager I make this time of year with my garden. Do I throw in the towel now and call it good, or do I try to eke out a few more weeks of gardening through cajoling and the use of plastic row-cover? Some autumns, we can have that beautiful golden rebound after the first light frosts and keep going for a while. This fall, I am thinking not. I’ll wrap things up this week.

I’ll pick all the tomatoes while they are still green, before any frost can damage them, and use them in sauté dishes or chopped on top of eggs in the morning. Cookbook author Paula Deen came to visit me last summer. As she might describe herself, she was a hoot. She loved fishing off the dock for greenling, cod, and little halibut and scouring the low tides for sea stars and other aquatic treasures. She makes a sweet green tomato pie with raisins and nutmeg I want to try. And, I have an idea for a savory Southern rendition of a tartine, a kind of French open-faced sandwich, with green tomato smothered in herbs and soft cheese.

What I do with the tomatoes picked today, however, is make a green tomato salsa. I start by pan-roasting a couple of serrano peppers and a few cloves of garlic, unpeeled, in a dry pan. It takes about 10 minutes to get the peppers and garlic soft. Serranos are a good choice for me because they are hot peppers but not the hottest. Two peppers are just about right for my recipe.

I add in a large handful of chopped green tomato. As the tomatoes begin to heat and caramelize, they exude moisture that makes them glisten. The kitchen is filled with the smell of chilies and garlic. I squeeze the garlic pulp out from the peel and pull the stems from the chilies.

I pour the contents of my pan into a blender and give it a few spins, then into a bowl. I add a little salt and diced onion. To cut the sharp raw flavor, I rinse the minced onion well under cold water first and shake off any moisture.  The juice of a lime and a handful of cilantro add that acidic green note I love. I want to make fish tacos with my newly crafted salsa but we only have some smoked pink salmon in the kitchen that looks, well, kind of pale. I go for a chicken taco instead.

I heat a few small corn tortillas, stuff them with an herby collection of greens dressed in more lime and salt, add in a few julienned red peppers and green onion, and the strips of chicken breast. The salsa is spread over everything.

I realize an entire summer’s effort has gone into my little tacos. They are delicious.

Blackcurrant bushes will be productive for decades, and if they survive in my garden, I bet they will grow in most places in Alaska. Blackcurrants are one of those berries that can be expensive to purchase in stores but easy to grow.  The taste (and smell) of blackcurrants is complicated to describe. I think of a blackcurrant as tasting like a cross between an overripe grape and an under ripe raspberry. The smell is deep and dark, kind of like cabernet wine.

My favorite uses for blackcurrants are perhaps with savory dishes. I like to add blackcurrants to rich beef stock and a little bit of butter to make a delicious sauce to accompany meats, particularly pork.  A heavy hand of blackcurrants, mint, and summer greens make an interesting salad. I like to spread creamed smoked salmon onto a toast point and top with just a dollop of black currant preserves.

To make a simple and sweet blackcurrant sauce, heat about 4 cups of currants in a small saucepan. Add in two cups of sugar or honey and mash the mixture up with the back of a wooden spoon until the mixture is thickened, about 10 minutes or so. This is good poured over vanilla or chocolate ice cream, either hot or cold. I don’t think it needs to be strained, but you can do so if you don’t want any seed bits included.

Some flavor combinations that go well with blackcurrant are cinnamon, nutmeg, dark chocolate, vanilla, clove, cardamom, and chili.

This week, I decided to make a rich chocolate brownie using black currants from the garden and a drizzle of crème de cassis added for flavor. Cassis is the French term for blackcurrant. Crème de cassis, or blackcurrant liqueur, is a luxurious ingredient both to drink and to cook with.

Brownie recipes can be oddly tricky in finding a good one. Some people like cake-like brownies and others like fudgy truffle-like brownies. I’m a cake-like person. Mandy, my baking assistant, is a fudge-like person. We settled on a recipe we found in a Donna Hay magazine (a beautifully photographed Australian cooking magazine we buy occasionally). We used half the butter the original recipe called for and added in our own black currants and crème de cassis. The results — a cake-like and fudgy brownie we are both happy with.

It’s nearly last call for any berry picking in Alaska. All our blueberries and currants are picked and in. We might have a week or more of finding cranberry and red currant bushes hidden along our walks through the woods. All the work we put into berry picking now will make the long winter ahead a little sweeter.

This time of year, there are always big displays of canning jars on grocery shelves and I wonder where all those hundreds of glass jars end up. I suppose a heavy dose of canning goes towards fish preservation, but in all of our garden enthusiasm, I’m sure I’m not the only one who plants way too much zucchini and cabbage.

I’ve had a fascination with preserving ever since I moved to rural Alaska. Over the years, through trial and error, I’ve realized what is realistic for my family. Big jumbo jars of pickled carrots stall and linger on the pantry shelf while jams and jellies disappear before the winter is over. I’ve decided to keep pickled things to small, four-ounce canning jars and use them as dollops of intense flavor on appetizers and more like condiments instead of main-course additions.

So, for my farmer’s market indulgence, I decided to make a couple of different condiments. The first was a little carrot and ginger pickle with coriander seeds and rice wine vinegar — which gave the mixture a bit of an Asian vibe. I am going to serve this on top of a salmon dish. Next, I prepared black currant and beet pickles using deep red and yellow beets as well as Chioggia beets (those pretty pink-and-white striped). This will go onto a toast point spread with goat cheese.

At its core, pickling vegetables is a simple process. Decide if you want the pickle to be firm and crunchy, or to have a softer texture. For my carrots, for example, I put the carrots and spices into a small clean glass jar and poured the hot pickling liquid over the vegetables. For the beets, I actually blanched them in the hot liquid for about five minutes before adding them to the jars.

The pickling liquid I usually concoct is a mixture of apple cider vinegar, sugar, mustard seed, black peppercorns, cloves, fennel seeds, and bay leaves. But this is completely negotiable. You could add in cardamom, coriander, or other aromatics as you like. Sometimes I throw in a small cinnamon stick into my pickling liquid.

While I was at it, I decided to try my hand at pickling bull kelp (also called bull whip kelp). My entire cove was loaded with freshly-washed-ashore kelp from some big storm out in the ocean. I selected a young stalk (the advice is if the bull kelp snaps when bent, it is still young enough to make a pickle). I washed the kelp in cold water, sliced it into thin rings, and dropped it into the pickling mixture. Kelp pickles are interesting atop any kind of seafood dish but I am going to mince the kelp pickle fine and add it onto a barbecued shrimp cake.

Here’s my recipe for pickling liquid. Add vegetables, fruits, and spices as desired. There is good canning and preserving information online for sealing jars properly in a hot water bath for long-term storage.  Pickled vegetables will keep about one week, covered and refrigerated, without sealing the jars.

The world has changed, and certainly learning about cuisine has changed. As an example, I’m currently fascinated with all things related to Indian food. Recently, I happened to tune in to a public radio station and caught an interview on curry with chef educator Raghavan Iyer. He is the author of a book entitled “660 Curries,” published by Workman Publishing Company. As soon as the program ended, I hopped onto a website and ordered his book. In about three days, it arrived at my remote lodge 200 miles down the Iditarod Trail. Another example of how the world has changed that seems pretty amazing.

Curry is a staff and guest favorite at the lodge. We buy coconut milk by the case and it is now a permanent staple on the pantry shelf (for what it’s worth, I’ve recently discovered organic coconut milk). I learned from Iyer’s book to never buy those small pre-blended spice bottles found in the grocery store labeled “curry”. These are too bland and generic to offer correct flavors. I also learned from him that any spice can really be used in multiple ways, offering different flavor notes: spices can be prepared whole or ground, toasted in a dry pan, cooked in oil, or used in a raw form, all of which changes the flavor and texture of the spice. Armed with a small electric spice grinder (which is really just an inexpensive coffee grinder designated for spices only), I dove into Iyer’s 800-plus-page tome.

