All Things Being Equal

EQUINOX. A day of the year when we have an electromagnetic balance... most of my life I passed this occasion by, not ever noticing the 12 hours of light matched with 12 hours of darkness. FYI, the Autumnal Equinox was last Sunday, September 22nd, at 20:44 Universal Coordinated Time. If you missed it, fear not; you can still look forward to the Vernal Equinox in a mere, six short months! (In case my writing does not convey it, please soak the word "short" in a serious bath of sarcasm. Our weekly weather reports have already featured snow. Winter, thy name is Alaska.)

Backyard campfire on the Equinox - note the darkness - haven't had that in awhile up here!

These days I anticipate the Equinox like a major holiday... something akin to Thanksgiving or Easter. We plan harvesting adventures; we create costumes and decorate our bikes for the potato parade; we get out the ingredients for our Equinox and Solstice breakfast of choice: crepes with various fillings (think homemade cranberry sauce and goat cheese... beyond delicious) - folded in half for Equinox, or spread out in a circular whole for the Solstice. Yes, we are secular holiday culinary nerds. Praise the Parsnip!

Kim and Jodi, cranberry picking in the forest... but where's baby AnnaBeth?

There she is! Happy as a clam stashed in the cranberry bush!

Some of our cranberry harvest.

Team Leslie - Ready for the potato parade!

Community garden goodness - bags of potatoes and cabbage!

Indeed, we may be some of the very few people in Alaska putting a holiday name to our now "second annual" traditions, but we are not alone in our actions. Stories in the work place revolve around weekends spent gathering low-bush cranberries, processing hunted meat, and picking green tomatoes from withering vines. And not just the crazy hippies like us... SUV-driving, fashionistas and gun-slinging (I love how often I get to use that phrase up here), wool jacket-wearing grizzly men... we all unite in this gleaning of the gardens and forests in an Alaskan frenzy before the frost. Compared to last year, Team Leslie is feeling professional. Gallon bags of berries and filets of salmon in the freezer, jars of dried mushrooms in the pantry, and some of that moose meat sausage that I found so unusual last year, in the fridge. Mind you, we did not kill or prepare the sausage. It was our generous neighbors again... freshly ground and spiced and delivered down the driveway, like the bear meat last week. Today I learned that the top floor of our neighbors' home, a sort of tower with 360 degree gorgeous-o windows overlooking the lakes and mountains, has a single small window with a sliding pane. Why? In case they spy a moose in the yard and want to jam a gun through the window and take a shot from above, of course. I bet Architectural Digest hasn't featured that one.

Fall Ponderings

CANNERS UNITE. After my story of panic, an unbelievable number of you wrote in with similar anecdotes, most ending in victory, of canning everything from apricots to salmon. Who knew?!? Sue in Chicago. Brad in San Fran. Jade in Hood River. Karen back from Europe. Rachael about to be married. All of you and more share the common bond of forcing mashed food into cylinders to eat another day! And it appears that you LOVE it! I am honored and somewhat skeptical to be joining this diverse and dedicated crew. Honestly though, thank you for your inspiration... Look out high bush cranberries, I'm a canner.

AUTUMN. Is here. Complete with falling leaves, pumpkin donuts at the Moose is Loose, fireweed whispies, and cool, crisp days. As some of you might remember from the blog last year around this time, autumn in our parts is pretty short lived; Alaska likes to showcase summer and winter, and then fall and spring get the short end of the stick. So unlike New Hampshire and Oregon where you get plenty of time to admire the foliage and visit various u-pick gourd farms, we have about 2 weeks to pack in the fall festivities and then it's time to bust out the snowshoes and the Christmas lights. Here are some glimpses into our attempt to live it up while we can!

No snow on the trail, yet.

Where's the snow? (Don't worry, he found some...)

High alpine color.

Fireweed seeds!

A good one!

Not a good one (but boy is it pretty!).

Couldn't help but collect a few 'shrooms on my ride! It's an addiction.

The epically fun game of leaf catching.

Sunset fishing (not catching) for Silver salmon on the Kenai.

Fresh-picked raspberry muffin making.

A really good deal - the neighbors took advantage!

MEAT. Today I had the following conversation with my dad on the phone:

"Guess what we had for dinner last night, Dad."

"Salmon?"

"No. Think a little higher on the food chain..."

"King Crab?"

"Umm, I think that's lower on the food chain. Well, I guess it depends on how you think about it... Anyway, we had black bear."

"Good God! (pause) What was it like?"

