Amystery

OLS-Week Four

I wanted a break from having the stove or oven on for very long this week. It has been rather warm here, probably not what folks outside of Alaska would consider that warm, but 80 degrees still feels warm, especially when you commute sixteen miles by bike each day. I've ridden straight to our neighborhood swimming hole on the way home several days this week. A favorite local meal when it gets hot is homemade pesto, cheese and local tomatoes.
Unfortunately it is not entirely local, the noodles and sunflower seeds are not from regional sources. I make my pesto the traditional way, in a mortar and pestle, but due to a recent tree nut allergy I have to replace the pine nuts with sunflower seeds. The basil and tomatoes are from the farmer's market, I've denuded my garden basil and I'm giving it a chance to revive. The mozzarella is made with milk from a regional dairy, I made it just a short while before dinner, so it was at its freshest. Yum, definitely a favorite summer meal.

OLS-Week Three-in search of local food

I'm a bit late for a post this week, but I have a good reason. My reason, well you can see some of it in the above picture. I took off this weekend to go dipnetting in Chitina. Basically, when you are an Alaska resident, you can get a dipnetting permit for this section of the Copper River, and during the supplemental period (as it was the past weekend) your catch limit is 40 (normally 30). I always mean to take photos when we are down there because it is a bit absurd. You have a massive braided river (~1 mile across) and a long handled net. You put this net in the river and somehow you actually catch fish. Often fishing there involves scrambling down rock walls and steep drop offs.

We did quite well and we could've easily caught our limit, but we stopped at 13. As it was, this was nearly 100 pounds of uncleaned fish and plenty for us. Here are the results of our cleaning, hauling and vacuum packing, the ziploc bags of fish are headed to local smoker tomorrow. Our efforts this weekend will bring us plenty of tasty regional salmon for the winter and well into next year.

OLS-Week Two

I decided that since I am making to eat local every day, that instead I would share my favorite local recipe results instead of subjecting you to all the other meals I am eating during the week (still rather heavily in the salad eating phase of the summer right now). Also for those of you who haven't been there yet, One Local Summer has it's own blog now, check it out for regional delights from your part of the country/world.

We had a potluck to attend today and I wanted to keep within my local eating boundaries, added to that was inspiration from this recipe created by the talented Heidi at 101cookbooks. However, with our warm weather right now that last thing I wanted to do was fire up the oven, so here is my take on a roasted salsa recipe.

I left the farmer's market this morning with luscious local tomatoes, peppers and onion that were bound for my salsa. I sprayed all the veggies with some non-local olive oil and grilled them on our little propane grill until they were well done on all sides. I pureed a few tomato slices with a little of the onion and half of a pepper in the blender, then chopped the rest and mixed with a combination of farmer's market purchased and garden grown cilantro. Other than the olive oil, the only other non-local ingredient was garlic, unfortunately we don't get garlic around here until late in the fall and my garlic that I stored away from last fall is long gone. This salsa was a hit at the potluck which also featured other spectacular regional foods....marinated moose steaks, salmon, halibut, of course many homegrown salads and rhubarb crisp. I call this salsa...Gracious Grilled Salsa, mostly because local tomatoes are truly a benevolent shining star in my summer eating.