Fall Maintenance
Switching modes & seasons // pumpkin olive oil cake, hedgehog mushrooms and taking care
It’s hard to believe we’ve switched seasons but the snow-dusted mountain peaks confirm that fall is really here! Still holding tight to the last day of summer in our memories, in which the sun shone and the wind took a breather and we enjoyed a perfect day on Kachemak Bay with friends. We picked the last of the raspberries on the trail leading down to the cliff above the sea at our cabin in Peterson Bay, brought a picnic of leftover garlicky tomato burrata pasta by skiff to a sunny beach and found a glorious patch of hedgehog mushrooms in the moss behind the red fireweed, under the trees.
The next day, we woke up to a decidedly new season. Our friends had skiffed back to town on the afternoon tide and we stayed at the cabin to watch the stormy weather roll through. A big research ship pulled in and anchored up right in front of our house to take shelter from the weather in Cook Inlet. We turned up the VHF and listened for radio chatter while we cooked a mushroom risotto on the wood stove with our hedgehog harvest. We got a fire going outside and cleared the tops of some alders to encourage sunlight over the hill and onto the back deck. We cut firewood and got the gaps in the wood pile filled up. The cabin is built right on the edge of a rocky cliff above the water and when the tide is high and stormy the waves crashing underneath the house is so loud you feel like you’re on a boat but dry and still and safe inside. The perfect place for storm watching.
Maintenance has emerged as the theme of this new season. Of buildings, vehicles, boats, property, and our bodies. Last week I heard someone say, fall is the time of year when Alaskans start taking care of themselves again, because it’s when they have time. Summer is the big busy season for fishermen and for the seasonal businesses built around the influx of visitors and tourism. Taking a break can cost you, and it’s not until September and the salmon are done running and the equinox that things really come back to a sustainable, balanced pace.
A more balanced season is always welcome. We’ve been dedicating time to bringing strength back to our bodies with yoga classes and paddling and hikes with babies in the backpack, clearing stuff out of the house that had its season but can now be let go of, taking inventory of our winter gear as temps drop down to the 30’s at night, making our last trips to the farmer’s market and harvesting the last of the family garden. Our chickens just started laying eggs and the vegetables coming out of the local farms are absolutely gorgeous. Huge carrots and cauliflower, beets, purple potatoes, onions!
The menu lately has been a lot of roasted root veggies (beets and cauliflower), spicy kimchi with kelp from the farmer’s market, salmon pie with creamy dill sauce from The Salmon Sisters cookbook and last night’s seasonal delight was this super moist pumpkin olive oil cake with cream cheese frosting, the perfect first taste of fall. 10/10 recommend.
Our shops are closed for the summer in Homer and our summer team has headed out for their winter travels, college, and beyond. We recently started fulfilling our frozen wild fish boxes from Homer instead of using a fulfillment center in Oregon, so we’re dialing in our shipments each week and hoping to be back to full swing for the holidays! Excited to be able to take extra good care of these shipments of salmon and other Wild Alaska Seafood heading out across the country, they are such precious cargo and it’s always so exciting to see where they travel. This week, Florida, New York, Oklahoma!
Sending all our best to our readers and community this season, we are grateful you are here. We have some good project cooking and looking forward to sharing updates and recipes here. Hoping we all get some nice sunny weather to say farewell to September!