Author Archives: Jack & Barbra Donachy

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About Jack & Barbra Donachy

Writers, photographers, food lovers, anglers, travelers and students of poetry

Alaska Gourmet: Pan-Fried Salmon with Herbed Butter on Butternut Squash Ravioli

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Fall food themes continue with this pièce de résistance fit for a king. Chinook salmon holds center stage drizzled with herbed butter and served on butternut squash ravioli. Food stylist extraordinaire Barbra came up with the idea of rolling shaved parmesan into tubes. 

With plenty of sockeye salmon harvested, cleaned and packaged in our freezers, it nonetheless wasn’t a case of “coals to Newcastle” when a friend offered up a couple fat fillets of Chinook. Reds, pinks, chums and silvers – they’re all welcome at our dinner table any time. But kings… with their higher percentage of healthful fat and their decadent melt-in-your-mouth texture… kings are special.  With a batch of butternut and ricotta ravioli in the freezer courtesy of Barbra, I knew just what I wanted to do with one of the fillets. This was as fine a meal as we’ve ever enjoyed. (Barbra promises the pumpkin/squash ravioli recipe will be posted soon!)

This dish goes particularly well with Brussels sprouts, a vegetable we especially appreciate out here in the Alaska bush because they ship well and have a long shelf-life in the refrigerator. Our favorite cooking method is to cut the Brussels sprouts in half lengthwise, toss them in a bowl with olive oil, sea salt and cracked pepper, and then place them cut-side down in sizzling olive oil in a frying pan. Turn the heat down (but make sure they’re still sizzling) and cover the pan. Check, and when the cut side has browned, flip the sprouts to the leafy side. Turn up the heat a little to get things really sizzling again, then turn it back down to a little below medium and cover the pan. The leaves will brown up and caramelize and a few will blacken. They’re ready to be served.

Pan-Fried Salmon with Herbed Butter on Butternut Squash Ravioli

Ingredients (serves 2)

  • 1-pound fillet of any wild-caught Pacific salmon, skin on
  • sea salt
  • black pepper
  • (Optional) mirin or white wine – just a little
  • 2 tbsp butter
  • 1 or 2 shallots, sliced fine
  • 1/2 tbsp tarragon (dried) or 1 tbsp fresh
  • 2 servings worth of ravioli stuffed with pumpkin, squash, mushrooms or light cheeses
  • parmesan cheese, grated or sliced, to garnish
  • Extra virgin olive oil

Directions

  1. Prepare ravioli per directions, timed so that it’s ready when the salmon is ready.
  2. Rinse fillet, pat dry with paper towels and cut into two portions. Inspect for pin bones, which can easily be pulled out with a pair of kitchen pliers. Sprinkle with sea salt and a little black pepper.
  3. Add a tablespoon or 2 of olive oil to a frying pan and turn to a little hotter than medium heat. When oil is ready to sizzle, carefully place fillets in the pan skin side up. Add just a splash of mirin. Cover and cook for 2 minutes, till meat is seared.
  4. Turn salmon over so that it is skin side down. Add another splash of mirin. Turn heat down to just below medium, cover. A general rule of thumb for fish is to cook for about 8 to 10 minutes per inch of thickness. When white substance appears on fillet, it is cooked through. Avoid overcooking.
  5. Meanwhile, over medium-low heat, melt butter in a small pan. Add shallots and tarragon and sauté just long enough to soften the shallots and release the tarragon’s aroma.
  6. Serve ravioli and arrange salmon on top. Spoon on herbed butter.
  7. Serve hot with a couple of fingers of your favorite bourbon.

 

Perfect Sourdough English Muffins: Easier than You Think!

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Perfectly round. Perfectly chewy. Perfect little breakfast breads. Why did I quit on you so quickly. my Darlings?

With success under my belt making sourdough bread, I found myself contemplating what other types of delicious baked goods I could make with my sourdough starter. A friend in the village lent me an old Alaskan recipe book with a huge collection of recipes that are truly Alaskan. Did you ever wonder how to cook up beaver meat? Or fireweed stalks? These are just a couple of the interesting recipes found in this volume. Of course, there was a substantial section on sourdough. I don’t know if many people realize this, but sourdough is a very Alaskan thing.  In fact, you can find starters that date back to the Klondike gold rush! It was an easy thing for people of that time to keep fresh starter going. They only had to regularly feed it. Delicious pancakes and breads could then be whipped up in a snap.

