Alaska Cooks

It was 45 degrees and raining in Anchorage, and didn’t feel much like summer was almost here. We had left work early on Friday afternoon, trying to sneak out of town ahead of the Memorial Day weekend traffic. So had everyone else, and it was a long, slow ride down the Kenai Peninsula to Homer. A “drinking village with a fishing problem,” Homer is literally the end of the road, 250 miles south of Anchorage. Every year a group of us heads down over the holiday weekend to spend the three or four days on a beach across Kachemak Bay. It started as a kayaking adventure, but with the advent of multiple kids, dogs, and expectations, the annual trip has grown into a beach party (kayaking optional) where the only requirement is that you provide your own camp chair - no poaching.

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alaska, barbecue, grill, holiday, pork

Alaska Cooks & Company are wandering through Ireland and France, basically attempting to eat our weight in cheese and baked goods. Please hang in there for another week or two - I’ll be back soon with tales and pictures.

jared

excuses

Ever since I was finally turned loose upon the world as a college student, omelettes have been a favorite. Cheap and quick, completely up to the whim of the cook. I’ve flirted with lots of ingredients, and have found that less is more, and simple is better. Funny how that works out so often. The ones that I find myself making over and over again, omelette aux fines herbes, or Parmesan, or even with bits of crispy pancetta, are a far cry from the egg-burrito types that breakfast joints fill with everything they have on hand. All the lovely pictures popping up lately of fine spring asparagus have been on my mind. Last week, we finally got the first shipments of the fresh spring shoots. I could say that the arrival of the lavender banded-bunches in our local market is another rite of spring for us. We have a lot of them: The appearance of last year’s dog toys from under the receding snow, the arrival of the cranes and geese, the first haze of green on the trees across the lake, the emergence of the Partner from her turtleneck…

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alaska, breakfast, comfort

The longer days and sunshine have pushed winter out, and we’ve all got a healthy dose of spring fever. There is still plenty of snow in the mountains above the city, and lots of cleanup left to do here in town. It’s that time of year again, when for good or ill, Anchorage has thawed out. The long days and rising mercury are welcome but the cleanup the long winter leaves us with is a chore. Roads have shattered and cracked, buckled and heaved, opening gaps that threaten even the most ridiculous SUVs. Gravel pelts the windshield, making me jumpy on the morning commute. Dirty water collecting in dirty pools along the gutters never has a chance to settle before another car sprays through, leaving just a little more gray muck behind. A winter’s worth of garbage emerges from the receding gravel and ice. Tires, paper, everything you can think of is out there decorating the medians. Our office goes out each May and picks up garbage, part of the city cleanup program. One year a group from another office discovered a rusty handgun. Another stumbled on a dismembered mannequin, and I can only imagine that first glance.

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alaska, seafood, vaugely asian

Biscuits. Cornbread. Muffins. Banana bread. Soda bread. Loaves. Pancakes, popovers, waffles, crepes, cookies, scones, doughnuts. I should mention biscuits again. You folks on Atkins are probably either cringing, drooling or crying by now. Quickbreads come in all shapes and sizes. Fairly easy to throw together, they typically take just a few minutes to mix and an hour or so to bake. Instead of using yeast, these type of breads are leavened with baking soda or powder. Since these chemical leaveners act fairly quickly, there isn’t a long fermentation period as there is with yeast. Nor does this type of baking require kneading. The opposite is actually true, as it’s easy to over mix the dough and turn your loaf into something with the same specific gravity as a doorstop. Some do require specialized techniques (crepes) or equipment (waffles, doughnuts, popovers), but most are simple mix-and-bake recipes that the average (or even fairly stupid) 6-year old could get right the first time.

The late Lewis Grizzard wrote in his newspaper column that after being married three times, and he always knew when the honeymoon was over. As long as she loved him, she’d make scratch biscuits, but when she switched to thwack biscuits (you thwack the can on the edge of the counter to open them) it was all over but the shouting.

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baking, bread