It seems, at a glance, that most Indian curries have a few similarities. Curry is loosely defined as any dish that is covered in a sauce or gravy that is rich in spices and herbs. Turmeric, cumin and coriander seem to make frequent guest appearances as well as ginger, garlic and red onion in most Indian-style curries.

One disadvantage of perusing a book with 660 curry recipes was that I couldn’t make up my mind which to try first. Today, in the end, I just kind of jumped in and concocted a curry dish that seemed to work with what was going on in the kitchen at the time, using Iyer’s basic principles.

I had a nice bright silver salmon in the fridge. I filleted the salmon and removed the skin. Next, I grated (I just used a regular old box grater) a tomato and a red onion. I put these into a medium saucepan over medium heat and stirred until the moisture was released and evaporated from both the tomato and the onion. This technique concentrates flavor. I added in some grated ginger, turmeric, cumin, coriander, fennel seeds, paprika, and cayenne pepper. I cooked the spices until they were fragrant, which took just a few minutes. Then, I added in some fresh lemon juice. After a moment, I added in a bit of canola oil and kind of fried the spices in the oil. Finally, I added in coconut milk. The whole operation went pretty quickly. It seems to me a perfect fast food dish.

When the curry was well blended, I dropped small cubes of that silver salmon into the just-simmering sauce. The salmon poached in the sauce almost instantly. I decided to serve my curried salmon as an appetizer on small rice cakes –seasoned cooked rice pressed into a sheet pan and chilled, cut out into small rounds. They were a big hit.

A few of the recipes that sound interesting to me in Iyer’s collection that I hope to try soon are lentil dumplings, minty coconut chicken strips, tea and ginger simmered chickpeas, hot chili dumplings with buttermilk, and there’s a saffron-rose sauce I just have to try.

Here’s my version of the salmon curry I made today. I hope I haven’t offended any regional culinary sensibilities by creating my own 661st curry combination. If I weren’t making this as an appetizer, I’d add in just a little chicken stock to loosen the curry sauce a bit.

When Elizabeth sent an email and asked that we have a Japanese omelette pan on hand (called a tamago yaki nabé) we looked in several Asian and other ethnic markets in Anchorage. Having no luck, we finally ordered our pans online and they arrived in just a few days.

The pans we bought are smallish rectangle nonstick pans with wooden handles. They cost about $20 each.  Japanese omelette pans come in a variety of sizes and surface finishes but ours are about 4-inch by 7-inch and we’re pretty happy with that. We learned that next purchase, if we find a pan that has a slight sloped edge on the far side, it might facilitate turning the omelette over. If we wanted to graduate to a restaurant-style pan, we might select a heftier 6-inch by 10-inch size.

Elizabeth first showed us how to wipe the pan with a small piece of paper towel saturated in high-heat cooking oil. Too much oil in the pan will ruin the omelette and not enough oil will allow the egg to stick. We were cooking over small Japanese-style butane stoves (which I find incredibly useful for everything — from culinary demos to appetizers on the deck).

Elizabeth instructed us to pick out the chalaza (the rope-like strand that anchors the yolk to the whites) from the egg so it doesn’t create a streak or any unevenness in the egg. We picked out these tiny white blobs with chopsticks — good practice for what was to come.

We thinned the eggs with a little sea stock we had made earlier in class. Sea stock is made with a big chunk of kombu, or kelp, about a quart of water, and a handful of bonito flakes. We put our sea stock into quart sized canning jars, which seems pretty handy to store. Sea stock (or dashi) can be used to season almost anything. Elizabeth explained that our egg mixture could be thinned with a little sake also.  We added a bit of salt and sugar (We learned that Tokyo-style omelettes have more sugar added than Osaka-style omelettes).  Elizabeth strains her egg mixture and mixes it well but she is careful to not add in too much air, which will create unwanted bubbles.

We tested our omelette pan to make sure it was hot enough by drizzling in a few drops of egg from the end of a chopstick. The pan needs to be nice and hot or the egg will stick.

Next, we poured in the egg mixture. For my sized pan, it was about ¼-cup of egg. We tilted the pan back and forth to spread the egg over the pan surface. Then, we set the pan over the flame until the egg shrunk away from the sides of the pan slightly. Off-heat, Elizabeth showed us how to use a chopstick to release the edges of the egg around the pan. She twirled and twisted the chopstick underneath the omelette to lift up the egg completely out of the pan. The omelette was placed gently back into the pan on the other side. Flipping a Japanese thin omelette with a single chopstick will take me a little time to master but I am determined to keep trying.  The omelette cooks on its flipped side just briefly to dry out, about 30 seconds, and then it is flipped out onto a clean, dry surface.

The paper-thin omelettes can be sliced into thin shreds and sprinkled over sushi rice, or used as wrappers around delicious fillings such as smoked fish and seaweed.

We made a thicker-rolled omelette that was prepared the same way but the egg was pushed to the back of the pan and another 1/4-cup of egg mixture was poured in, with that process repeated about four times. We added a sheet of seaweed to make a layered effect in our rolled omelette.

Omelettes in Japan are usually served room temperature. The thin omelettes will last for about five days in the refrigerator.

To learn more about the cuisine and teachings of Elizabeth Andoh, visit her website at www.washokucooking.com.

Heath loves to cook and through the positive ability to connect with family and friends through social media, I’ve been following his adventures from afar.

Heath wrote me last week, looking for a new recipe to try.

He said: “There’s a small Italian PX here that has several cheeses, meats and wines. I also have 4 pounds of Danish butter in my fridge. I have a decent selection of herbs and garlic. I have only a little bit of all-purpose flour.  I have time for baking. It is much better than the food in the chow halls.”

In his small living space, Heath has a little convection oven, a crockpot, and a Dutch oven to work with.

The image I had in my head of a kid from Alaska shopping in an Italian store in the middle of Afghanistan swirled around for a day or two. I settled on the idea of a recipe we’ve been using all summer in our cooking classes. It’s an Italian-style olive oil cake. Olive oil replaces butter in a traditional cake and lemon brightens it up. It’s a nice soft cake that accommodates a variety of fruits and sauces to accompany it. I recommended that Heath consider a chocolate sauce.

Heath wrote back, “I’ll check to see if Mohammad can get me a lemon. I can get great chocolate for a sauce at the European PX”.

Now, I am imagining quaint French dinners spilling out from Heath’s little convection oven.

Here is the recipe I sent to him. It is adapted from an old issue of Gourmet magazine and we’ve been using it for years. If you have any extra batter left over, which can happen with varying sizes of loaf pans, put it into a muffin tin and make a few cupcakes.

Heath sent along images of his baking project. He had to grate the lemon with a pocketknife and he had to whip the egg whites with a fork. But, in the end his cake looks pretty good.  He’s looking for other creative recipes.

Hey, Heath – The blueberries are just about ripe here in Alaska. We’ll pick some for you and save them for when you get home.

Raw foods haven’t sounded so appealing to me. In my mind I have thought of soaked cashews pureed into pudding or some other less appealing manipulation of perfectly grill-able foodstuff. There is nothing culinary I won’t try, however, and I want to learn more about this subject. I like the idea of living food. As it is, we all eat living food every day by way of fresh fruits, vegetables, and leafy greens (except Neil, a beloved employee of mine who only seems to eat burgers and fries). But, eating a totally raw diet seems a little radical and limiting to me. Who can live without popcorn?

People eat raw food for different reasons – politics, health, and the opinion that living enzymes in non-heated food may aid in digestion. There are arguments for and arguments against consuming raw food as a complete diet and I am far too busy with our incredible Alaska summer to contemplate much about that. I just want to try a few recipes and weave some of the best of what the raw food movement has to offer into my cuisine.

The recipe I selected to start with is a type of cracker made with nuts, seeds and herbs.

I had to have a food processor to puree up the nuts and herbs and a dehydrator to “cook” the crackers. Those are heavy investment items but I had the food processor already and I have wanted to get another dehydrator for berry picking season anyway, so it was easier to justify the purchase.

Basically, the recipe involved soaking raw flaxseed (which I have a new affinity for) for several hours until the seeds exuded a kind of viscous coating that I suspect binds the crackers together. I also soaked sun-dried tomatoes in a little water that softened the tomatoes.