Now that I have a healthy starter going (I actually have two, thanks to another friend), I started playing around with recipe ideas that would showcase this unique ingredient. In short order, an idea came to me from a recipe that I’d failed at several years ago…

I got into serious baking when we first came out to the Alaska bush. At that time, we decided to make as much of our food as we could from scratch, knowing that our local store would have limited supplies. We shipped out ingredients in bulk, like 50-pound bags of flour and sugar and 25-pound bags of rice and beans. It was lovely to have a year’s worth of ingredients in our pantry. Lately, I’ve been contemplating how my baking skills and confidence have grown since the days of bread machine loaves and basic chocolate chip cookies to what I turn out in our kitchen now: lattice-topped pies with homemade crusts and my own “Twix” bars in which every layer of the candy is crafted from scratch.

I can’t remember what about my first English muffins was so bad, but I do remember being quite frustrated and promptly turning my back on these little breads. Until now. I’m glad I came around. These round beauties came out better than store bought. They had that lovely sour tang to them, the chewiness that is the hallmark of good English muffins with the expected crunch of cornmeal on the outside. Of course, we split them with forks before serving them toasted with butter and homemade jam. We also use these muffins for tasty breakfast sandwiches of fried egg, salmon, and melting cheddar cheese. As it turns out, these tasty baked breads are actually pretty easy to make. Who knows what wrong I did to this recipe so many years ago.

Sourdough English Muffins

Ingredients

  • 2 tbsp granulated sugar
  • 2 cups warm water (about 110 degrees F)
  • 1 tbsp active dry yeast
  • 7 cups all-purpose flour
  • 1 cup sourdough starter
  • ½ cup nonfat dried milk
  • ¼ unsalted butter
  • 1 tbsp salt
  • cornmeal, for coating

Directions

  1. Combine all of the dough ingredients (except cornmeal) in a large bowl.
  2. Mix and knead. Dough should be elastic and not too sticky.
  3. Place dough in a lightly greased bowl. Cover with plastic and let rise for about 1 hour.
  4. Turn dough out on a lightly flour surface.
  5. Divide dough in half.
  6. Roll dough to about ½ inch thick. Cut into 3” rounds with cookie cutter. Or just cut dough into squares, using a knife.
  7. Re-roll and cut any remaining scraps.
  8. Repeat with remaining half of dough.
  9. Place rounds onto cornmeal-sprinkled baking sheets. Sprinkle with additional cornmeal.
  10. Cover with plastic wrap and let them rise for another hour.
  11. Preheat a large griddle over medium-low heat.
  12. Place as many muffins as you can (without crowding) on griddle.
  13. Cook muffins for 10 minutes on each side.
  14. Remove muffins from griddle and cool on a wire rack. Store tightly wrapped at room temperature for about 5 days. Freeze for longer storage.

Recipe adapted from King Arthur Flour.

Salinger’s Overlooked Masterpiece: Franny and Zooey

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Salinger had a gift for placing his protagonists in certain, very specific places from which the rest of the world is held at arm’s length. In the case of the Glass family, to which Franny and Zooey belong, he went a step further and created an existence from which the rest of the world is barred from admission. No one is seen as quite good enough, interesting enough, self-aware enough, insightful enough or honest enough to be permitted into this singularly insular family. Except, of course, for the reader.

In Franny, the short story that opens Franny and Zooey, Salinger takes us to a vantage point from which we are permitted to observe and eavesdrop on a small table in a small restaurant where on a weekend break from college the protagonist is studying her date’s attempt to coax his frogs’ legs into position so he can have a proper go at them. She, meanwhile, barely touches the sandwich that has been set before her, preferring to chain-smoke while the two of them engage in distracted, fragmented but revealing conversation.

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The precision characteristic of much of Salinger’s writing could be distracting – if not downright annoying – in the hands of a less skilled author. The temptation would be to skim past much of the descriptive detail. But we don’t. Like detectives, we’re glued to every gesture, every phrase, searching for clues, knowing that even one passage carelessly glossed over might mean missing a vital element to the story unfolding before us. We sense almost immediately upon meeting Franny that something is wrong with her – or if “wrong” is too strong, then at least unbalanced. 

This installment of the Glass family saga was first published in The New Yorker in 1955. The novella-length Zooey, set almost entirely in the bathroom(!) and living room of the Glass’ apartment, was published in the same magazine a year later. In Zooey, it is almost as though the precisely detailed descriptive passages become the plot itself as every nuance reveals a lead.

