Finally got back over to check our crab pots after 3 weeks of the truck in the shop and still there. Jeffy let me borrow his truck, and an uneventful ride to the cabin. There were 3 dungies in the pots. One pot was full of juvenile king crab, and so glad to dump them out so the pot can fish again as I’ve never had dungies and king crab in the same pot that I remember.

Almost had a catastrophe at the cabin. I tipped over the table that had the radio on it, and the batteries came out of the radio, and then when I put them back in, the radio wouldn’t work. It’s an old AM/FM/CB/TV/Shortwave/Weather radio I got at a garage sale 2 doors down, and similar to the radio I used in the Peace Corps. It uses 4 “D” batteries, but I bought some adapters that allowed me to use “AA” batteries. I put the batteries back in, and it wouldn’t work. Then I saw the old “D” batteries I had in there before, and loaded them, and it did work. GREAT! I thought. I didn’t break the radio. The “AA” batteries stuck out of the adapters, and were sort of too small to make good contact on the negative end with the spring in the battery holder.

I used the old D batteries through the night and in the morning and then it hit me: tin foil! I took them out and put a square of tinfoil in the negative end of the batteries in the compartment where they contacted the springs and problem fixed!  The radio worked. So problem solved. I can use the 50 pack or whatever it is of Costco batteries that should last me til I’m in my 60’s, which ain’t too far now.

I steamed the crab at the cabin but didn’t feel like picking the meat since there were just the three. I brought them home for Sara to give away to some freshman colleagues to welcome them to the Capital.

I’ve made a couple batches of ice cream the past few days and both were good. The base for the ice cream is “Philadelphia Style” ice cream, and is 2 cups whipping cream, 1 cup milk and a cup of sugar. I added 1.5 cups of very finely ground bull kelp stipe, after draining off the liquid.

For one batch, I simply added 2 tbs of vanilla extract to make vanilla kelp ice cream.

For the second batch, I took 2 cups of frozen Haines cherry juice from Roy and Brenda’s cherry trees, and boiled it down to a cup, after listening to my friend Marc Wheeler’s Butterfat podcasts about ice cream making. Then, I added the one cup of sugar for the ice cream base to the juice concentrate and heated until the sugar was dissolved.

I then churned each recipe in our Kitchen Aid with the ice cream bowl and mixer attachments.

Both came out good! For the vanilla ice cream, you can certainly taste the bull kelp. For the cherry ice cream, if you didn’t know the bull kelp was in there, you’d think the chunks you were eating were cherries.

Sam and Andrew left for Sierra Leone on Friday and Gloria back to college on Saturday.  Dad left me some money when he died and I sent it with Andrew for the widows of my friends in Sierra Leone.  Sam has been on the middle school cross country ski team with coaches who Sara grew up with. The start of the season they were having to do dryland training when there was no snow, and this was tough so Sam was trying to get out of practice but luckily Gloria is wise to his ways and asked me when he said there was no practice and we got him there. Once the snow came, he was good to go and is a natural at classic and skate skiing. No drive, but the skill is there. And anything to get him outside.

Today, I started grinding venison for burger and sausage.  I experimented using some rhubarb and sea asparagus a few weeks ago and really liked it. It fell apart because of too much rhubarb, I think, so will try again now with less rhubarb. I’ll use half the deer and organic pork fat for that, and with the other try using red huckleberry puree and maybe devils club buds.

I had enough pork fat for half the burger I ground.  The other half I froze just as burger, and so will give to the cross country ski coaches and my bear hunting partner.

I ended up using 85/15 venison/pork fat, and made sausage using rhubarb, devils club buds, sea asparagus, a hot African spice mix Andrew gave me, and some wild bull kelp fronds w/ herring (?) eggs sprinkled on them. I cut back on the rhubarb from the earlier try, and now it will stay together. For the others, I would measure out the weight of deer, and then mix in measured amounts of the plants and spices, then fry a small piece and taste, then add more ingredients as needed. They all came out okay and will encourage me to get some more devils club buds and sea asparagus next year as these are really great ingredients. The sea asparagus replaces salt altogether, and the devils club buds have a very distinctive flavor similar to carrots that adds a nice contribution to the sausage. The kelp was perhaps the most surprising, as it added both sort of taste of the sea and added nice texture.

I set the crab pots over a week ago and then took truck in for a problem with the transmission and other things- an electric issue I think. Buy my mechanic got backed up with a problem and now it’s going on two weeks so itching to get back to pull the pots and spend some time at the cabin.

My brother in law took the 135 Merc Optimax off his skiff and got a new 150 to replace it.  My wife’s sister obviously loves him more than she loves me, as I’ve not been able to get the same for our boat. However, my brother in law said he’d give me the 135 as it just needs a new alternator. I got quotes from air carriers and barge lines for shipping it here. Then I found out my friend Larry was going to start a freight operation and could get the outboard up here for me because the boat he was buying for his business was in – you guessed it – Craig!  Next thing I know I’ve offered to go down and bring the boat up with him and he wants me to be his relief captain. He then said he’d have to make a stop in Wrangell for some documentation measurements at my good friend’s shop where the boat was built. He thinks this is a deterrent to me, and I think the trip just keeps getting better and better as I’ll get to see Dave and Bob in Wrangell.

Paul in Petersburg then calls and said he needed to break the news to me that we should not have our annual superbowl get together. I had been thinking the same thing and he was relieved I agreed with him, but he had items he had wanted to get to me. Now that we have a plan in place to bring Larry’s boat back, we’ll be traveling right by Petersburg so I can pick them up from Paul on the way from Wrangell to Juneau.

Today, I made some jam with red huckleberries and rhubarb. Also got the bagel factory going again. This time, blueberry, fiddlehead and bull kelp stipe bagels are on the docket.

It took awhile, but Covid has finally touched our lives, as one good friend lost their aunt in Virginia, and another close friend lost their dad in California. President Trump’s second impeachment is now sharing alot more time in the news with Covid, but things with Covid, while seemingly okay here,  do not seem to be getting better elsewhere down south. Just two simple acts asked of our citizenry to protect their fellow citizens – distancing and wearing a mask – and yet many still think it’s all part of a conspiracy or it’s their right not to be bothered protecting each other or it’s some leftist propaganda. Juneauites seem to be doing it for each other, but elsewhere, it’s become a political thing now. You really can’t fix stuid, not even deadly stupid.

Versatile Sea Asparagus

Sara and her friends in Craig picked sea asparagus in the early summer and gave about all they picked to her. Some people say to soak it first to get some of the overt saltiness from it, but I just sort of packed it down in a 4 cup measuring cup as my uniform volume for preserving it, and then this amount in a vac pack bag, and froze it. Although most recipes I see are to pickle sea asparagus, I’ve been finding great ways to use the plant fresh frozen raw, and embrace its saltiness.

The first try was to use it in my bagels. I followed a standard bagel recipe, and added sea asparagus finely chopped in the food processor to the dough. The sea asparagus gave a neat appearance, sprinkled throughout the bagel, and the sharp saltiness was perfect in a bagel.

Today, I used it to make venison sausage, as I wanted to experiment with sea asparagus and rhubarb – two plants I have in abundance in the freezer- with meat I have in abundance – deer burger.

I took Jeff J. and Keith out cruising the beaches today looking for deer. Snow was down to the waterline in much of the coast we cruised, but we didn’t see a deer. There was a boat anchored at about every cove, hunting.  A decent day of little rain/snow and wind for a change. Another big blow is coming tonight so seems everyone was out deer hunting during this little calm period. We saw a couple humpback whales feeding near the boat ramp.