Next, I pureed a variety of nuts, herbs, dried fruit, and seeds into the blender. I added in the soaked tomatoes and its water and threw in some salt. After the blending process, I added in the soaked and mostly drained flaxseed, some sea lettuce we had harvested at last low tide and dried in the sun, and a little bit of soy sauce and chili powder.

I spread the mixture out onto a nonstick sheet that came with my dehydrator. My batch of cracker dough made enough for six sheets of crackers placed over three layers of trays in the dehydrator.

I dried the crackers at 115 degrees for about six hours. They were still sticky but I could handle them enough to flip them over.  I left the dehydrator running overnight. In the morning, the first thing I did, like an excited kid, was to lift the lid of my dehydrator and peer at my sea crackers. I cut them into several different shapes – round and square.  I think they are delicious.

Overall, despite needing some specialty equipment, making raw crackers with nuts, seeds, and herbs is pretty easy. I tried another variation with sesame seeds and sunflowers that I didn’t grind up and I love the extra crunch this adds.

The variations of this recipe seem endless: dried fruit, coconut, different types of nuts and seeds. I think it will be a great cracker addition to our repertoire, raw or not. The following recipe is loosely based upon a flaxseed cracker recipe included in “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Eating Raw” by Mark Reinfeld, Bo Rinaldi, and Jennifer Murray.

We look for loons and swans on Marten Lake near the lodge

Skinny mommy needs to fatten up before the fall

This mommy and cub are just enjoying the sunshine on a rock near Fisher Falls

I bought way too much zucchini at the market — which is exactly what happens with a good summer garden harvest. Usually people start too many zucchini plants in the first place, because the seeds are so big and rewarding when they sprout. One plant – maybe two – is all a typical home garden needs. So I have somehow replicated a bumper crop and brought home a basketful of zucchini and yellow squash.

For the most part, in my kitchen, we use any summer squash interchangeably. Usually green zucchini (summer squash) holds up better to bumpy airplane rides and transport into the backcountry than yellow squash, but we use it all.

We have been making a Spanish ratatouille-like dish called samfaina all summer with squash, eggplant, onion, bell pepper, smoked paprika, and saffron that I could perhaps eat for every meal the rest of the year. In that dish, we grate fresh tomatoes with a hand grater into the pot of simmering vegetables and we add in a nice rich olive oil. We’ve been grilling zucchini, and slicing it raw into thin long strips with a vegetable peeler to wrap up smoked salmon mousse. I have a secret favorite zucchini dish I remember from my childhood — hollowed out zucchini filled with tomato-dense ground beef, spices and melted cheese.

When I flew home a cooler filled with ice packs, bubble-wrap, and zucchini on the airplane yesterday, Mandy looked at me a little sideways. She started grating zucchini for morning breakfast breads. Her commercial-kitchen zucchini bread recipe is this: 1 pound, 2-1/2 ounces all-purpose flour, 1/4-ounce baking powder, 1/4-ounce baking soda, 1/2-ounce salt, 1/2-ounce cinnamon, 1/2-ounce nutmeg, 12 ounces sugar, 12 ounces brown sugar, 12 ounces vegetable oil, 9 ounces egg, 1 pound, 2 ounces zucchini and 3-1/2 ounces whole wheat flour. Add in as many chopped pecans as you like. Mix the dry ingredients with the wet ingredients and bake as instructed below.

I like a little bit different style of zucchini bread. I am not a big cinnamon fan so I often exclude this in baking recipes. I love a little bit of sour cream, lemon and cardamom in zucchini bread, so here is my recipe. Maybe you can try both and see which you prefer. Add in a bit of chocolate, blueberries, dried cherries, pineapple and other interesting ingredients into your zucchini bread batter — it is adaptable.

When my dad was home, we went to open-air markets where old women bought birds just to set them free. We would eat green peanuts drenched in salt, and blood-red papayas were heaped into stacks everywhere. We’d walk along crowded streets peering into shops at silk cloth, teak furniture, and art.

One leisurely Sunday afternoon, we walked into an unadorned, heavily air-conditioned restaurant. It was a restaurant geared more for Thai local trade than for tourists. Each of the maybe fifty dining tables was covered in sensible protective plastic. On the table were the usual bowls of fermented fish sauce, hot sliced peppers floating in vinegar, sugar, and deep red chili powder. A bottle of Maggi sat on every table around the room. We were served an appetizer.

The appetizer was a big basket of shrimp toast – a simple dish of pureed shrimp, soy sauce, fresh coriander, sesame oil, and sesame seeds. The pureed shrimp was spread onto one side of a small toast triangle and deep-fried, perhaps in peanut oil. As we sat at the table and my parents chatted about more important things, I began to quietly work my way through the entire basket, squeezing some lime onto a shrimp toast, dipping another into a little chili oil or vinegar.

We left Thailand and returned to the States just in time for Janis Joplin and Angela Davis. The width of blue jean bottoms expanded and then contracted, hair got long and then short again, but the flavors of that shrimp toast always lingered in my memory.  After the war ended, slowly but steadily Thai restaurants began to dot the landscape. When visiting a new Thai restaurant, I always ordered the shrimp toast on the menu — I still do. I think it was that first exposure to the flavor combination of soy sauce and sesame oil — with just a splash of lime — that attracted me.

Last year I spent some time in Spain. While there, I developed a serious taste for pimenton, Spanish smoked paprika. What began as a spice curiosity has now become a kitchen essential for me. I put smoked paprika into salmon spreads and hot-smoked soups, egg dishes, and onto potatoes. Now, I’ve added it to my beloved shrimp toast recipe.

I’ve eliminated the basic Asian flavor profile of cilantro, soy, and sesame and updated it with Mediterranean flavors of olive oil, lemon zest, sea salt and pimenton. I added in green onion and flat-leaf parsley.  I prefer to sauté the shrimp toasts instead of deep-frying them. As always, I use Alaska seafood and, more specifically in this case, side-stripe shrimp just caught from Prince William Sound.  Following is the recipe for my updated Spanish shrimp toasts. They’ve been popular this summer as a snack at lunchtime and an appetizer before dinner.

We head off to Mike Nakada’s oyster farm. The working part of the farm is a series of rows of oyster cages, suspended mesh lanterns, submerged in the bay and marked by colorful buoys. There are so many oyster buoys here it looks like some beautiful futuristic art installation. Nakada’s operation consists of a series of floating platforms tied together along with several boats, large and small. A small platoon of “farmers” sort through a long tray of recently harvested oysters, picking off mussels and barnacles, dropping each oyster into a bucket designated by size.

Kachemak Bay oysters are so delicious in part because of the hand-harvested care they receive and, in part, by the cold clean water they live in. Oysters in Alaska don’t reproduce because the water is so cold. Although this might be labor-intensive for the oyster farmers to re-seed their stock constantly, the consequence results in plump meaty oysters that haven’t put any energy into reproducing. The cold waters of Kachemak Bay prevent bacterial invasion that might influence the quality of warm-water oysters.

I look through several grades of oysters and I actually decide on the less expensive “petit” size. The smaller size is perfect for our appetizers this afternoon out on the deck. Like any over-eager shopper, I buy more than I need. At home, I have an old lantern net that I can store my oyster supply right off the dock and keep the oysters healthy and alive in the cold ocean water. Of course, if you don’t have an ocean out your front door, you can keep oysters in the fridge for about a week as long as they stay nicely closed and smell like a fresh ocean breeze. Store oysters with their cups up so the liquid doesn’t leak out. They need to breathe, so don’t put them in plastic.

I decide today to make fried oysters. We almost always eat these beauties raw or lightly grilled but I have a hankering for something different. We try two different styles of batters: one is a flour and whipped egg white mixture that is more like tempura than breading. The other is a panko breadcrumb base. The result is delicious, crunchy oysters that we eat like popcorn as we watch our otter paddle around the cove.