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The two stories were bound together in book form in 1961. Although Franny and Zooey spent 25 weeks atop the New York Times Best Seller List, a number of reviews gave it harsh treatment. These rather peevish lines in 1961 from John Updike in the New York Times capture a general feeling expressed by others: “The author never rests from circling his creations, patting them fondly, slyly applauding. He robs the reader of the initiative upon which love must be given.”

Joan Didion crankily called the stories “spurious,” and slammed the pedantic nature of Salinger’s writing, likening Franny and Zooey to “self-help copy… for Sarah Lawrence girls.” (Ouch.) Alfred Kazin dismissed the writing as “cute.” Maxwell Geismar opined that the writing in Zooey was “appallingly bad,” and George Steiner dismissed the novella as “shapeless self-indulgence.”

Barbra and I had both, independently, read Franny and Zooey many years before we met each other. The book stayed with us (as did It’s a Perfect Day for Bananafish for me, the first installment of Salinger’s Glass family stories). Neither of us had any idea that the book had met with such disfavor when we added it our list of books to read together.

We found the work to be a quick, riveting read (and were amazed to later discover that some critics had groused that it was too long). I found myself comparing it with Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby for the very specific sense of place and character it portrays while remaining artistically fresh and thematically timeless. Zooey in particular is a masterpiece, and by that I mean that if writing were displayed in museums in the manner in which paintings are displayed, it would occupy a hallowed place beside a handful of other great post-modern works of fiction.

Searching the internet for positive reviews, we were gratified to find that forty years after the book came out, Janet Malcolm had come to the conclusions similar to those we’d come to. In Justice to J. D. Salinger, (The New York Review of Books, June 2001) she identified Zooey as “arguably Salinger’s masterpiece” and went on to write:

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Our view is that Franny and Zooey belongs in the canon of great American post-modern literature. Going beyond American shores in the genre, this is an excellent book to pair with a reading of Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler.

Writing for Readers who Love Reading – Italo Calvino’s “If on a winter’s night a traveler”

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‘The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: The continuity of life, the inevitability of death.” From Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler, quoted in the film Stranger than Fiction.

I first encountered If on a winter’s night a traveler when I was stationed in Japan onboard USS Blue Ridge, reading voraciously during my free time at sea in an effort to prepare myself for college once my hitch was up. Published in Italian in 1979, Calvino’s masterpiece had just been translated into English. Did I come across it on a visit to the foreign literature section of Maruzen bookstore in Tokyo’s Nihonbashi district? Did my sister who was working on a master’s degree in literature send a copy to me? I don’t recall. But by the time I was a few chapters into it, I sensed that I was reading a book that would endure among the important works of postmodern literature. An “anti-novel,” some have called it, for the rules of narrative it challenged and broke. When writers and literature professors caution that readers should avoid asking the question, “What is this piece of writing about?” this is the kind of writing they have in mind.

As such, the fragmented journey Calvino takes readers on is not everyone’s cup of tea. An otherwise positive 1981 New York Times review concluded by pouting that the book contains “…a sadness of its central subject, the absence of the artist, Dickens, Tolstoy, Stendhal, Dostoyevsky…” whom the reviewer appreciated for the more linear plots they crafted.

Nevertheless, notice the names on the list Calvino’s work was being compared to: Giants.

Some years ago Barbra and I came across the film Stranger than Fiction, the story of one Harold Crick (Will Ferrell) who comes to realize that he has become trapped in a novel as the protagonist and that his life is being whimsically determined by the novel’s author. In his attempt to extricate himself from this predicament, Harold ends up in the office of literary professor Jules Hilbert (Dustin Hoffman) who, swinging on the pivotal phrase “Little did he know…,” offers Calvino’s observation that ‘The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: The continuity of life, the inevitability of death'” and observes that Harold’s first task is to figure out whether the novel in which he is entangled is a comedy or a tragedy. This is one of our favorite films, and I suspected that Barbra would love Calvino.

And so we finally got around to reading If on a winter’s night a traveler, taking turns chapter by chapter against a Chignik Lake background of darkening fall nights, hot cups of tea and a little chocolate.

If on a winter’s night is packed with quirky juxtapositions, startlingly inventive metaphors, precise language, a metaphysical examination of the act of reading and light romance. These elements are masterfully woven together, if not by a plot, exactly, then by threads that pull the reader ever deeper into a literary mystery about a literary mystery. There, I used the word “about.” That’s enough. This is a book that will delight and fascinate readers who love to read.

