Celebrating Summer

Nothing says summer like a homemade peach pie.


And nothing tastes like summer like eating it.

The Naturalist's Meal

9:00pm. The thought of dinner occupied most of my hike in Port Alsworth. Dinner will be Lake Clark style – what did I pick today and what do I have leftover? The highlights: bolete mushrooms picked during my hike, radishes from my garden, udon noodles from Anchorage, half an onion and a tomato leftover from J. In half an hour, I am eating Lake Clark Minestrone straight out of the pot. I deem it a delicious meal but let's be honest, after that hike, I might have eaten my own hand.

Foods of Yesteryear

This is a jar of historic sourdough starter - a direct descendant of the starter that kept Dick Proenekke company for those years alone in his cabin at Twin Lakes, Alaska. Thank you to Kay and Monroe, the cabin's caretakers, for your generosity in sharing Dick's starter... and your delicious hotcakes.

About those hotcakes ... Kay mentioned they picked their first quart of blueberries today, and I sampled a few along the path, the best blueberries of this season so far. All of the talk of starter and blueberries got the Park Ranger to thinking about a feast of sourdough blueberry hotcakes he had with Kay and Monroe several years ago. Our hosts, upon revisiting this memory, quickly got up and started making “sourdoughs,” as Monroe calls them.

Monroe’s Sourdoughs:
- bowl of sourdough batter/starter
- some salt
- 1 egg
- some oil
- handpicked blueberries
- maple syrup

Monroe makes a paste of baking soda and water and adds a spoonful to a small bowl that holds enough batter for two hotcakes. He says if he added the baking soda all at once, the last cakes wouldn’t have any rise left in them.

In Lieu of Oven

During a hike through Port Alsworth, the Historian, who describes himself as "on exile from Maine," gave me his recipe for baked beans.

The Historian's Boston Baked Beans:
- 1 ceramic bean pot
- 1 bag of beans from Maine (red or pinto will also do)
- dried ginger
- dried mustard
- molasses
- 1 onion
- Canadian bacon

Soak beans overnight. Boil in soaking water. Take spoonful of beans, blow on them, and if peels move, take off heat. Drain liquid. Put whole onion at bottom of pot. Mix other ingredients into paste. Add paste to beans, add water. Bake for 12 hours at 350F.

After trying to keep up with him during the brisk hike, I was too tired to turn on any heat-producing device to make dinner, but of course, I still wanted dessert. I solved the problem with a helping of Lake Clark Lazy Man Bread Pudding:

- Sauté chopped white peaches in a pat of butter.
- Add half can of mango juice to thicken into syrup.
- Add chopped bread and vanilla yogurt.
- Dust with cinnamon.

Do Not Eat This Sh*t Under Any Circumstances

When flying to Lake Clark, you are told to pack whatever food you intend to eat. However, since I was going to be in Lake Clark National Park for less than two weeks, I did not think to pack ingredients for pancakes. My friend J had a bag of amaranth flour that had a pancake recipe on the back, but we were missing several ingredients. I made an executive decision that anything missing that had a granular texture would be substituted with multipurpose flour, which J had in his tent cabin. Since we did not have maple syrup, I added a few tablespoons from one of my instant maple-flavored cream-of-wheat packets into the dry ingredients, then chopped up a white peach I had brought from Anchorage, sautéed the fruit in a precious pat of butter, and dumped half a can of mango juice to reduce into a syrup (having not brought sugar). What resulted was a satisfying stack of Lake Clark pancakes.

As I was making this breakfast, it occurred to me how scarcity deeply affects the value of things in our lives. In Anchorage, I frequently buy eggs eighteen at a time at Costco for a couple of dollars, and I think nothing of them. But for my short stay at Lake Clark, I brought only a precious three eggs. J gave me two more, but after today’s breakfast, I am down to only two. These last two eggs will likely be The Most Important Eggs of My Life. Not having what I needed to make pancakes also forced me to be a little bit resourceful. At home, I would have absentmindedly reached for the good Vermont maple syrup I keep on hand and hence would have never wandered into the white peach mango fruit chutney we ultimately had for breakfast.

Scarcity gives every resource here a multifaceted life. Everything used here has to be burned or taken back to a landfill in Anchorage. Everything eaten here has to be hunted, grown locally, or more likely (because the soil is so poor), flown in from Anchorage. In my few days living out of small boxes of food, it has become clear that waste is a luxury and curse of big city life. Port Alsworth, on the other hand, is a place built and constantly fixed with broken parts – odds and ends given second, third lives through the efforts of hardworking people. In this sense, I understand Port Alsworth.

It has also become apparent to me that the people of Port Alsworth have come here to be left alone. While everyone is very friendly and is genuinely happy to see you trudging up the path, there are few invitations into someone’s home or plans to get together. Despite this strange strain of indifference, I feel an overwhelming desire to feed this entire community, to say something in food to replace the silence of words.

J and I ended the day with yet another resourceful dinner in the form of old MREs (Meals Ready to Eat) found stored somewhere in a shop cabinet. As part of reorganizing the shop from floor to ceiling, the MREs had been alphabetized and placed next to the microwave for anyone to eat. J and I had sampled the Fudge Brownie and Pound Cake as fuel while bottling homebrew. I recommend both highly. J is of the opinion that the Pound Cake may be the best MRE ever. For our dinner snack tonight, however, he wanted to try something different. We had Cheese and Crackers, but I didn't have much appetite for dry stale crackers and cheese out of a plastic bag. The really scary MRE we sampled, however, was Omelet With Ham. It should have been more properly labeled as "DO NOT EAT THIS SH__ UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES." The Omelet With Ham tasted something like soggy cardboard. I've never eaten soggy cardboard before, but I think the taste is unmistakable. While I took no more than my initial bite, J polished it off. Boys are funny that way.

"Making of the Sausages"

After dinner, J and I embarked in yet another series of common activities in Port Alsworth, AK: preparing salmon for canning and transformation into jerky. The Park Services historian had agreed to lend us his heavy duty pressure cooker for canning, and we got tips and equipment for the jerky from the maintenance and safety officer. J and I spent much of the evening washing fish, cutting fish, stuffing fish, grinding fish, mixing fish.

I have to admit, however, his stash of sockeye reds was truly amazing. J had frozen much of it in solid ice, having run out of vacuum bags, and the soft bright red salmon flesh seemed to be as beautiful as it must have been on the very first day.


To make salmon jerky, you must remove the skin from the filets, thoroughly debone the fish with needlenose pliers, and put it through a grinder. For grinding, we borrowed an old-time contraption stored in an original box happily labeled "Making of the sausages" in four different languages.

At the end of our rainbow, we had a beautiful pot of ground up salmon. Patting the salmon jello was a strangely satisfying thing to do, but our work was not done. After adding jerky seasoning, the mass has to marinate overnight before being stuffed into a tube that looks like a caulk gun and then piped out onto a grate for drying in the oven. Luckily those steps will be saved for tomorrow because I am pooped out.