Here’s how we made our fried oysters:

To make our first batter, we combined a half-cup of all-purpose flour with 1 whipped egg white, 3/4 cup water, a tablespoon of olive oil, all folded gently together in a bowl. We dried each oyster with a cloth towel (so the batter didn’t drip off), dipped the oysters into the batter, and fried them for a few minutes in a small pot of hot (350-degree) oil on the grill. We dropped a big handful of arugula into the oil to make a crispy, crunchy salad to go along with our oysters. We sprinkled the arugula with salt as it came out of the pot and drained it on a small mat of paper toweling.

On to the next batter — the panko bread crumb recipe, which definitely ups the crunch factor. We dusted the dried oysters lightly in cornstarch, dipped them into a small bowl of whisked whole egg, and rolled them in panko crumbs. Into our hot oil, out onto the towels, and a sprinkle of salt completed the process.  We added lemons and a spicy garlic sauce (with just a hint of Asian flavor) to our oyster platter. Both batters were delicious but I think I preferred the panko version over the tempura-style batter. Below is the recipe for the dipping sauce we used.

If I randomly flip through an old magazine — say, Cuisine Magazine from October of 1980, the first thing I notice is how shockingly outdated the food shots seem. A photo essay of a 1980 dinner party looks heavy and deep-fried by today’s clean and simple standards. All those cigarette and alcohol ads are a reminder of how far we have come. As I look through the magazine, some recipes — and even a few photos — hold their own. It’s proof that good design prevails, even in cooking.

One dish that was popularized in 1980 that can still hold its own is grilled pizza. Widely attributed to Johanne Killeen and George Germon, restaurateurs from Providence, Rhode Island, grilled pizza is as popular a novelty today as it was then.

When making grilled pizza, step one is to plan your toppings. I decided that for my pizza, I would grab what was already in the fridge. The recipe that follows makes dough enough for two pizzas, so I decide on two different styles. For one pizza, I’ll add smoked salmon, grilled apricots, red onions and goat cheese. For the other, I’ll combine prosciutto, tomatoes, and a buttery fat sheep’s cheese from Spain called Idiazábal.  Killeen and Germon favor pizza Margherita, which for them means a combination of garlic, fontina cheese, Pecorino Romano, basil and canned tomatoes.

To make a good pizza on an outdoor grill (versus an oven), start with a good olive oil you like. I say this because it seems to take quite a bit of oil to lube up the top and bottom of the dough and the barbecue grill itself.  I like to use fruity oil (like Mustapha’s Moroccan olive oil, a favorite of mine) rather than oil that is deep green and bitter like some Italian olive oils. Green oil burns easily.

Roll the dough out flat and thin, and don’t make a lip around the edge. The size of your pizza dough shouldn’t extend the width or length of your grill. One trick to making this whole thing work is to have a couple of areas on your grill that are variant in heat — a hot spot and a cooler spot. When one section of the grill is good and hot, drape the dough right onto the (well-oiled) grate so the dough will develop nice, crusty grill marks. Cook the dough over the fire for just a minute or so. It will puff up slightly.

Next, flip the dough over and move it to a cooler part of the grill to cook at a more moderate temperature. Brush the surface with olive oil. And, then it is back to the hot part of the grill, but keep the dough moving by turning it with a pair of tongs. This allows the dough to finish cooking without burning the bottom.  Add on those things you want to be hot and add later those things you want to be left on fresh.

Below is a variation on Killeen and Germon’s debut grilled pizza dough recipe. Over the years there have been variations made — a little sugar, a pinch of whole-wheat flour or rye flour –but there is always plenty of olive oil in the mix.

Remarkable summery things have already been happening: A pair of gulls has nested in a tree on an island in the middle of the lake at Winterlake Lodge. Whoever heard of that? A charm (that’s the name for a group) of hummingbirds descended upon our back deck at Tutka Bay Lodge and a few are still lingering on to delight us. A bear came up and kissed (really more like licked) our bear carving near the walkway at Redoubt Bay Lodge and an employee caught it on camera. Tiny wonders happen every day, all summer long.

Sockeye, and their annual return to my kitchen, is one particular summer wonder I look forward to each year. Sockeye are the only fish that feed like whales, with their gill rakers open as they swim along, feeding on small plankton. The carotene of small shrimp and krill in the sockeye diet give them that brilliant red color and particular flavor. All that hard work of swimming and eating at the same time, I suppose, gives them that nice firm flesh.

In my commercial kitchen, my stove doesn’t come equipped with a broiler but my friend Greg tells me that he always prefers to broil sockeye. He cooks fish with the skin on and skin-side-up under the broiler so the fat from the skin (and the grey fatty layer between skin and flesh) melts down and “bastes” the fish. It sounds like a good idea — it’s just too bad I don’t have a broiler.

We’ve been saving scraps and trim from filleting whole sockeye salmon to make burgers for our staff dinners. When we make burgers, we can scrape enough flesh from the backbone carcass of the fish with a spoon to add an extra burger or two. We don’t waste a thing. Take a look at the photo included in this article to see how much meat can be salvaged from a discarded salmon carcass. It really is remarkable.

When we make salmon burgers, we puree part of the salmon meat and cube another part of it. This textural variation makes a nice firm burger without having to add any egg or bread filler into the patty. We just add in herbs, seasonings and spices to give our burgers a little zing, shape them, and grill or sauté them. I like red onions, either pickled or grilled, with salmon. We’ve been using smoked paprika from Spain as a nice complement to salmon burgers lately. The lime and cilantro add a refreshing summer touch. We’ve had a little habit lately of making our own root chips and other vegetable crisps to serve with burgers. We’ve been sprinkling dried sea lettuce over our chips as a kind of salty accent.

Don’t forget to look out for those small wonders of summer.

A new chef has arrived in our kitchen and today he is conducting his first cooking class for our lodge guests. His name is Casey.

I hire six chefs to work in three different lodge kitchens for the summer. This year, Casey will leave behind urban life to cook Alaska cuisine from now until the first snowfall.  I like to see what creative dishes and new ideas my visiting summer chefs might bring to the table. Casey has been working for a famed California celebrity chef and he breezes through the homemade pasta demo. He’s done it a thousand times.

To make pasta dough, Casey starts by piling 2 cups of all-purpose flour onto the kitchen table. He makes a well into the center of the pile of flour and adds in 6 large egg yolks, 1 whole egg, 1 1/2 teaspoons of olive oil, 1 tablespoon of milk, and a pinch of salt. He mixes the dough with his hands and feels if it might be too dry. It all depends on the humidity of the kitchen, the age and style of flour being used, and other variables whether he’ll need to sprinkle in a little more milk. He finds it hard to explain what we should be feeling for. He does this by touch.

“Here, feel this, “ Casey says to one of the students. She feels the flour between her fingers and nods an understanding.

Casey kneads the dough once he can gather it into a ball. He pushes the dough with the heel of his hand, turns it slightly, folds the dough back onto itself and repeats the motion. When the dough is smooth, Casey stops kneading and lets the dough rest. He cuts it into manageable chunks and rolls each piece out with a rolling pin.

For the orecchiette, Casey uses a small metal cutter to punch out dime-sized disks from the sheet of rolled dough. He then shows his attentive students how to press their right thumb into the disks to make a little dimple. Everyone seems to talk at once as they cut and twist and pile up completed orecchiette onto a baking sheet sprinkled with cornmeal.

Next, Casey makes a wide, flat sheet of pasta he fills with herbs and flowers from our garden. He places another sheet of dough onto the top of it. He runs the pasta through the rollers of our pasta machine to “laminate”, or press together the dough.

We have an electric pasta machine in our kitchen. It’s not necessary, but if you make pasta on a regular basis, I recommend you at least consider the investment. Electric pasta machines are expensive but they are durable workhorses that should last a lifetime. There are several good quality hand-crank pasta models on the market. And, truth be told, many of the best pasta varieties can be done by hand (like our orecchiette).

Casey uses only all-purpose flour for his pasta but I like to use semolina flour – or perhaps a blend of semolina and all-purpose flour. It’s a personal preference and you can play around with flour mixtures as you like. A trick to making good pasta is to not add in too much liquid (Casey uses a touch of olive oil and milk — this is personal preference as well). If you add too much liquid, the tendency is to correct with more flour and you end up with tough, chewy dough.