Happy Holidays! Lowbush Cranberry (Lingonberry) Upside-Down Cake

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Bursting with the flavors and colors of the holidays, this lowbush cranberry cake makes a beautiful centerpiece for a fall table and, if there is any left, the breakfast table the next day!

Oh, these little red gems, these sour little beauties. They go straight from the freezer into a delicious batter and bake up into a cake you’ll want to share with friends.

Lowbush cranberries (as they are known here in Alaska) are our superstar fruit of fall and winter. Known as lingonberries elsewhere, these tart, tiny red berries grow close to the ground in cold, boggy habitat of northern climes. They taste similar to the cranberries we used to buy in the store, but they are so much better. As with many small, wild fruits, they are packed with more flavor than their mass-produced counterparts. And according to the University of Alaska, our lowbush cranberries contain more antioxidants due to clean air and long summertime sunlight hours. The berries are easy to pick and easy to clean and are widely available in our neck of the woods just around the time of the first frost. So far, we’ve made them into hot juice drinks and cranberry sauce. Now they are starring in this sumptuous upside down cake.

Lingonberry aka Lowbush Cranberry Upside Down Cake

Ingredients

Bottom Layer

  • 4 tbsp unsalted butter
  • ¾ cup dark brown sugar
  • 3 cups lowbush cranberries (or substitute store-bought cranberries)

Batter

  • 1 ¼ cup all purpose flour
  • ¼ cup corn meal
  • 1 ½ tsp baking powder
  • ¼ tsp salt
  • ½ cup unsalted butter, melted or browned
  • ¾ cup granulated sugar
  • 1 tsp Penzeys powdered lemon zest (or zest of 1 lemon)
  • 2 large eggs, beaten
  • 1 tsp vanilla extract
  • ½ cup whole milk

Directions

  1. In a small saucepan, heat 4 tbsp unsalted butter and brown sugar.
  2. Stir constantly until butter and sugar are melted together and bubbling.
  3. Pour mixture into bottom of 9 inch cake pan. Set aside.
  4. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (180 degrees C).
  5. Whisk together flour, corn meal, baking powder and salt in a large bowl.
  6. In a small bowl, whisk together melted butter, sugar, lemon zest, eggs, vanilla and milk.
  7. Pour wet ingredients into dry and whisk together until mixed.
  8. Pour cranberries evenly on top of butter mixture in the 9-inch pan.
  9. Pour batter evenly over cranberries.
  10. Bake cake in preheated oven for 50 minutes. Wooden pick inserted into center will be clean when cake is done.
  11. Let cake cool in pan on wire rack for 10 minutes.
  12. Run a knife around the circumference of cake. Invert on cake platter to serve.
  13. Serve warm.

Recipe adapted from David Lebovitz.

Diminutive Raspberry Cheesecakes with a Sweet Raspberry Jam

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Cheesecakes for one – creamy vanilla with the tang of cream cheese. Top it with some favorite jam and Wow, this makes for a delicious, elegant dessert.

Out in the Alaska bush, I don’t usually stock cream cheese in my pantry. But during a recent visit to a neighboring village I happened across a two-pound block at the store. It doesn’t freeze very well, which makes for a perfect excuse to immediately create lots of baked items with this delicious ingredient. I’ve made these lovely little cheesecakes before using matcha green tea as the flavoring. This recipe is a perfect base in which to add in a variety of flavors. For this batch, I wanted to showcase my raspberry freezer jam, so I created a complementary vanilla-flavored cake.

Diminutive Vanilla Cheesecakes

Ingredients

Crust

  • 1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
  • 1/3 cup granulated sugar
  • 1 egg, beaten
  • 1/2 cup butter, melted

Filling

  • 1 package of cream cheese, 250 grams, softened to room temperature
  • 1/2 cup granulated sugar
  • 1 large egg, beaten
  • 1 tsp vanilla extract

Directions

  1. Preheat oven to 300 degrees F (150 degrees C). Line 8 standard-sized muffin tin cups with paper liners.
  2. In a medium bowl, mix together crust ingredients.
  3. Evenly divide crust mixture into lined muffin tin cups. Press down to form bottom of cheesecakes.
  4. Bake crusts for 5 minutes. Let cool.
  5. In a large bowl, whisk together filling ingredients. There should be no lumps and all ingredients should be mixed well.
  6. Divide filling evenly into paper lined cups.
  7. Bake cheesecakes until set, about 16 – 18 minutes. Centers should not jiggle.
  8. Refrigerate cheesecakes for 3 hours before serving.

