Alaska: Day 5

So it's my last day as Food Projects Director for the Community Food Council for Del Norte and the Adjacent Tribal Lands. That makes me sad, even though I am truly excited for my new job. Part of my motivation for doing the work at the Food Council is that I understand from lived experience what it's like to live without a real grocery store and have out-of-control food prices eat every pay check. 

We visited both of our "supermarkets" in Bristol Bay and I couldn't resist snapping some of the food prices. This is part of what made us leave Alaska -- we just couldn't afford to eat!

Cranberry Curd -- Thinking Outside The Can!

I'm thinking outside the can with all my cranberries!

It's so fun to have lots of cranberries to play with. I'm going to do something savory with them tonight for dinner -- still in experimental stages -- but I also juiced a few cups this morning so I could try my hand at cranberry curd:

It's hard to tell in this picture, but the color is red, but not as vibrant as the berries or the juice because the color of the egg yolks is tempering it a bit. It is delicious and smooth as silk, though. Curd is supposed to freeze well, so one jar will be going in the freezer for Christmas, just because it's the right color. 

Addition: I got chastised for not including the recipe. I used this lemon curd recipe as the model, but switched the lemon juice for freshly-squeezed cranberry juice. I also added a pinch of salt because I thought I needed to add some pop to make up for the lack of zest.

Cranberries In Photos

I am a little sore and a little sunburned, but I'm ok with that because the cause was a glorious afternoon of cranberry picking! As I mentioned yesterday, the two Oregon counties to our north grow many delicious cranberries. We got to go pick the edge of a bog that is waiting its turn for a flood and harvest.

On our way to "our" bog, we got to see the tail end of the harvest of a flooded field. Such amazing colors!

It's hard to tell size from this picture, but the berries are HUGE compared to the tundra cranberries I picked in Alaska. But you CAN see how plentiful they are.

Picking into a white, slightly translucent bucket on a sunny day leads to the illusion that these are free cranberries, all huddled in a circle. They're not! This was my half-full bucket.

Our food crew, showing off our harvest. All told, the three of us picked about 29 pounds of cranberries in just over an hour.

I wasted no time. An hour after I got home with the berries, there was a cranberry crisp bubbling away in the stove, another assembled and frozen, and some sliced berries simmering in balsamic and sugar to go into a roasted beet salad.

Now I just need to finish cleaning and drying the rest and I can go to bed!

Cranberries!

Really, I should wait until tomorrow to post about this because I'll probably have pictures, but I'm excited, so I can't wait.

I didn't know this until we moved here, but the two Oregon coastal counties to our north produce about 5% of the national cranberry harvest. Because the growing season here is so long, the berries get to stay on the bush longer than in other cranberry-producing regions, so they get bigger and redder and sweeter.

And I get to pick some tomorrow!

A friend/colleague leads cranberry gleanings in bogs near Port Orford. Gleaners get to keep half (I think) of what they pick, with the other half going to support the Port Orford Co-op. I'm hoping my fingers remember their cranberry-picking lessons from Alaska so I can come home with lots of berries to play with.

Guest Post: Salad Bar for KRECR

Today's blog post is written by Darcy Jo. It is her choice of topic and her words. I am writing only this introduction:

My name is Darcy Jo.At school, we made puzzle pieces that showed what KRECR needs.My puzzle piece said the school needs a salad bar.I think it had one last year,but
no one got salad, and they sold it.But I remember that when I was in kindergarten,
I went to Pine Grove, and they had a salad bar.They used to have early out on
Friday, but they now have it on Wednesday.My school still has it on Friday.
On early out days you do not have lunch.We could borrow the salad bar on
Wednesday and make it Salad Bar Day.

If Your Menu Said...

Matsutake mushroom. Stinging nettle. Smoked sturgeon.

That was how our fifth course of a tasting menu was described tonight. I was picturing a roasted (?) mushroom, sauteed greens, and a small piece of fish. 

What would you picture?

What I didn't picture was a small white pitcher being put on my plate. It was tiny. Like an individual pitcher of cream that might come with a cup of coffee.

There was a green foam hiding the rest of the contents, but as I dipped my spoon in, I found a velvety mushroom soup, with shavings of smoked sturgeon at the bottom. It was not at all expected, but it was so good.

It was maybe a quarter cup -- maybe -- of complete deliciousness that made me wish my tongue was long enough to reach the bottom of that little pitcher. I didn't try, although I wanted to. We were, after all, seated at a table for six and had just met two of our dining companions as the meal began.

