Matsutake Camp

This past weekend I traveled down to Oregon with photographer Eirik Johnson (check out his work here) to pitch my tent at a matsutake camp in the Central Cascades of Oregon, on the edge of the high windblown desert. (More on the unlikely setting later.)

We stayed at the smaller camp in the woods near Crescent Lake, where a mushroom buyer named Joy was kind enough to give us space behind his buy station. That night pickers trickled back into camp to sell their day's work to Joy, who was paying 20/20—twenty dollars a pound for both #1 and #2 matsutake buttons. The former (pictured at top) has an intact veil covering the gills—the preference of well-heeled customers in Japan, where these mushrooms were destined—while the latter is slightly marred by a small hole in the veil, as shown (barely) below if you click on the image. In any event, both grades fetch the same price in a year such as this, when the picking is poor and mushrooms are in demand.

That night we hung out by the fire with a couple pickers from Weed, California. Som, Laotian by birth, first started picking matsutake in the Crescent Lake area as a teenager with his mother. He'd been in camp since the highly regulated season opened after Labor Day. His dog Whiskey guarded the shelter by day.

Som's friend Forrest, pictured below with his day's pay, was picking for the first time since his usual construction work has dwindled. He told us the learning curve was steep—something we would learn firsthand the next day when we went picking with Joy and his kids.

Sometime after dark a refrigerated truck stopped at the buy station to collect 260 pounds of matsutake and drive it to Portland where it would be processed (cleaned and packed) and air-freighted to Japan so that the matsutake-crazed customers of that small island nation could shop for inividually-wrapped buttons at the market. Last year the nightly poundage at Joy's station might have been five times more.

I've picked plenty of matsutake in the past closer to home, which I usually cook in a traditional Japanese-style sukiyaki. But here on the edge of the desert the picking is entirely different. Whereas I look for mature fir trees in the North Cascades, most of the picking at Crescent Lake is in pine: lodgepole and ponderosa, with a smattering of Douglas-fir and true firs. In some cases the tree composition is all pine and the conditions surprisingly dry.

Matsutake, however, thrive in sandy soils, and the pumice-laden soil in this volcanically active area provides ideal habitat. Mount Mazama's eruption nearly 7,700 years ago created Crater Lake and dumped three to five feet of pumice on the surrounding hills. Though the ground appears dry and dusty, the pine needle duff holds enough moisture to promote great fruitings. Joy said that Japanese customers appreciate the chewy texture of high desert Oregon matsutake.

Picking matsutake in the pine forests around Lake Crescent on a year such as this, when the pick is small, is not for beginners like Forrest (though he was fortunate to have an expert mentor in Som). In a normal year a matsutake patch will announce itself with "flags" or "flowers"—fully emerged mushrooms that indicate the presence of smaller buttons hiding under the duff. This year even the #6 flowers were commanding a decent price, meaning everything was getting picked. And experienced pickers who knew how to find the concealed buttons were being careful to "control" their patches, as a buyer named Leo explained to me, by picking everything to eliminate any evidence of fruiting mushrooms and then visiting regularly to catch the buttons before they emerged.

Finding a matsutake button beneath the duff on a forest floor otherwise devoid of any sign of fungi, indeed a floor without a single mushroom anywhere in sight, is an art form. Joy showed us how it was done. He carefully scanned the ground of a known patch before pausing over what to me was an imperceptible rise in the duff. Using a metal staff that resembled a tire iron, he scraped away a small amount of forest debris to reveal the white cap of a matsutake button. He picked it stem and all without trimming anything (Japanese customers want the dirt attached at the end, as this signifies life force). Later, when I tried to find matsutake on my own in a stretch of woods filled with pickers, I got completely blanked.

Unlike Joy, Som, and Forrest, who prefer camping in the woods, most of the pickers and buyers are now based out of the town of Chemult, 20 miles down the road from Crescent Junction, where several business owners in town rent space for mushroom camps. Pickers and buyers have moved here in recent years to avoid onerous fees levied first by the Forest Service and now Hoodoo, a private concessionairre. Hoodoo has since cut its prices, but it may be too late to lure the pickers away from the comforts of town, which include electricity and nearby groceries.