The Damp Times: The News on Home Brewing in Chignik Lake

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With no place to pick up a case of beer for our Octoberfest sausage (grilling in the background), we decided to have a go at brewing our own. The results? A pilsner as light and crisp as the autumn weather we enjoyed today here in Chignik Lake.

Nothing compliments fried oyster po’ boys, grilled sausages with caramelized onions, deep fried rockfish or the end of a good run like a crisp, cold lager or ale. Living in a “damp” village where alcohol is permitted but not sold, we added “learn to make beer” to our list of culinary goals for this year.

For us, a kit was the way to go. The one we ordered came with a can of wort – the thick, molasses-like mixture that is the base of beer -, bottles, and everything else we needed. Total brewing time was about six weeks.

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And the results… Well, take a look! We’ve already got our next brew going. Looks like it’s time to purchase proper beer glasses!

Beading the Dolly Varden… And how Did they get that name?

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Spawning salmon attract opportunistic Dolly Varden char looking for easy pickin’s of fresh roe. It’s the perfect opportunity to grab a fly-rod, a handful of beads and hit the water. 

Chignik Lake’s main road begins at the dirt airstrip on the west side of the village and terminates at the riverside boat landing to the east. The 3.3 miles in-between, often marked with clumps of bear scat, moose tracks and even wolf prints, runs past a tiny post office on the ground floor of the postmaster’s home and a clinic only occasionally manned by itinerate healthcare providers who fly in from other villages. Along the way, the mostly dirt road winds past a school with a total enrollment of 19 students, a tiny Greek Orthodox church, a community center and a sparse collection of houses that are home to the village’s 50 or so inhabitants. Patches of salmonberries, alders and fireweed edge most of the road, which at one point crosses a crystalline stream that fills up with spawning char each fall.

The only practical ways in and out of the village are by bush plane or boat. And so, when a friend told us he’d be flying into the sister village of Chignik Bay and suggested we come down for some fishing, we needed to hitch a ride on someone’s skiff in order to make the 16-mile run down the Chignik River, through Chignik Lagoon, around the headlands and into Chignik Bay. Fortunately this didn’t present a problem, as we’re virtually the only two people in the village who don’t have an aluminum Lund v-hull with an outboard motor – the Chignik Lake version of a pickup truck

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Chignik resident Clinton Boskofsky runs his 18’ aluminum skiff down the Chignik River on a sunshine-filled day in early fall.

A few bald eagles eyed us cooly from bank-side perches as the skiff bounced down the remote river toward the Alaska Gulf. Two weeks ago on this same river I’d seen a handful of bears drawn by thousands of sockeye salmon teaming in the shallows, their bodies crimson red, heads moss green. But today salmon were scarce and the bears had moved up into the feeder streams where the fish were still spawning. 

Gradually, the brisk fall air took on a familiar briny scent as we approached the lagoon. The bones of an old gillnetter fishing boat rested along the southern shoreline and an abandoned cannery came into view on the opposite side, vestiges of a not-so-distant past.

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“Love this smell!” Barbra called out over the steady hum of the outboard.

“Tide’s out a little, flat calm. No bears I guess, but it’s a good day to see otters!” I called back.

Sure enough, as we broke into open water, a raft of sea otters popped up their heads to give us a curious look.

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Puffins, kittiwakes, murres, gulls, cormorants, auklets and leaping salmon were also in the mix of wildlife as we hung a right, arced around the headlands and cruised into Chignik Bay. Surrounded by a semi-circle of mountains, the evening light over the village was fading fast. As the bow of the skiff nosed into the gravel beach with a metallic crunch, our friend Jerry walked down to greet us.

“Any fish up in the creek?” I asked him.

“I dunno,” he replied. “I just got here myself. Haven’t been up to look yet. I guess we’ll find out tomorrow morning.”

Work in Mongolia having pulled us away from our adopted state for the past two years, it had been awhile since we’d last seen our old friend. With lots of drinking… er… catching up to do, we ended up getting a late start the next day. Fortunately, it wouldn’t matter. If salmon were in the stream the Dollies would be close behind, sucking up any loose eggs that failed to get buried in the spawning redds. The char wouldn’t be fussy as long as we showed them beads approximating the size and color of the roe they were feeding on. 

Shortly after lunch the next day, the three of us were standing on a bridge at the edge of Chignik Bay village overlooking Indian Creek’s pellucid waters. A month ago, this very stretch of the stream had been thick with spawning pink salmon. That run was over. With and without polarized sunglasses, we strained our eyes hoping to catch a tell-tale flash or shadow below the rippled surface.