Michael and I splurged for a late anniversary dinner and went to the Historic Requa Inn's Beermaker's Dinner tonight. (He was in Pennsylvania for the deal deal last month.) It was eight courses of magical cooking -- not a single miss on any of the plates, starting with a halibut fillet on top of creamy wild rice and ending with a panna cotta served on caramel sauce. I used a leftover piece of fry bread to mop up extra sauce from the family-style serving dish. I'm not ashamed -- it was the perfect end to a perfect dinner.

Dinner (And Early Birthday Party Planning)

Tonight, as a belated anniversary celebration, Michael and I went to the Historic Requa Inn for dinner. We enjoyed a four course meal of mostly-local delights that included a little wild rice dumpling to start and an almond/brown butter cake with blackberry juice to finish. In between there were some beautiful beets with flash-fried fennel tops, potatoes mashed with olive oil, roasted mushrooms, and other deliciousness. Thanks to chefs Paul and Thomas for a wonderful meal!

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Darcy was with a once-in-a-blue moon babysitter, Beth. We're just two days away from an early birthday party for Darcy and she is starting to fixate on it. Before we went to dinner, Darcy insisted that we put together the goodie bags. Then she made a guest list complete with symbolic codes for how likely she thought it was that each of those people would come to the party. When we got home from dinner, Beth said that Darcy had expressed some serious concerns about how her cake would get made. Perhaps I am running out of time, she worried. She also made an excellent list of how she views the party events:

Be warned, children, there are apparently two outdoor lectures as part of this party! 

Apropos of nothing, I'll end with a picture of Darcy at the Chocolate Exhibit we caught at Turtle Bay Museum in Redding a few weeks ago:

The Hidden Blog

I might be cheating slightly today. It's not much of a cheat because I have written a long, complicated, well-illustrated blog post. Just not here.

Some very few of you know that I used to have an active food blog. It's been about two years since I wrote anything at all on my food blog, but yesterday, I was inspired to do so. A friend of mine here in Crescent City is participating (and helped plan) Ferment Del Norte's Local Food Challenge. For most of October, he is trying to eat only foods that are grown in our region. This is a challenge that requires a lot of forbidden foods, since there are so many foods that simply do not grow here. 

The one ingredient that is not produced and sold here that I could not give up is salt.

We were discussing this yesterday morning and I asked why you couldn't just make your own. We do live right next to a rather large bath tub filled with salt water, after all. So I promised him I would make him some salt. If you want to read the story of how three random gallons of the Pacific Ocean became beautiful bowls of salt, you can check out part one and part two on my food blog, Isolated Foodie. I have never cross-posted from one blog to the other before, and even my own mother claims that she didn't know I had a food blog, because I did it for me, not for an audience. Although I did start using my first name on the blog, I use pseudonyms for the places we've lived and the two blogs are on different accounts. In other words, if you'd like to comment over there, please don't say, "Hey, Angela GLORE, I didn't know you could make salt in CRESCENT CITY. Glad I read about it on GLORES AROUND THE PARKS." Otherwise, enjoy!

The Darcy-Fruit Paradox

Birthday pictures will come tomorrow. Today, enjoy my fascination with my child's love-hate of fruit.

My child does not eat fruit. We sneak some into her with an occasional 100% juice serving, but she mostly spurns that, so her daily fruit consumption comes in the form of Trader Joe's freeze dried bananas. It's the only thing that resembles fresh fruit that enters her body. When asked, she will tell you -- and that IS a universal you because she is not shy with this information -- that it's "too juicy". When her beloved Miss A brought grapes for the weekly nutrition-in-the-garden activity, Darcy was the only student out of 900 Miss A sees every week who refused to taste it. Too juicy.

Despite this stubborn refusal to eat fruit, Darcy likes to play with pretend fruit (she has Melissa and Doug's wooden fruit that can be "cut" for a fruit salad because the pieces are velcroed together) and has long-term jokes/stories about fruit. For the longest time, she would talk about "mam fruit", always with a giggle, and when we moved to this house, she decreed that the dogwood fruits (ripe this time of year, about golf-ball sized, and red) are mam fruit. So she's really excited now because she just noticed that some of the mam fruit are ripe. 


It took us months to figure out where she had come up with this term. One day, we were watching Miss Spider's Sunny Patch Friends and she said, "This is the one with the mam fruit!!" That perked me up and I watched carefully. In this particular episode, a firefly loses his glasses and while he's looking for them, he bumps into a fruit and says, "Oh! Excuse me, ma'am, have you seen my glasses?" Thus is born the mam fruit.