Most chefs recommend letting fresh pasta dry out slightly, about an hour, before cooking it so it won’t break up in the simmering water. Drop the pasta gently into salted simmering water for just a few minutes. Fresh pasta cooks fast.

Casey saw a little black bear today out in the back of the lodge behind his cabin. He’s already been picking flowers from the garden to add to his desserts. By the end of the summer, I’m sure he’ll have lots of Alaskan adventures to tell.

We almost always serve two hot appetizers and a couple of cold items. The star of our collection, however, is the ever-present cheese board.  We serve our cheeses before dinner; not between the entrée and dessert, as I learned to do in France. There is a distinct advantage to this strategy: guests come in to the lodge from hiking and exploring and they are hungry. Their palates are receptive to different flavors and textures.

One small pleasure we have every year before summer gets started is that we get to sit down and select our seasonal collection of cheeses. We buy our cheese from a cheese shop in New York City and have it air-freighted in each week. We start by listening carefully to our cheesemonger’s recommendations, trying samples, and thinking about what works with our appetizer and wine list.

Classically, a cheese course represents at least three different cheeses, one of each type of milk (cow, sheep or goat).

Here are a few tips for setting out an interesting cheese board:

1. Choose a nice board to serve your cheese on. I like the newer style bamboo cutting boards for cheese service. They are perhaps too pretty and too soft to actually cut on, but perfect for serving food.
2. Bring cheese to room temperature before serving for best flavor.
3. Serve a separate small knife for each type of cheese (so one knife isn’t used on multiple cheeses).
4. Rather than organizing cheese by the classic three milk types, perhaps pick a theme for your cheese (that will compliment your other appetizers and wine selection as well). An example is serving only cheeses from Italy or a collection of all-American blue cheeses.
5. Don’t cut cheese into individual portions. Serve them in wedges or blocks.  That helps to increase the longevity of the cheese.
6. Cheese is a complex and ever-changing topic. Keep a small notebook and take notes (and photos) of cheeses you enjoy.

We make specialty fruit and nut breads daily to serve with our cheese. We also serve a small basket of plain baguettes or crackers for more complex selections. I trim a small branch from my black currant bushes along the trail and spread it down the middle of our cheese board to separate different cheeses.

I like to experiment and make condiments and preserves to go with the variety of cheeses, such as rhubarb chutney, pickled beets, or hot and spicy pickles.  A treasure every summer is the small amount of rose petal jam I can make from wild roses near the lodge.  One time, years ago, I tried to make nasturtium jam to go with our cheese board. That didn’t work out so well. The whole house filled with a bitter and spicy aroma for hours. The smell made everyone a little nauseous.  I can’t tolerate the smell of nasturtiums to this day.

A current favorite cheese I like to serve is Shropshire blue cheese from the UK. Shropshire blue is a cow’s-milk blue cheese made with vegetable rennet and annatto, a natural food coloring that adds a surprising orange color to the cheese. Shropshire blue has been called “Stilton colored with sunshine”. Serve Shropshire on a slice of chocolate walnut bread spread with a bit of rhubarb chutney.

Another favorite cheese of mine is the little pasteurized goat’s milk Chabichou from the Poitou region in France. This cheese goes perfectly with a small tray of fruit, particularly cherries, accompanied by a glass of sparkling wine.

Here is a recipe for rhubarb chutney that we use to accompany our cheese board. We make several variations on the rhubarb theme – sometimes we add green apple, fresh figs, cranberries or other fresh and dried fruits. We sometimes add beet juice to chutney to add a beautiful deep red color. We serve rhubarb chutney all year long. In the summer, I like to walk down the trail to the old trapper cabin at the end of my property and harvest rhubarb. It’s been growing in the same small abandoned plot planted by some long-ago gardener for over twenty years now.

I own three lodges in Southcentral Alaska and that seems a pretty complicated thing, time-management-wise.  But for all the hard work and tricky logistics, it comes down to the fact that I get to run three very different kitchens and cultivate three completely different gardens. Even though my lodges are only an hour apart from each other by airplane, the microclimates, elevation, soil, and other factors make the timing such that each garden progresses on a different schedule. It’s as if I can time-travel between micro-seasons all summer long.  One plant common to all three of my gardens is mint.

It seems like a cliché to bring up the miracle of spring, but really, how is it possible that a bed of mint can make it through all those months in the deeply frozen ground, lying dormant under so many feet of snow? The moment the snow melts, out come those dark and mysterious intensely green shoots reaching skywards. I am nearly certain that anyone in Alaska can successfully grow a bed of mint in the summertime.

At Winterlake Lodge, I have a small rocked-in pathway of mint in my garden so it won’t spread into other beds. The pathway curves and bends just a little and I imagine it to be shaped like a river. On one end is the chocolate-scented mint we combine with real-life chocolate and at the opposite is the orange mint delicious in sorbets. In-between are more pungent peppermint and spearmints that go into iced tea and savory dishes all summer long.

A favorite early spring and summer dish I like to make with mint is lemon and mint risotto. We make this dish sometimes for our guests, but we also serve it often to our hard-working lodge staff.

In Northern Italy, where I tend to spend any Italian-vacation time, Carnaroli rice is the go-to short grain superfine — a term used to define size of grain — rice of choice over the Arborio variety that has been more common here. Carnaroli, which was hybridized in the 1950s, is so popular in Italy because it is just slightly longer than Arborio,  has a greater starch content so it will hold its shape, and absorbs more liquid than Arborio. It’s all a subtle point when zooming into the kitchen from the garden to make a quick lunch for the crew, but it might be interesting for you to try different types of rice in making risotto.

Making a good risotto is not simply cooked rice with a bunch of stuff thrown in together. There is a method that must be fairly precisely followed. First, the rice is sautéed in butter (or butter and oil) and usually some onion. This has to be done gently or the grains will harden. Some kind of simmering liquid (chicken, vegetable, or fish stock, wine or a combination of those) is added in a little at a time, in about half to two-thirds-cup increments. Don’t add in more liquid until the rice has absorbed the previous. The rice should cook on even heat so the bottom grains don’t burn or become mushy and top ones are still uncooked. Right at the end, more butter and Parmesan cheese is almost always added. Risotto should be eaten as soon as it is ready.  In between, almost anything can be added to a good risotto. I am particular to lemon and asparagus in the springtime. Risotto can become a household dish that is dressed appropriately for different seasons: herbs and citrus in the springtime, rich salmon or halibut in the summer, and mushrooms in the fall.

The following is a favorite recipe for risotto that utilizes our mint from my gardens. Hopefully, by the end of the week, we’ll have all the beds planted and we can celebrate with a nice big platter of risotto.

• Rhubarb Honey Cake
• Mandy, our pastry chef prefers using vanilla paste in desserts rather than extract. The brand we use is Nielsen-Massey. This recipe is closely adapted from the Ad Hoc At Home cookbook by Thomas Keller. Ad Hoc is a restaurant in Yountville, California where Mandy used to work.
• For the pan schmear:
• 8 tablespoons unsalted butter, at room temperature
• 1 ½ tablespoons honey
• teaspoon dark rum (optional)
• 1 cup packed light brown sugar
• teaspoon pure vanilla extract (or vanilla paste if you have it)
• teaspoon salt
• 1 pound rhubarb, washed and cut into 1-inch slices
• pint strawberries, cleaned and sliced
• For the cake:
• 1 1/3 cups cake flour
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 8 tablespoons unsalted butter, at room temperature
• 1/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons granulated sugar
• cup honey
• teaspoon pure vanilla extract (or vanilla paste if you have it)
• 2 large eggs
• 1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon milk

I received a message in my inbox today from a restaurant asking me to please not contact them anymore.

For the past five years, I have been contacting a restaurant in Spain requesting a reservation for dinner for two. I have emailed about once every other month for the past five years, so that is perhaps 30 attempts at a dinner reservation.