“There’s a salmon!” I looked to see where Jerry was pointing.

“Oh, yeah!” Barbra exclaimed. “There’s a few!”

Mildly irritated that I still hadn’t found the fish, I narrowed my eyes and kept looking. Gradually, almost magically, some of the multi-colored stream bed rocks I’d been staring at began to reveal themselves as animate objects, little light-gray torpedoes casting faint shadows. Pinks. Looking more closely, other, smaller shapes subtly shifting in the current materialized. Dollies.

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Colored rocks below a rippled surface paint a mosaic on Indian Creek.

Each of us rigged up with a standard 9’ leader terminating in a 5x tippet, threaded on an egg-sized bead somewhere in the orangish-red spectrum, tied on a small black hook, pinched down the barb and affixed a hot pink, fingernail-sized strike indicator a few feet above the egg. A translucent silicon stopper inserted into the bead would allow us to keep the egg in place a couple of inches above the hook.

Fishing beads is fairly straightforward. When salmon spawn, the female uses her caudal fin – her tail – to dig out a depression in the stream’s gravel bed. This nest is called a redd. As she deposits her eggs, a male releases milt. The female then moves upstream and again uses her tail to push gravel over the fertilized eggs. Thus buried, the eggs will remain well oxygenated and safe from predators until they hatch in the coming months.

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Male Dolly Varden in brilliant fall spawning colors. Note the orange bead “egg” just below its jaws. In a few hours of fishing covering two days, the three of us caught dozens and dozens of char from 10 to 19 inches. We kept 10 fish for the kitchen – a few small fish to charcoal grill whole and three larger fish for other recipes. (See Rustic Char and Dolly Varden Shioyaki.)

But there are invariably eggs that drift out of the redd before they can be buried. Mergansers, gulls, sculpins, trout, char and ravens are among a host of opportunists that seek out these loose eggs. On Indian Creek we encountered American dippers, a fascinating songbird able to hop into a stream and walk along the bottom, availing themselves of drifting roe.

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Dollies are fall spawners and the abdomen of this beautifully-marked female is swelled with her own eggs.

The objective is to present the bead so that it gently bounces along the bottom as a natural egg would. A cast straight upstream or quartering upstream is generally most effective. When a char intercepts the bead, the strike indicator floating with the current will hesitate. With a small, sharp, barbless hook, simply lifting the rod while tightening the line is sufficient to achieve a hookup.

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This male Indian Creek Dolly Varden was stuffed to the gills with fresh salmon roe. Note the red dot on the egg closest to the Dolly; it indicates that the egg has been fertilized.

The next morning, with a few hours to spare before our boat ride was scheduled to show up, we decided to have another go at Indian Creek. This time we wanted to give our tenkara rods a try. It’s origins in Japan, tenkara angling exemplifies simplicity at its finest.

There is no reel. Instead, a long line is attached directly to the tip of a light, delicate but strong, telescoping rod. Our tenkara rods are about 12 feet in length but telescope down to a mere 21 inches. The entire set-up weighs less than 2 1/2 ounces. Rated for a maximum tippet strength of about five pound test, these rods are perfect for hiking and stream exploring in pursuit of fish of a few inches up to a couple of pounds. Between the long rod, a slightly longer line and an outstretched arm, a cast of nearly 30 feet is achievable – plenty long enough to cover the water on streams, small rivers and even the weedy margins of a lakeshore. 

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Jerry took this stunning female Dolly on a tenkara rod and a bead. Rod, line, lure and pristine water… Angling doesn’t get any more beautifully simple.

Fishing over the same water we’d hit the previous day, we expected fewer fish. Happily, that wasn’t the case. In fact, our two largest char came on the tenkara rods. And for the second day in a row, except for a pair of dippers and a belted kingfisher, we had the stream to ourselves.

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So how did this fascinating member of the trout and char clan come to be called “Dolly Varden?” Glad you asked.

It seems that sometime in the 1870’s anglers on northern California’s McCloud River were catching a species of brightly-colored trouty-looking fish. Admiring the brilliant spots and colorful markings, the anglers called them “calico trout” after the floral-patterned cloth. A group of fisherman were looking over a catch of these “calico trout” and lamenting that there wasn’t a better name for them when a 16-year old girl, the daughter of local resort owners, happened along. The girl had been reading Charles Dickens’ Barnaby Rudge in which there is a character by the name of Dolly Varden. This character was named for the feminine fashion of the time, a  muslin dress worn over a brightly colored petticoat. In fact, the girl had recently received a dress and petticoat in that very style. “Why not call them ‘Dolly Varden?’” she suggested.

