With apologies to Wisconsin, a love note to Alaska

My mental map of Juneau is populated more with berry bushes than actual manmade landmarks: hairy stinkcurrants and blackcurrants, which make the best jam; red currants, not only delicious but about as optimal as foraging gets; salmonberries, juicy but flavorless, a good fallback or pick-me-up on a bike ride; and of course blueberries. Last year W. brought home from Alaska, as a consolation prize for the wage slaves in our household, namely me, a case of blueberry jam.

This year, alas, we were too early for berries. The currant-skeins were all so small and green …

However, we were not too early for Dolly Vardens. Named, I remind you, for a flirty Dickens tart in a polka-dotted dress. Dollies are hardly flirtatious, though. They’ll just eat whatever, and that’s why I love them.

They taste like a delicate cross between trout and salmon. Yet salmon and halibut, the big fatty brutes, get far more attention. Lucky me.

Of course, W. and I are not averse to salmon-fishing. We carried home two of the four we caught, frozen and wrapped in my wedding-party attire. (The wedding being the ostensible occasion we were there; the fishing being the actual reason.)

If W. learned anything as a teenaged deckhand on a charter-fishing boat, he learned how to make fish look big in the photo. I think the blood makes it look like he won a knife-fight with the fish.

Rockfish: Disparaged by salmon fishermen, but it makes the best Thai fish cakes.

We did a lot of nostalgic hunting and foraging, starting the first day: a bike ride to a bolete spot at the base of a glacier, followed by waffles at the Waffle House, followed by dolly-fishing amid the horseflies at Eagle Beach. I have many fond memories of slow, brain-dead waffle-eating after a long day of foraging or hiking out the road. And I love the luxury of how casual fishing is in Juneau: deciding after the day’s main-course activity, to follow up with a little casting … not driving all day to get to a fishing spot; not staking ego or happiness on whether anything is caught, because the fish are so plentiful. In Wisconsin I haven’t encountered any fish bonanzas except winter bluegills, which are hardly worth eating.

Other notable edibles:

• Beach asparagus, a salty vegetable I just learned about. Would make excellent salad garnish.

Foraging for the masses: The Shriners in their tiny cars and everyone else at the 4th of July parade spend most of the parade throwing taffy at people. Sartorial note: Shriners in Alaska wear fancy rubber boots from Fred Meyer.

• A Maryland-style crab boil, with newspapers festively lining the table — Maryland-style except for the size of the crabs — something I’d been yearning for since I left Alaska. Incidentally, PSP has recently been found in Southeast Alaska crab guts. (You never ate the guts anyway, but do be careful.) I am concerned that the anthropogenic rise in sea temperatures will bode ill for my love affair with Dungies and other Alaska shellfish. If the oysters start getting spawny in Kake, that’s when I’ll grow a beard, slash my clothes and start wandering the streets with signs about Impending Doom.

The actual reason we went to Alaska: A wedding in Excursion Inlet, two hours' boat ride from Juneau. This picture marks the first time I have mixed high heels with seaweed.

Wisconsin has its charms, such as the four gallon bags of cherries I put in the freezer last week. But I left my heart somewhere in Gastineau Channel — to feed, naturally, the Dolly Vardens I hope to catch on my return.

Mushrooms on layover

W. and I congratulated ourselves for escaping the Anchorage airport yesterday after 13 hours or so of travel. We took a cab to Kincaid Park. A place that suggested it might have morels, based on the presence of this:

That could have happened in Madison. This probably couldn’t:

Those smudges are bear pawprints. A fellow forager: the hummingbear!

Foraging begins—Mushrooms still sleepy—A happy consolation

People go crazy over these, but they taste pretty much like garlicky green onions you've had before but with a tender leaf. The reason we go crazy is because wild things are always better. It's not rational, but there you have it.

Week #2 of the 2011 morel hunt: no morels. Last weekend it seemed like it was still pretty much winter out there. But today we walked among shoots and sensed we were just a few days too early. The obsession is growing. But stay out long enough, and Mother Nature will always provide something. Sometimes it’s something unpleasant, like ticks. (Who knows, I may have those, too.) Today it was a lovely consolation prize: ramps.

Springtime is cheesytime

Curd in cloth; and unmolded two days later.

Incidentally, the making of stinky cheese is one of my top post-reporting-burnout fantasy careers. I also want to own goats, but goats whose poop is someone else’s responsibility, if we’re going to flesh this fantasy out. But for now I am a long way from Master Cheesemaker, and just two weeks ago embarked on my first long-term cheese project.

Wild turkey, with a small ‘t’

Four pounds of it, snagged by hunter Karl, brined and waiting for the smoker.

!!!

