Beautiful girls: Nora and Zoya make salmon cakesWarning: For those of you who don't like hunting or eating animals, I advise that you stop reading here 'cause this post contains photos of hunting.
Otherwise: For those of you into meat eating, this is a sweet post!
Otherwise: For those of you into meat eating, this is a sweet post!
I had the great joy of making a trip to Kodiak, Alaska this past week, where I attended the Kodiak Area Marine Science Symposium and spent the week living with good friends Patrick, Zoya, and their kids (click here to check out their blog about life in Kodiak). They were wonderful and generous hosts, as always. We have an enthusiastic blog follower in Patrick, and he made it his mission to give me as much local Kodiak food as he could - and he delivered! The selections were all protein, since local vegetable material is pretty tough to come by in Kodiak in the summer, let alone in April. In fact, Zoya went to Safeway one afternoon and found there were no vegetables to be had, even in the grocery store.
Patrick enjoying black cod (a.k.a. sable fish or butter fish) - it is sweet, oily, buttery, rich, and delicious.As I've described in earlier posts, Patrick is a hunter and provides all the meat his family eats. This includes elk, venison, and mountain goat in various forms, as well as canned salmon and other fish. Patrick has completely altered my opinion of hunting and has broadened my vision of what meat-eating can be. I look forward to the spoils of his hunts each time I go to Kodiak, and I am in awe of the amount of work and skill that goes in to pursuing, dressing, and carrying a large animal out of the field. Below are a series of photos showcasing what we ate this week...as with everything else we eat, I think it's important to know where our meat comes from, and it can't get much more real than this. If you're interested in getting more detail, watch Patrick's video of field dressing a deer. It's amazing - and not gory - and was shown in the Kodiak Film Festival this year. I treasure my trips to Alaska, and this was one of the best!
Deer - this made a wonderful roast.
Canning salmon!
Sigh. When I first saw this photo, I thought it was a happy, grazing mountain goat. Nope, he became sausage and roast.
We are in meat heaven here on Kodiak! But it must be said we also have awesome seaweed. I failed on that one - I had to be at the museum for an accreditation interview at low tide - But next year we'll be eating lots of seaweed for your visit too.
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And I will add that special care was taken to only give Catherine pictures of the actual animals she ate. Patrick
ReplyDeleteYep, that's pretty impressively real meat. And Patrick, I was excited to see the field dressing video, after Catherine had talked about it when she was here in Seattle post-conference. It was a great video - I was impressed with how it was informative and yet not too gross. :)
ReplyDeleteWhat a wonderful post, Catherine! It was so fun to relax and hang out with you!! LOVE the photos you took. Miss you! Zoya
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