I’m known to be persistent when trying to make dinner reservations. One time I telephoned every day as I travelled from the South of France to Paris in hopes of a reservation at restaurant Jöel Robuchon. The reservationist came to recognize my voice as I called in each day and we developed something of an over-the-phone friendship. “No, sorry Madame Dixon, not today”, she said regretfully. Finally, the reservationist answered and asked me excitedly, “Can you be here tomorrow?” I zoomed to Paris rapidement in my little rented Citroen.

Another time, I sat on my hotel bed in Barcelona for several days, peering into my laptop with a poor connection. I needed to log in using a username and password at exactly 10 o’clock in the morning New York City time for a reservation to the tiny twelve-seat Momofuku Ko restaurant.

Last year, I hired a stiletto-wearing taxi driver in Lake Garda, Italy who could work a cell phone, drive a hundred miles and hour, and negotiate for me a reservation to Dal Pescatore in Northern Italy.

These efforts have all been successful except my attempts at a reservation to El Bulli in Roses, Spain. I don’t feel so bad. I only had a 0.4% chance of obtaining one of the annual 8,000 available reservations. According to the restaurant, that means a purported 2 million people emailed El Bulli for reservations in 2010. The restaurant is closing this July to reinvent itself into a learning center, hence the email asking me to stop bothering them. In some ways, I’m relieved – no more hopeful emails followed by absent or disappointing responses. As far as my love affair with Spanish chefs, my new fascination is with female chef Carme Ruscalleda and her unique Catalan cuisine prepared in the small village of Sant Pol de Mer.

Why should I care about fine dining chefs in faraway places such as Spain or France? I don’t necessarily try to replicate their efforts in my tiny Alaska kitchen. They matter to me because I can learn from them and discover the possibilities within my own cuisine. I can look at Alaskan ingredients and think about them from a different perspective.

In reality, I don’t have to travel far for culinary inspiration. Here in my seaside kitchen, as I look out over Tutka Bay, I am reminded of the many remarkable chefs preparing world-class cuisine right here at home. Two of my favorite culinary destinations in Kachemak Bay are The Saltry Restaurant in Halibut Cove and Maura’s Cafe in Old Town Homer.

Try the Saltry Restaurant’s recipe for seviche. Watch for owner Marion Beck’s new cookbook coming out soon – and, don’t forget to make reservations.

Welcome back to Redoubt Bay

May 22′nd – It’s time to fly back in to the lodge this week with crew, groceries, and herbs to plant in the garden! We love the energy of a new summer season. The trees are beginning to bud and the grass is just turning green. It’s all just ahead of us – those endless summer days, bears swimming, diving, and teaching their babies how to fish.

Lodge managers Amy Smith and Adam Schoen are returning this year with a remarkable team and we are making preparations for our first guests arriving on May 31′st.

Housekeeper Dianne Smith worked in Antarctica this past year and she spent several weeks with us at Winterlake Lodge over the Iditarod.

Chef Joshua Harroun has been honing his Alaskan cookery skills at Tutka Bay Lodge for the past month while we have been waiting for the ice to go out at Redoubt Bay Lodge. Along with chef Jonathan Benson, Joshua has an adventurous and exciting menu collection for the summer season.

Naturalist guides Guillermo, David and Elle – and dishwasher Nicky (a Winterlake Lodge alum), round out our strong Redoubt Bay Lodge crew.

Hundreds of pounds of gear will fly in this week. We’ll haul it all up the wooden steps from the dock at the lakeside. Then, we’ll stand on the deck of the lodge and look over the lake for the first bear sighting of the season.

Last year, my husband Carl and I bought a small piece of property across a pretty little lagoon from our house in Tutka Bay, on the south side of Kachemak Bay. The previous owner had towed a derelict crabbing boat onto the property and moored it to the shore during an exceptionally high tide. The boat is called the Widgeon II. It has a history of rebirth, having once been a World War II troop carrier and then fitted into an Alaska crabbing boat.

The previous owner built, by hand, a two-story wooden structure onto the deck of the Widgeon. It looks a little bit like a kooky wooden ark but it was designed more with a Viking hall in mind. When someone, shortly after our purchase, asked me what I might do with an old beached crabbing boat, I didn’t hesitate. I thought to turn it into a cooking school, of course. That’s what you can do in Alaska. You can have a crazy idea and then just do it.

I’m fairly new to Kachemak Bay and I want to learn everything there is about the maritime culture here. I’ve been trying my hand at harvesting and drying small amounts of seaweed, dehydrating seawater to make our own sea salt, and preparing halibut and cod in different ways. I’ve stared an octopus in the eye. I’ve played around with making kelp pickles and I’ve developed a serious taste for Kachemak Bay oysters. There’s an oyster farm just a few coves away where I can go to get fresh appetizers for the evening. I’ve fallen in love with those collectible Japanese glass floats sold all over Homer. I like going up the deep fjord of Tutka Bay and checking on the crab pot I got for my birthday. There are eagles everywhere.

Today is the first cooking class of the season. There’s a nip in the air and plenty of snow on the ridge but I wanted to participate in the Kachemak Bay Shorebird Festival this year so we opened the lodge a little early. Although I’m too busy to take in any of the bay tours or lectures, I get the chance to meet a few birders.

One of the greatest things about owning a cooking school is having the creative opportunity (and excuse) to learn new dishes and styles of cooking. Today’s class is all about the fresh fish we catch here in Kachemak Bay but I’ve decided to make little Venezuelan corncakes called “arepas” to go along with our menu. Arepas are small cakes that are grilled and often split and filled. They are almost like corn-only English muffins. The first time I had an arepa was in Napa, of all places. A small colorful food stand was serving them stuffed with all sorts of cheese and grilled meats.

My mother is in town painting a mural of a tree trunk and branches onto the back wall of our small Homer Spit retail store. She is the only artistic one in our family as far as I can tell. I certainly didn’t get that gene — I’m still at the stick figure and smiley-face stage.

Many years ago, we owned a lodge we have since sold, but my mother painted the name of the lodge, surrounded by draping fuchsias, onto a piece of cottonwood that ended up hanging outside of our log lodge for over twenty years. She painted the sign in part with some fingernail polish that one of our guests offered her for extra color. The sign still hangs there today.

Another — perhaps less impressive — characteristic of my mother’s is that she’s one of those people that truly loves bread. She likes toasted bread spread with cream cheese, and baguettes sliced on the bias. She loves crusty boules and hot buttery buns. One of our favorite laugh-about-Mom memories is a time my sisters and I took her to a French-themed restaurant. The server told our mother that they had just run out of baguettes. She was irate. “No more baguettes?” my mother asked the server incredulously. She wouldn’t stop talking about it the entire meal.  “No more baguettes” has become our family’s phrase for “watch out for Mom — something is bothering her”.

For Mother’s Day this year, I have decided to bake a batch of brioche with a variety of fillings. I am baking the butter and egg-laden dough (and what better symbol of love than eggs and butter?) in muffin tins so my mom can experience love in small doses.

Brioche is simple bread to make, but there are a few tricks to success. Unlike the no-knead bread we made a few months ago, this one requires kneading the butter into the flour. Make sure your yeast is fresh, your eggs and butter are at room temperature, you add the butter in bits at a time so it blends well with the flour, and consider kneading your dough by hand. Most recipes call for dumping the dough into a food processor and letting the mixture whirr for 8-10 minutes. I find it particularly satisfying to knead the sticky mass by hand until the strands of flour are all coated with butter and eggs into a shiny cohesive mass. I personally think it takes a little less time to knead brioche by hand than in a mixer because the warmth of hands contributes to the process.

Let the loose soft dough rise for an hour, knead it down, and cover the dough with a clean kitchen towel. Gently deflate the dough by turning and kneading a few times. Put the dough into greased muffin tins (or loaf pans or even little flower pots work).  Bake for about 15 minutes until they are an egg-enriched golden brown.

I’m making a big batch of extra dough during my Mother’s Day baking session and putting the rest into loaf pans to make into French toast for the morning.  And, I can’t think of anything better than big fat brioche crouton to go on top of summer salads.