So it should not have surprised us when she created the lemange this weekend. A lemange is half lemon/half orange and it easily created when you own the Melissa and Doug fruit set described above. When I asked about the flavoring for her birthday cupcakes, she asked for lemange-flavored cupcakes and that's what she got, thanks to the miracle of lemon juice and orange extract. But the best part about this is that shortly after deciding on the name for this new creation, Darcy sat down with her paper and coloring supplies at her small table. When she was done, she came and showed us this paper:

I love that she can write. In sentences. With the correct spelling. And punctuation. And I love her imagination. I would love it even more if she could imagine herself EATING SOME FRESH FRUIT juice and all.

 

Arcata Market

Sometime around Labor Day, we went to the very fabulous Arcata Saturday farmers' market. It's held in Arcata's plaza, with vendors going all the way around all four sides and a few in the center (mostly prepared foods and the live music). Darcy was having fun dancing and playing with hula hoops while I shopped the edges.

The most-wonderful balloon man made a pink octopus for Darcy while she watched in awe. She's holding a sunflower taller than she is, but you can hardly see it. Michael reported that some random stranger went and bought it for her in appreciation for her great dancing skills.

These next photos are in honor of my Uncle Nick. Those of you who don't know him probably don't know that he has a website called Poems for Free. He used to do exactly what this Poem Store does: people would send him a request for a poem on a certain subject or in honor of a person or event, and he'd write a poem. He got too many requests after a while, but he still writes and posts poems that anyone is free to use.

This poet is at the market all the time (as far as I can tell) and types up her poems on her portable that she hauls around (with her chair) in her kitted-out hauling bike. It's very cool. High pressure creativity, though!

After market, we went to the local, organic ice cream shop, which Darcy adores. (I do, too -- the lemon-poppyseed ice cream is delicious!) They have a pretend ice cream shop that she plays in long after the ice cream is gone. They have very cute homemade aprons, which Michael is helping model here.

Now, I have to go eat Ethiopian food! Yay!

Our Fruit

I apologize for the lapse in blogging. It's the whole buying a house, going to a family reunion, painting, flooring, moving...all in the span of two weeks. It'll really take it out of a person. But now we're well-settled into our new house and we have time to breathe occasionally. We also have wireless internet in the house now, so our "old" computer, the one with my beloved Photoshop, is connected to the internet on a regular basis. So blogosphere, watch out! I'm back.

As I may have mentioned in May, when I last blogged, we have a beautiful, very large yard at our new house. It is full of fruit trees and vines and canes and bushes. Almost any form fruit can grow in, we have it. And it is all starting to ripen now. Even though it's been a very foggy late July and August, the fruit is doing well. Today, we finally had sunshine, so I expect to be harvesting over the weekend.

We have several apple trees, with two bearing heavy loads of fruit. I was told that some are baking apples and some eating apples. We'll see as they get ripe. I'm looking forward to both! Apple pies. Apple butter. Apple crisp. Apple snacks.

I need a ladder to harvest these blackberries climing up our holly!

Kiwis! We have kiwis! Real fuzzy ones, too, not the smooth-skinned, yellow-fleshed kiwis. These are the real deal and our vines climb at least 25 feet into the air, with scores of the fuzzy beasts. When they were true babies, their fuzz was quite red and they were beautiful.

Darcy's already done some harvesting. She was so proud. Here she is reaching up to test some beautiful...

...peaches! We've already eaten two of our very own peaches, but none were ready for picking on this day. After all our sunshine this afternoon, I'm counting on three or four of them being ready this weekend. We don't have tons of peaches, but we have a couple dozen, at least. I've been told this is a bad year for fruit trees in the area because we had some late, frenzied storms that damaged a lot of blossoms.

You really should come visit.

Oh! The Light! The Light!

The light from the end of the "I only eat bagels" tunnel is so bright, I'm blinded!

We've been seeing signs of the bagel fetish starting to end, but the last two days have been incredible. Last night, she ate green beans with garlic and red pepper flakes, and mushroom ravioli. She even chose to dip some of her beans in the mushroom sauce that Michael and I ate with the ravs.

Tonight, Michael made falafel. And I made tahina sauce for it. Darcy tried both for the first time, with no fusses at all. She politely refused the tahina at first, but then took a giant serving spoon and dug right in. Smeared it in her pita by herself. Put a puddle on her plate. Licked the spoon.

After finishing an entire pita, she decided to drop her falafel into her milk. Then she added her cucumbers. And some tahina. She created cucufalafelmilkini. AND DRANK SOME OF IT.

Who knew the darkness could end so abruptly??