The name stuck, and so this most colorful salmonid came to known by a most colorful name.

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The eponymous Dolly Varden fashion of the 1870s…

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 …And an exquisite specimen of Salvalinus malma – the Dolly Varden char.

Back in the skiff heading home, a squall packing icy rain hit us square in the face as we rounded the cape. We pulled jacket hoods tight and hunkered down, following Clinton’s directions to shift our weight against changes in wind and current in order to keep the boat on an even keel. No complaints. A few fish iced down in a small tub, time on a beautiful piece of water, a friendship renewed… And we never take for granted how fortunate we are to live in this land of staggering abundance.

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Sleeves rolled up and arms elbow deep in Indian Creek’s frigid waters, I snapped a few frames not sure what, if anything, I’d get. There appear to be four species of salmon as well as a couple of dozen char in this shot. 

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A basic bead kit includes a box with a few beads and a few short-shank hooks, silicon toothpicks (if you’ve been using wood, try silicon), and a card of self-adhesive strike indicators. (There are 12 pink, fingernail-sized self-adhesive foam squares on this card.) The strike indicators can be slid up and down the line depending on water depth. The bead, pegged to the line with a silicon toothpick (inserted and trimmed close to the egg) can also be slid. Note that the egg is affixed about two inches above the hook. This positioning ensures that fish are consistently and neatly hooked in or just outside the jaw, minimizing injury. A pack of small split-shot sinkers to keep the egg near the bottom is also handy. There’s still one more step before this rig is finished – can you spot it?

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Look Ma! No reel! Determined fighters, even small Dollies put a nice arc in a tenkara rod. My connection with genus Salvalinus, the chars, began when I was about seven years old and caught my first brook trout, S. fontinalis, on Minister Creek in Pennsylvania. It’s an arbitrary thing, I suppose, to have a favorite fish, but if I had to name mine…

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: Book Review and a Proposal for Reparations

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Tatanka Yotanka, Sitting Bull, Chief of the Hunkpapas of the Teton Sioux. (Photo: Wikimedia.org)

Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown*, 1970 

I first read Dee Brown’s somber account of America’s treatment of Native Americans upon finding it on my parents’ bookshelves when I was in high school. Of course, none of my friends were reading anything like this, and when I attempted to discuss the book with my high school history teacher, a staunch conservative, his attitude was dismissive. If my parents actually read the book, they had little to say on the subject. And so I internalized what I was reading.

The book has stayed with me for the past 40 years, through visits to Native American reservations in the lower 48 and visits to First Nations villages in Canada. It was a presence in the back of my mind when, as was a young man hitch-hiking across America, I found myself in a plush white Cadillac heading west across Wyoming. Behind the wheel was a man in his 30’s. Spread across the front seat between us were legal books and document folders. He told me about how he had left his reservation – how difficult that had been -, how he had become a successful lawyer and how satisfying it was that some of his work included advocacy for his people. It has been with me these years in Alaska, living in Inupiat and Aleut/Alutiiq villages, making friends with my neighbors and admiring much in these communities. It was with me when I saw in the news that Lower 48 extremists were attempting to take over Bureau of Land Management acreage as though it’s theirs to take over, willfully ignorant of history; willfully ignorant of who was on these lands first, should they ever be ceded back to private ownership. The book again made its presence known in a restaurant in Anchorage where, on a restroom wall, someone who knows little about any of all this felt compelled to apprise other patrons of his bigotry toward Native Americans.

Forty years after that first read, I just finished rereading Bury My Heart. I read it aloud as Barbra listened, chapter by painful chapter. Throughout the read, I found myself rediscovering passages that have stayed with me these past 40 years – a song about ponies, stirring quotes from Chiefs, treaty violations by the American government that, even now thinking about their callous enormity, leave me without words.

A brutal history

It is a hard read. The facts, about which many Americans remain in denial, are brutal. Don’t be misled by reviews that insist Brown’s treatise isn’t meticulously researched. It is, with 23 pages of sources cited. As for bias, if anything Brown has left little unturned in a nearly fruitless effort to identify white Americans who took a courageous – or even principled – stand on behalf of the tribes that were being systematically wiped out. The best one reviewer claiming bias could come up with is that an army officer guilty of a massacre was cashiered. Independent sources state that in fact, the only “punishment” that officer received for overseeing the slaughter of women and children was that he was permitted to resign. For similar behavior, plenty of other army officers received promotions. In fact, it was General Sheridan who is credited for first proclaiming that “The only good Indian is a dead Indian,” a sentiment backed by war policy that shored up rather than hindered his career.