I went on to explain how we'd gotten the bear meat from our neighbor; he had just returned from a week-long moose hunting venture and, finding no one at his home, stopped by our house to share in his excitement. He had successfully gotten a moose, but had also gotten a black bear. Apparently his little family hunting cabin closer to the mountains has frequent bear visitors, so he was smart and tried for  both a moose tag and a bear tag on the off chance that he would get super lucky. ("Stayed up all night to get lucky..." Gotta love a little Daft Punk amidst a hunting story.) FYI, a tag is the hunting license one needs to legally take down a particular animal. There is a lottery for geographic areas with a limited number of tags given out for a season. Well, super lucky he was. And a few hours later he knocked on the door again with a bag full of meat - a "filet mignon" cut of bear. Wow. Our dear neighbors back in Oregon would deliver vegan cupcakes... this was different.

I've found myself thinking really hard about black bears since the meal, more than I've ever thought about a cow or a chicken or a fish. Mind you, our family used to celebrate "Vegan Wednesdays" when we ate no animal products on that day of the week for more than a year. J and I figured that if our family of three did that, it was almost like we were half a vegan! It was an eco-friendly, ethical-friendly choice. But also hypocritical - "Bacon Saturday" and "Butter Thursday through Tuesday" pretty much canceled out the deal. So I guess you could consider us food agnostics; we are aware of the choices out there but have yet to settle on the best one for us.

Back to the bear... This animal was wild and alive two days ago. A big mammal, like me, exploring the forest and getting ready for winter. The times that I have seen a bear in the wild it has taken my breath away. Something about knowing that our natural places can still support such large animals... that there are still the wild spaces and intact food webs and genetic hardiness to handle our changing world. Amazing. And in stark contrast with this wonder is the fact that I ate one. Like I said, I'm still thinking about it quite a bit. I am thankful to have moments like this to give me pause. To make me excruciatingly mindful of something so simple as eating a meal. To make me consider my place in the world and my actions. And as I sit and think, black bear "left overs" sit in our fridge. What an odd thing.

Canning Panic

JELLY. Jam. Preserves. Smashed up, squished, gooey, ooey fruit. Practically once a day for my whole adult life I have twisted off the cap of a jar of sweet berry goodness and slathered it on a croissant or a sandwich or a dark chocolate brownie (good one, hmm?). But up until this past week, I had never made the stuff myself.

Enter the Alaska vibe and this odd deep-seeded desire to harvest and create and enjoy nature's bounty. I would normally add "survive" to the list but I'll be honest: there is no way in hell Team Leslie could survive on our buckets of collected produce and fungi... maybe for a day or two, but then we'd be toast (without jam). Anyway, our homesteader groove has been strong lately and so we embarked. Indigo and I had seen a recipe for jelly made from fireweed, that gorgeous fuchsia flower growing prolifically in any open space during the summer months. So we diligently stripped every fireweed stalk we came across of its petals and froze them in lovely purple baggies... boiling them yielded a pink, fragrant juice. Next came the pectin powder, the sugar, and the... PANIC.

(A brief interlude about panic... My philosophy is this: the only people I know who deserve to feel like panicking on a regular basis are ER doctors, of whom we know many. The rest of us? Not worth it. Unless life or limb are at risk, we should take a chill pill and settle down. Ironically, panicking is not part of the job description for our dear ER doc friends. Perhaps, as an outlet, they should take up canning...)

I took a closer look at the little folded paper guidelines tucked in the pectin powder package and discovered an overwhelming set of directions for canning. (I should confess that when buying said pectin powder at the grocery store I noticed a whole canning kit... "A canning kit? How hard can it be? We've got cans, lids... we're golden.")

• Lids need to be kept hot in a near boiling water bath.
• Jars should be sterilized and remain warm.
• Jam should be added to jars with haste, lids screwed on tightly, and can rack submerged into boiling water bath for five minutes with several inches of water above and beneath.
• A "popping sound" indicates that the seal is not sufficient.
• A sloshing consistency indicates that the jelly did not set properly.

Hot lids? Sterilized? Can rack? Not sufficient? Not set properly? AHHHHH! A sweet Mommy-daughter project turned into a full fledged disaster zone. In a sad attempt to create a "can rack" and a "boiling water bath" I folded up some aluminum foil into a fan and jammed it down into a steel pot of water, cranked the heat to high, and chucked in the lids. A minute later I sloshed our virgin jelly into the jars, capped 'em, and, taking a deep breath,  gingerly submerged them onto the aluminum foil fans. The Homesteader Gods were not in my favor. The jars began to jump all around, clinking and clanking and flipping over, the foil floated to the top of the pot, and the water began to boil over.

"Indigo! You need to give Mommy space, now."

"J, I need your help, now."

There was yelling. Tongs were wielded with vigor. Someone may have been hip-checked out of the kitchen. In the end, two little four-ounce jars of fireweed jelly sat on a dishtowel on our counter. And we waited for the tell-tale popping sound...

No pop! One for us and one for Great Grammy.

Bolete mushrooms - just dry fry, no canning. Ahhh... (and who doesn't love that funny little instrument man on the cover of the mushroom guide?)