So, I’m packing up my basket of brioche and boating over to Homer from Tutka Bay to deliver my gift. Happy Mother’s Day, Mom. We’ll always have plenty of baguettes and brioche on hand for you.

Any chef will tell you that one of the most important ingredients in a well-stocked kitchen is a steady supply of good, high-quality chicken stock, on hand at all times to go into dishes from soups to sauces.

Most traditional chicken stock recipes call for cut-up chicken carcasses added with vegetables and water, then simmered for eight hours or more. Many restaurants simmer their stock overnight and have a stockpot going 24 hours.  The long slow simmering extracts flavor from bones without making the stock bitter, which happens if the stock is boiled. Here in Alaska, for many of us, simmering something on the stove for eight hours or more can mean heavy propane use. For those who live like I do, flying in a 100-pound bottle of propane, unloading it from the airplane, hauling it up to the house — and doing the reverse when the bottle is empty — makes some styles of cooking impractical.

I have two chicken stock recipes to recommend for those conserving energy. These are great recipes for other reasons as well, like good flavor and time management. The first involves chicken wings, and the second involves a pressure cooker.

Chef Jean Georges Vongerichten is somewhat of a hero of mine. He grew up in a part of France that I admire. He worked at the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok where I spent many a childhood Saturday ordering gourmet burgers with Swiss cheese. He has successful restaurants around the world, and he writes good cookbooks.

In Vongerichten’s cookbook “Simple to Spectacular”, there is a recipe for a one-hour chicken stock. It basically requires:

• 1/2 of an onion
• 4 cloves
• 2 pounds of chicken wings, cut up
• 1 medium carrot, peeled and chopped
• 1/2 of a celery stalk, chopped
• 1/2 of a leek, chopped
• 4 cloves of garlic
• A bay leaf
• A small handful of peppercorns
• Some thyme

Stick the cloves into the onion, throw it and all the other ingredients into a large saucepan, and cover with 6 cups of water. Bring the mixture to a boil, then lower the heat and simmer for an hour. Skim any scum (it’s just protein, but it makes the stock cloudy) that accumulates on the surface. Vongerichten explains that the best chicken stock should taste like meat, not bones, and using chicken wings offers an efficient combination of both of those.  Put the cooled stock in the fridge and skim off the fat that solidifies on the top. The stock will stay good for 3 days. It will stay good even longer if you bring it to a boil every three days. Or, you can freeze it.

The second stock-making tip is not so much a recipe as a technique — using a pressure cooker. Pressure cooking the chicken-wing and vegetable combination will reduce the time necessary for making delicious chicken stock to 30 minutes.

Every pressure cooker operates a little bit differently and this is one device that you should read through the instructions carefully and hang onto them. Basically, use the same ingredients as above and put them into a pressure cooker. Seal the pot and bring it up to 15 pounds of pressure.  A key point in making stock is to not fill the pressure cooker more than half or two-thirds full, so there is plenty of room to generate steam.

Reduce the heat on the stove after pressure is achieved to just maintain that 15 pounds of pressure. It might sound complicated, but it really isn’t. After 15 minutes, turn off the heat and let the pressure cooker cool gradually (versus turning the valve to release the steam all at once). Remove the lid from the cooker carefully, and only after the pressure button has released (on my model, it’s a little red button).

To make a richer, deeper stock, you can brown the chicken wings first. Coat the wings in a little extra-virgin olive oil, place them into a roasting pan. Roast in a high-heat oven for about 45 minutes.  Then add in the rest of the vegetables and herbs and cook for about 20 minutes more. Add the browned wings and vegetables to six cups of water on the stove, bring to a boil, then simmer for 30 minutes. This is called “jus rôti” in culinary vernacular.

To make an ultra-rich stock, add in half a pound of prosciutto or dry-cured ham cut up into the roasting wings . Add the vegetables after 40 minutes, then cook it all for an additional 20 minutes. Then, add all of this to one batch of the one-hour stock above and simmer for about 30 minutes more. Strain. This is called “fond riche”.

With a big batch of chicken stock on hand, I’ve decided to make a favorite North African dish that is also an easy weeknight meal.

Part of the customization a macaroon can take on is either in variation in the batter or in the filling. Famous pastry shops in Paris, Ladurée and Pierre Hermé to name two of the most famous, list exotic flavors such as Rose Petal with Lychee Paste and Blackcurrant Violet.

At the end of it, the development of a macaroon recipe is a highly personal process.

Fiddlehead fern emerging in the springtime

Springtime in Alaska is stunningly beautiful if you look closely past the debris of winter. This week we are cleaning up the yard, preparing the garden for planting, and letting the chickens out in the yard to sun themselves in warm afternoons (the chickens have a nice yard that is protected by an electric wire fence).

The loons that live on our lake have returned. They cry and fuss every time a floatplane lands on the lake and in a few months, they’ll proudly display their new baby.

The beach at low tide

We just had the lowest tide of the year at Tutka Bay. We put on our mud boots and explored the beach in front of the lodge for sea stars, anemone, and other sea treasures. Tidepooling is one of the most intriguing aspects of living along the ocean – and the low tide happens twice a day, every day.

Two days after the Great East Japan Earthquake, I received an email from culinary teacher and cookbook author Elizabeth Andoh describing the moments of the earthquake as she experienced them in Tokyo. I have since been receiving Andoh’s frequent updates through her online newsletter.

Andoh lives and teaches in Tokyo and Osaka. We have been corresponding with each other for many years and I am a devoted fan of her many cookbooks. I use Andoh’s book, “Washoku: Recipes from the Japanese Home Kitchen” as a closely followed reference for our Japanese classes at my cooking school.

Andoh’s most recent cookbook is entitled “Kansha: Celebrating Japan’s Vegan and Vegetarian Traditions.” It’s an important addition to my Japanese cookbook collection. According to Andoh, the word kansha means appreciation. As anyone who follows Elizabeth Andoh’s work knows, her books are filled with beautiful Japanese words and her interpretations of their meanings. Andoh’s books are not merely cookbooks. They are life-changing philosophies.

In a recent email sent out to Andoh’s many friends and followers, she began a “dictionary of a determined nation,” a collection of words that reflect the spirit and mood in Japan as it struggles in the aftermath of catastrophic natural disaster. Samples of some of the words in Andoh’s deeply personal annotated dictionary are shimbou (patience), gaman (endurance) and gambaru (hanging in there).

Part of Andoh’s message to the world is to consider using food in a way that results in little or no waste. This is part of her kansha philosophy. One recipe from her book that reflects this concept is Heaven-And-Earth Tempura Pancakes. Andoh explains that her name for this dish is a euphemism for the tops and bottoms of various produce that might be found in the fridge in need of repurposing. Heaven might be the top of fennel, celery or leeks. Earth might be trimmed bits of mushrooms, parsnip, or carrot peel.

One trick to making great tempura pancakes is to select a collection of vegetables and herbs that have near-similar cooking times. Cutting most firm vegetables into thin strips and a few others into half-moons to provide a little textural contrast will help shape the pancakes. Andoh recommends dusting the ingredients lightly with cornstarch before mixing in the batter to help the mixture hold together.

Today in my kitchen, I had Japanese eggplant, bitter melon, carrots, zucchini and red onion on hand. For herbs, I had a big bunch of basil and some cilantro.

I followed Andoh’s instructions on making a thin batter from cake flour, cold water and ice cubes. I dusted the cut-up vegetables and herbs with cornstarch, poured the batter over them, and deep-fried the pancakes one at a time in canola oil.

To make this recipe easy to execute, I recommend using a wide Chinese-style long handled strainer that can hold a delicate mound of veggie-batter mixture in its basin. Dip the empty strainer into the hot oil first before adding any batter and the pancake is less likely to stick. Place about a quarter-cup of veggie-batter mixture onto the strainer and lower it into the oil. It takes a minute or so to cook through, but you can lift the strainer after about 30 seconds to check on the color of the pancake.