There are light spots among the 449 pages. The ancient songs stand by themselves as beautiful poetry; the many photographic portraits of Native American leaders, similarly, often capture grace and beauty. When Tatanka Yotanka (Sitting Bull) goes off script at a public ceremony to tell a white audience exactly what he thinks of the way they have treated him and his Native American brothers and sisters, it’s easy to cheer. And very, very occasionally a judge, army officer, or other white with enough power to matter does find in himself sufficient courage, empathy and sense of justice to come to the aid of a people being systematically extirpated. These respites notwithstanding, the reader knows from the beginning that the story is going to come to a bad end for the protagonists, and it does.

In these somewhat more enlightened times, people of good intent periodically speak of reparations for America’s past wrong deeds. The unfortunate reality is there isn’t much good land available to cede back and it is land that underpins many of the grievances. As to the loss of culture, language, family lines and entire tribes and nations… 

Practicable, meaningful reparations

But there are two things that could be done and that would have meaning:

  1. The manner in which many public schools serving Native Americans are run reflects a level of corruption reminiscent of the bad old “Indian Ring” that conspired to cheat Native Americans out of virtually every treaty provision they were granted. One by one, these schools need to be reformed; their administrators  removed and the corrupt review processes by which these schools remain accredited – facilitated by auditors who are either dishonest or inept – need to be completely overhauled. “Completely” means completely. Remove everyone who has overseen the mess, throw out all the old forms and guidelines, put in place people who care about these communities and who have the expertise to get it right, and start again from scratch.
  2. Add Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee to the canon of required reading in high schools and colleges across America. No adult literate American should go through life ignorant of this history, regardless of how uncomfortable it might make them.

*Doris Alexander Brown, 1908 – 2002. While many assume that Dee Brown must be Native American, in fact he was white, born in Louisiana and raised in Arkansas. Boyhood experiences with a kind acquaintance named Chief Yellow Horse and a friendship with a Creek boy prompted him to reject the stereotypes of his day. (Wikipedia.)

Roasted Squash Pecan Bread

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Imbued with traditional fall flavors, we have a feeling this bread could become a new Thanksgiving tradition!

During our annual shopping in July, we picked up several acorn and butternut squashes – favorite centerpieces in many of our recipes. There is also a practical side to squashes when living in the bush… they ship well and last a long time in a cool, dry location. Up in Point Hope, we used to keep squash and potatoes for months in our mudroom. Here in Chignik Lake, a much more damp location, the fridge serves as our long-term storage area.

Recently, after oven-roasting a butternut squash in olive oil and garlic, I decided to try something new. I have a time-tested base recipe for fruit bread, but instead of the usual pears or other fruit, I used the roasted squash. Even the raw dough was quite tasty! (I know, I know, I’m not supposed to eat raw dough…but I always do). The squash helps to make the bread moist and satisfying and pumpkin pie spices give it a sense of holiday seasons. Pecans add a layer of flavor and a hearty crunch. This would be a perfect Thanksgiving bread!

Roasted Butternut Squash Pecan Bread

Ingredients

  • 2 cups mashed roasted butternut squash (any roasted squash will work)
  • ½ cup vegetable oil
  • ½ cup unsalted butter, melted
  • 4 large eggs, beaten
  • 2 tsp vanilla extract
  • 1 ½ cups granulated sugar
  • 1 tsp galangal (or ground ginger)
  • ½ tsp ground nutmeg
  • 1 tsp ground cinnamon
  • 3 ½ cups all purpose flour
  • 1 tsp baking powder
  • ½ tsp salt
  • 1 cup chopped pecans

Directions

  1. Grease two 8 in. x 4 in. x 2 in. loaf pans. Set aside.
  2. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C).
  3. In a large bowl mix together squash, oil, butter.
  4. Mix in eggs and vanilla.
  5. Mix in sugar.
  6. Sift in spices, flour, baking powder and salt.
  7. Mix well, but do not over mix.
  8. Fold in pecans.
  9. Pour batter into two prepared pans.
  10. Bake for 60 minutes or until a wooden pick inserted into center of loaf comes out clean.
  11. Top should be lightly browned.
  12. Cool for a few minutes in pans. Remove loaves and finish cooling on wire racks.