Food: From Beautiful Bounty to Embarrassing Bulk

FOOD. We all eat it. But where do we get it? Up here in Alaska, the answer can vary quite a bit...

FISHSLAYERS. Ahhhhh, Alaskan residents dipnetting. Perhaps best described using numbers:

1 big ass net
1 big ass handle
25 salmon (max, per head of household), clearly not higher order thinkers, swimming into net
1 human, not necessarily skilled in any way, chest-deep in the water, holding the handle
21 days in July
100 percent of success due to luck and luck alone

Remember our first stab at dipnetting when we first moved up? Complete fail. Ended up without a single fish and had a kind neighbor gift us one of theirs to feed our summer visitors. Over the years we've improved a bit, catching 8 fish on our best day ever, securing our own net rather than borrowing from friends, and somewhat mastering an efficient processing strategy (Kim de-scales the fish, J fillets the fish, and J-Dock Company down in Seward does the vacuuming sealing for about $1/pound).

Well this year we returned from Lower 48 travels and had just a few days left in the dipnetting season. Slightly bleary-eyed, we hit the road for Kenai with our supplies:

• cooler
• bag of ice
• dipnets (in pieces that can be reattached so they fit in Sally Ride)
• waders (for J) and dry suit (for Kim)
• neoprene gloves
• billy club (for bonking the fish on the head after they're netted and dragged to shore)
• fillet knife (with sharpening block)
• cutting board (with strong metal clip to hold the tail fins)
• bucket (to hold the other stuff and hey, it's just always good to have a bucket)
• water and snacks 
• hoola hoop and James Patterson kid novel (Indigo does not like to fish, but she likes to watch)

We got to the beach parking lot early and scored a spot near the stairs, carried everything down and hopped in the water. Within 1/2 an hour, J was dragging out the first fish. Then we started feeling them hit our legs... by lunch time we'd made two trips up and out to a local thrift store to buy more coolers!

23 fish for Team Leslie
3 humans, tired and pleased with ourselves, unskilled fisher people and all

Kim and J early in the game, starting to fill up cooler #1.

Filling the freezer and then some!

BLUEBERRIES. It just kills me in the winter when we go to the local Safeway and eye the teeny tiny half pint cartons of blueberries in the produce cooler section. $6... maybe $8 per half pint. Just enough for a good smoothie or a round of Saturday morning pancakes. Now every year we try to stock up and pick our own in August, but time gets away from us, school starts up, we eat a ton of what we've picked, and a few baggies end up with the dregs in the freezer.

Well this year we decided to do some picking up on Mt. Alice, usually framed across the bay in our window. It was my birthday weekend, also J and my 17th wedding anniversary, and one last summer overnight camping adventure was in order. We crossed our fingers that there would be some bloobs up high and after getting above treeline, we hit the mother lode: 1 gallon of big berries off a single bush! Eat your heart out, Safeway.

Serious work; a winter's worth of extra tasty breakfasts is at stake!

Powered by blue!

COSTCO. Last but not least, (and it does pain me slightly to write this), we of Team Leslie have joined a wholesale warehouse club. A company that started out selling food in an airplane hangar. A company that has more pallets per acre than blades of grass. Good God.

How did we come to this, you ask? Well, when we first arrived in Alaska, we quickly noticed that everyone had a Costco membership. Everyone. Pantries were filled with 144-packs of mac and cheese, plastic wrapped together; enough paper towels to sop up a baby pool; and goldfish crackers in boxes the size of small cars. Home-made robot costumes made of massive Kirkland boxes walked the streets on Halloween. Guests arriving at a potluck dinner needed to enter in pairs to hold up the 36-serving pies without having them cave in the center. We were terrified.

It's also of note that Team Leslie had moved up from the fruit and flower rich farmers markets of Oregon, from the organic samples on wooden platters in the Whole Foods of California. There was a time where we knew the chickens who laid our eggs, knew the orchardists who grew our apples, and milked the tits of the... okay, we didn't do that last one. But we did feel connected to our food and enjoyed our saunters up and down the isles in these nutrient rich market places. Market places. Not warehouses.

But groceries here in Alaska are expensive; the price we pay for living so far from the rest of civilization, right? Except for our fish and our berries, most foods we consume are traveling thousands of miles. And when a lot of it gets here, especially produce, it's in sorry shape. The joy of cutting into an avocado and seeing that creamy green amazingness? Rare. The sadness of cutting into an avocado and seeing brown mush and dark grey strings? Standard operating procedure.

Enter Costco, and bulk food towers of power. Clearly, we have arrived.