Following Andoh’s style, I made some pancakes that were predominantly green in color and others that had red and orange hues. I served them together with a little wedged lime and togarashi powder (a Japanese chili pepper condiment).

To learn more about Elizabeth Andoh, go to www.kanshacooking.com. Follow through different links to access Andoh’s companion site on washoku cuisine and to sign up for her culinary newsletter.

Breakfast with the Danes

It’s early morning and we are in the midst of a late spring snowstorm. The wind is fierce and waves are crashing onto the beach near our dock. My 82-year-old father Jim has recently moved in with us and he is up early. Jim is hard of hearing, a remnant of World War II, and my normally peaceful and quiet home is jolted by the sounds of television politics.

Jim is a first-generation Danish American. We are Americans because my dad’s great-uncles, Jens and Christian Nissen, took a boat from Copenhagen to New York City in the early 1900s. I know this because my dad and I spent a recent evening together peering into my laptop searching for our family history. The amount of information we found was staggering. We even pulled up a photo of the boat that my great-great uncles sailed on.

How the Nissen boys ended up in Alaska and why they settled in the Petersburg area is still unclear. But the uncles sent money for my grandfather Ove Schmidt and his soon-to-be wife Asta to come to the States from Denmark, and so here we are, my dad and I.

We’ve been to Denmark a couple of times to visit relatives on both sides of my father’s family, and now I stay in touch with cousins on Facebook.  But these days, there are few remnants of our Danish heritage woven into our daily lives. My dad loves to eat something called rollmops — rolled pickled herring. And he loves dense rye bread spread with butter or sometimes a little cold roast beef. He has a taste for stinky cheese and strong licorice and so do I. Maybe that’s genetic.

Morgenmad (breakfast): I’ve decided to make a Danish breakfast for my dad, something that would remind him of his childhood. I’m making aebleskiver, little spheres of dough that seem like a cross between pancakes and popovers. They are made with a pancake-like batter with egg whites folded in for lightness. I’m opening the last of the blueberry jam to add into our aebleskivers. I’ve been reluctant to open this last precious jar on the shelf until the next summer was at least in sight.

I have an aebleskiver pan that I picked up at a local culinary store. It’s a cross between a skillet and a series of attached egg poachers.  My pan isn’t quite as cool as a sturdy cast iron model I might get from Denmark. Oddly, the pan is nearly identical to a kanom krok pan used in Thai street food cuisine. I wonder how that happened.

This is an easy recipe. Add the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients and stir. Fold in the egg whites gently.  Today I have added in some orange juice to the batter. I grated in a bit of orange and lemon zest. I thought these flavors might go well with the blueberry jam.

Danish food hasn’t historically been on the culinary radar. It is a cuisine born from a harsh northern landscape. But recently, world gastronomic attention has turned to Scandinavia. The restaurant Noma near Copenhagen was named the best restaurant in the world in 2010. The cookbook “Noma: Time and Place in Nordic Cuisine,” written by René Redzepi, is an international sensation. This book is worth a look for Alaskans because we share many ingredients and cooking styles with Denmark.

I give my dad a basket of aebleskiver, filled with blueberries I picked last summer. He bites into one.

“Hmm — my mom used to make these,” he says, as he reaches in for another.

We spotted two returning trumpeter swans a few days ago and I swear I heard a duck quack early this morning. Suddenly, in the light of day, all my windows badly need washing. It’s early breakup in Southcentral Alaska, a time of year that offers a particular kind of beauty.

I transition from one lodge to another this week and we begin to prepare our little cooking school outside of Homer to open on May 1. I love this time of year, not only for the natural changes unfolding but also for the renewal of our kitchen pantry. We move out of long-braised and denser cuisine to serve more a-la-minute and fresher foods. As much as we love them, we put away our favorite winter beet and potato dishes, stews, and warming hearty menus.

At my kitchen table, we pile up books and magazines, notebooks and scribbled menus from the past and we begin to assemble our new summer menu ideas. This is a particularly satisfying project, like planning a new summer garden or scrapbooking for the culinary crowd.

Each year, I select a small personal culinary theme to focus on.  It’s not to say it’s all we cook, but I spend a little more time on that particular subject. Last year, I was determined to learn more about Spanish cuisine. I traveled to Spain, I hired a Spanish chef to work with me for the summer, and I read incessantly about Spanish culture and food. I even tried to teach myself a little Catalan.

I cooked paella with bomba rice and I became heavily addicted to tomato bread. I bought more saffron and smoked paprika than I bought sea salt last year, but I just couldn’t warm up to salt cod. And the names of Spanish wines and wine grapes just fly out of my head as soon as I hear them. It’s a lifelong endeavor, to understand a particular cuisine like that of Spain.

This summer, I am dedicating any snippets of free time to return to an old favorite. I am studying French regional country cuisine. I have a new edition of the red Michelin Guide in hand and I scour through regions and towns mapped out in the guide for one- and two-star restaurants that sound interesting.  I ask restaurants to send us menus and I’ll hopefully narrow down a list of must-visit destinations for some future trip to France. I’ve bookmarked a collection of blog sites manned by culinary experts who live in France and I look through French magazines and periodicals that might offer inspiration.

One of my favorite French country recipes is for blue cheese and onion tart.  Delicious any time of the year, I love to load up fresh herbs, mushrooms, slow caramelized onion, and tangy blue cheese onto a crispy olive oil tart.

The comfort of bread

Whenever I face complicated or difficult times, I seem to gravitate towards the largest mixing bowl on my shelf. I fill it with flour, yeast, salt and water. Then I start the process of making a big batch of bread. It seems to work every time. I focus only on being in my kitchen, as if this place is the center of the universe and making bread is the only important work I have to do.

Over the years, through trial and error, I’ve settled on something of a small repertoire of bread recipes in my kitchen: quick breads and brioche at breakfast, pizzas and crusty milk rolls for lunch, Indian naan bread and delicious dark fruit and nut bread for appetizers, and classic French baguettes and boules, sourdough and honey-wheat breads at dinnertime.

I started my bread-making career as a young woman living in a small two-room cabin along a remote river in Alaska. We had two small babies and no running water.  It was a big adventure for me — to discard my career as an urban professional and embrace rural living. Making homemade bread was one of the first challenges I tackled. The image of bread being kneaded onto a wooden surface, floury hands wiped clean with a tea towel, and the yeasty smell of baking bread epitomized for me the new life I was creating with my family.

Fast-forward thirty years. We have running water now. The babies are long grown up. Things have begun to change in our little corner of Alaska. But, I still love the same old bread recipe I have been making for all these years.

It goes as follows:  Add three cups of warm water to two packages of dry yeast. Add in one-quarter cup of fireweed honey and let the mixture sit for 15 minutes.   In a large bowl, mix together one cup of powdered milk and four cups of flour (this can be a mixture of white, whole wheat or bread flour – whatever you prefer). Combine the yeast mixture into the dry flour mixture and mix well. Let it sit for about an hour. Add in one-third cup olive oil and a heaping tablespoon of salt. Mix in three more cups of flour into the mixture or until the dough forms a ball and can be kneaded. Place the dough onto a floured surface and knead it for about 10 minutes. Let the dough rise for about an hour (covered with a tea towel). Shape the dough into two loaves or rounds and let them rise for another half-hour or so. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Brush the bread loaves with a beaten egg and bake for about an hour, checking towards the end to make sure the bread crust doesn’t get too dark.

This recipe originated from “The Tassajara Bread Book” by Edward Espe Brown. My copy of this slim brown paperback book is now spattered with stains and the spine is ungluing, so I just keep the book on my bookshelf as an icon to those early years.

When my daughter Mandy came home from pastry school, she told me I don’t need to proof the yeast in warm water, that salt could damage the yeast, and — most controversial of all in my kitchen — I didn’t need to knead the dough.

“Just mix in all the ingredients, stir, and let it rise,” she said.

Change can be hard. I still find myself kneading our no-knead bread recipe when Mandy isn’t looking.

So, when the world seems overwhelming and complicated for you, consider making some homemade bread, kneaded or not.