Good Eats

I have a backlog of food photos to share! I have organized them by meal.

Breakfasts

Omelette with turkey, bell peppers, onions, and tomatoes, topped with queso fresco and chives from the garden:


The breakfast the morning after taco night, with leftover guacamole and pico de gallo:


Yum! My love of pico de gallo is why I always keep my knives razor-sharp.

Huevos rancheros, with black beans, salsa from a jar, and cilantro from the garden (and of course queso fresco because what is life without cheese?):


Lunches

Grilled cheese and tomatoes!


Oh I guess that's it for lunches. They are a bit less interesting...

Suppers

Guacamole and pico de gallo in the making!


Now everything is ready for tacos!


Heating tortillas and beans:


Pan-frying the fish (this is cod, but I also do this with rockfish and halibut):


Oh dang I never photographed our actual tacos. Oh well.

OK here is moosey noodle soup with collard greens:


Here are crabcakes!


We had crab legs for DL's birthday dinner, and the Best Thing in the World to do with leftover crab is crabcakes! I thought of the perfect thing to go with crabcakes; this potato salad that has green beans!


A perfect meal!


Here are roast veggies, from the least exciting veggies from our CSA: red beets, yellow beets, and kohlrabi. I added olive oil, salt, and thyme from my garden:


They came out... okay. How exciting can roast veggies be?


A fine thyme was had by all.

This is chicken and peanut stew:


The recipe hails from Ghana. I learned about it on the underside of a peanut butter jar. I had forgotten that it calls for sweet potatoes, so didn't buy any. I substituted yellow potatoes and carrots. It is topped liberally with cilantro:


It's absolutely delicious, and it inspired me to order a Ghana cookbook. I wonder what else they eat in Ghana!

Dessert

My rhubarb is going nuts, as usual, so I got some strawberries to make a classic strawberry rhubarb pie. That combination is just so magical. The syrup that comes out is like ambrosia. Well, I got lazy and didn't feel like making a pie, so I stewed the berries and rhubarb with sugar and lemon juice to make a simple compote:


It had the same magical flavor as a pie filling, without me having to make a pie!


Here is an obligatory photo of my faithful kitchen supervisors:


The fireweed is juuuuuuust starting to bloom. They don't look so vivid pink in the rain:

Notes from here and there

So far, the weather this summer has been lovely. Not too hot, not too cool; sunny days alternating with rainy days; and not many fires and clean, crisp air. I'm very grateful!

Blueberries are appearing now, and they are huge and brilliant blue! But I sampled a few, and they are still sour. The sugar will develop in a week or so.

These raspberries are ripe though, and they grow wild in our yard!


Every dog has her comfy. Cricket loves to sunbathe:


Thistle prefers to hang out inside, so she gets squozen:


Here I am pulling pin bones out of a salmon fillet with needle-nosed pliers!


I am wearing a kuskpuk, an Alaska Native garment that is very practical, with a huge front pocket and a hood. Traditionally, these were made with marine mammal gut and worn over a parka in wintertime to keep the parka clean. Nowadays, they are made of light cotton and nice in summertime as a bug shield. The hood has quite a bit of overhang over your face, so it’s very effective! I also used to wear a kuspuk on airplanes before covid came along and I quit going on airplanes. The hood is a defense mechanism from chatty seatmates, and the pocket is perfect for your boarding pass, a packet of tissues, a hanky, hand sanitizer, a lip balm, and a small bottle of hand lotion since airports are so dry! Now it’s a good garment for a post-covid world. You can pull the hood over your head to protect against potential sneeze juices, and keep hand sanitizer in the front pocket. Then it’s easy to pull off and throw right into the laundry hamper when you get home.

Thistle supervises fishy handlings very closely! She has not yet learned that she doesn’t get raw fishy! She only gets cooked fishy!


Speaking of laundry, we quit going to the laundromat since the ‘Rona, and I handwash clothes in a tub. I used to stand in the tub and wash clothes with my feet (like ancient Greeks making wine, said MK). But then I found this thing at Samson's Hardware, which is a very old-fashioned hardware store here in Fairbanks. They are the only place you can find things like an old-fashioned manual clothes agitator, stovetop pressure cookers, hand-forged tools, giant cast iron dutch ovens, and other things of that nature.


My current leisure reading is very Of the Moment:

The most miniscule of things

bumblebees on delphiniums!

I was only trying to photograph the bumblebees, but look how lovely the delphiniums look in this light!







Here is a kerflop photo:


And a wolfing-down-their-supper photo:


Sweet Thistle:

Bees!

Like gardening and keeping chickens, beekeeping seems to be a growing hobby nowadays, not just in Fairbanks but all over the U.S. I have several neighbors who keep bees, and it's always a pleasant surprise to see honeybees in my yard.

Honeybees are not native to Fairbanks, and most people who keep bees expect them to die every fall when temperatures drop. This is not as heartbreaking as it sounds; apparently bees don't in general live very long. UAF has done some research on whether it's possible to overwinter bees, but I'm not sure the status of that project now.

Our only native bees are big fuzzy bumbles, which I love!

Yesterday, I caught this one on the delphiniums, with a friend:


Does anyone know what the one on the left is? It has a fuzzy sweatshirt on and no pants, just like a honeybee, but it is colorblock yellow and black instead of stripes!

Here are more photos of the delphiniums, which are wild. Domesticated delphiniums also do well here, and are more beautiful. But these wild ones are worth all of the effort I put in to grow them, which is none.




Queen Thistle surveying her domain:


Here is a great article on the bear dogs that are keeping the firefighters safe from bears!

Also, also! Look at this Schweetie. Newtok, a beloved neighborhood dog, is getting more and more pets and visits as his cancer progresses. Go gently, Newtok.

Flower talk

This pretty purple flower is endemic to the Arctic and called "eskimo potato" (Hedysarum alpinum). Its roots are starchy like a parsnip, and are consumed by many animals, including humans. In fact, the name for UAF's main campus, Troth Yeddha', is an old Athabascan name for the main ridge of UAF campus, which was a gathering place for harvesting the troth, or wild potato. (yeddha' means ridge).


This equally pretty and equally purple flower is also endemic to the Arctic. People call it "wild sweet pea" (Hedysarum mackenzii), but no part of it is edible. There are stories of people dying for making this mistake, including possibly Christopher McCandless of Into the Wild fame.


Incidentally, the bus in which Mr. McCandless died, which some unwise and careless people had been seeing as a pilgrimage site (and drowning in the river while attempting to get to it), was just removed by the military, at no cost to the public. They said it was a training exercise for their pilots, and what an interesting thing that would have been to witness!

This is a wild iris. They grow all along the Tanana, and I love them.


So pretty!


"I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field and don't notice it." --Alice Walker


This is an Alpine Daisy. Of course, latitude can make sea level resemble altitude. We get quite a few "alpine" flora and fauna around here!


Does this look comfy? Thistle seems to think so.


She has sofffy jellybean toesies. I miss Roo's sofffy paws Most of All, but I'm glad Thistle lets me squeeze her jellybeans.


Cricket sez, "I also have paws! Check out my back paw!"