The turkey’s purpose is to inspire a group of non-turkey hunters before their turkey hunt this weekend. Just before turkey season begins for everyone else, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources has a Learn to Hunt program, organized by Karl. I’ll be hunting, even though I lost my glasses this week. As will W., and a few other wild-food-friendly friends. It’s a natural progression from hunting mushrooms to hunting moving prey, a leap that requires substantially more hand-eye coordination.

I am petrified of drying out the meat; Ruhlman has advised keeping the temperature as low as possible. Also, we may have to engage in some Poor Housewife Witchery to stretch it out over the expected crowd. Perhaps something involving the other Wild Turkey.

A sausage cure for the winter blues

Tastes like salami, but more so than usual: smoother, richer, funkier. The extra pork fat stayed nicely separate from the meat, which validated my OCD efforts to keep it cold during the grinding process.

First, a note of thanks to my parents. When you sent W. that bulky weather station, the one that displays the humidity and temperature both outside and inside, plus the barometric forecast and the atomic time, we scoffed. We can get the weather outside by going outside. We get the weather inside by going inside.

However, it was indispensable in creating the perfect sausage-curing climate. Perhaps if the manufacturers had mentioned that use on the packaging, I would have been less skeptical.

The curing box

“Dry-curing” is a misnomer, from my point of view inside a very, very dry house. Every morning this week, I’ve woken up a desiccated shred of a human being and been forced to gulp my weight in water so that humanity returns to me. The dryness is making my cold worse, not curing it.

The sausage and I are on the same page with this one.

This weekend, I ground and stuffed Tuscan salami, my first attempt at dry-curing. I also discovered that my basement/curing cellar is running around 40 percent humidity — much lower than the 60-70 percent recommended. If the casings dry out and harden, they no longer allow water from the inside of the sausage to escape — i.e., the magic of dry-curing.

I spritzed the sausages hourly while I mulled what to do.

I was going to add a humidifier to the basement, but my neighbor pointed out that basements typically do not respond well to wetness.

Ruhlman and Polcyn, in Charcuterie, suggest an old fridge, unplugged, with salted water in the bottom to keep the humidity up (salted to discourage germ growth). But my local thrift shops had nothing. Freecycle and Craigslist did not provide. And I’m not all that keen, anyway, on adding another big appliance to the basement.

So my curing box, at the moment, is a cardboard box. It has plastic duct-taped to line the insides, a pan of water in the bottom and a dowel thrust through the handles. It’s a little small for the purpose, but humidity is at 70 percent and holding. The ne plus ultra of climate control, if not of elegance. The experiment is off and running. Now it’s time to pray to the iodophore gods that our sanitation was sufficient, and that the Bactoferm F-RM-52 is able and energetic, and that the cats do not escape into the basement and make trouble.

And now I just need a dry-curing box for myself.

The greedy hunter pays the price

Chanterelles: hard to miss, harder to clean.

The search cost for many mushrooms, so sparse and unpredictable, would seem to be too expensive for what you get — except that you weigh those costs not only against the find’s quantity and deliciousness, but your irrational desire for the quest itself, or to conquer the maddening woods.

Chanterelles are pleasantly untricky to find. But they are the mushrooms for which I’ve paid the steepest price so far.

Dirty, dirty boletes

The first mushroom bonanza formed the idea of the thing, created a precedent for all others. They were aspen boletes, which I never saw in the wild but W. hunted on a glacier trail in Juneau last year with a friend. They went back armed with loads of cardboard boxes and filled them all. It took days to clean and dry them all, a year to eat the small concentrated bag we took with us to Madison. While they were drying, while others were waiting on newspapers and in boxes to be dried, we ate a Slavic yogurt soup with mushrooms floating in it; it could not be simpler or more divine.

Boletus pulverulentus. Perhaps not the Ur-mushroom, but it has its good points. At right, the cleanest ones I ever saw growing, freaks of their kind.

Because of that the boletes were the Ur-mushroom in my mind. As you know the porcino, queen of mushrooms, is a bolete. So about a month ago, when I discovered a wood that was scattered with them — all over, so many underfoot I couldn’t help but step on some of them — I thought my life charmed. I discovered the boletes at the same time as the mosquitos discovered me,

The mosquito of vegetables

I cannot understand what people see in celery. To me it provokes the urge — never indulged yet — to lie at a restaurant and claim I am allergic. I can taste it in cheap curry powder; it ruins otherwise fine chicken broth. Another thing I kvetch about is the paltry pickings in my CSA box. But now they finally fill the 5/9-bushel box, and with what? An entire celery bush the size of the Eiffel Celery Tower.

I do know someones who will take this off my hands, though.

She also nibbles on the plastic-and-duct-tape window cover every chance she gets. I haven't known someone this omnivorous since college.