Margins are thin in the wild mushroom trade and costs can be shaved in other interesting ways. One buyer in Chemult operated out of a shipping container.

We were lucky enough to visit the night of a big celebration in support of a Buddhist temple in Springfield, Oregon, where many of the Southeast Asian pickers live. Lao, Hmong, Mien, and Cambodian pickers celebrated by slaughtering a cow and then feasting on a dinner of beef tripe soup, beef larb, sticky rice, and barbecued ribs. A Laotian pop star stopped by en route during a U.S. concert tour to entertain. Even Buddhist monks were on hand to offer blessings.

Much has been said about the Wild West nature of the Crescent Lake and Chemult matsutake scene. Indeed, I heard many stories around the fire, stories for another time. Suffice it to say that I was impressed by the skill of the pickers and the sense of community that attends this unusual stop on the mushroom trail.

Wok-fried Shrooms

I went a-pickin' this week. It's been a disastrous fall mushroom season in the Pacific Northwest, depending on your point of view. Hot temps the last two weeks of August followed by drought in September burned the primordia where it emerged from the duff, resulting in major crop failure for Cascade Mountain porcini, matsutake, and lobster mushrooms. Chanterelle patches burned and then partially recovered, owing to their long growth cycle, but some patches never produced while others are substantially reduced.

The most experienced commercial pickers and buyers, on the other hand, are making bank from the poor conditions. Prices are high and those who know where to go are lining their wallets. I joined a commercial picker friend earlier this week and loaded up on both golden and white chanterelles, porcini, hedgehogs, and a few matsutake, which are just starting to fruit in the coastal patches of Washington.

It's rained a lot in the past week and chanterelle pickers are advised to get 'em quick. Patches that were in good shape a week ago are now maybe 50-50, with big soggy flowers becoming the majority. (Sounds like the U.S. Congress.) Check out this picture below. There are maybe four dozen prime curled-cap goldens in the frame, perfect for the table. If you're into giant water-logged blooms, be my guest. We left them all behind.

And here's a very cool fairy ring of white chanterelles that I found near the goldens. These were in perfect condition despite their large size and probably weighed a few pounds all by themselves.

Back home I had a geoduck on hand from my shellfish farmer friend John Adams at Sound Fresh Clams & Oysters, so I made a quick Kung Pao with snap peas. The shrooms I decided to cook separately as a side dish. You know how at Chinese restaurants you get mushrooms in a silky smooth sauce? It's no secret—just corn starch. I used porcini, hedgehogs, chanterelles, shiitake, and enoki mushrooms, the latter two varieties purchased at my handy Mekong Market down the street.

This recipe is based on one by Fuchsia Dunlop. My changes included the use of duck fat and soy sauce.

1 lb mixed mushrooms, sliced
2 tbsp peanut oil
3 tbsp duck fat
1 heaping tbsp garlic, minced
1/3 cup chicken stock
1 tsp corn starch combined with
2 tsp soy sauce
salt, to taste

1. Heat peanut oil and duck fat wok over high flame until nearly smoking. Stir in garlic and cook until almost golden. Don't burn! Add mushrooms (if using enoki, put aside until later) and stir well. Cook a few minutes, then add enoki and cook another minute or so.

2. Add chicken stock. Bring to boil. Stir in mixture of corn starch and soy sauce. Continue to cook, stirring, until sauce thickens. Season to taste.

The final dish is a tender umami bomb—the ideal accompaniment to a spicy meat dish.

Salal Preserves

Salal, along with the tree that it often associates, Douglas fir, is one of the most iconic plants of the Pacific Northwest. You might even say it's a well known shrubbery. And if saying this word makes you want a shrubbery, well then you might just have to watch this.

Back to salal. The binomial is Gaultheria shallon. It's a member of the heath family, Ericaceae. In researching this post, I was surprised to learn that the so-called berries are not technically berries at all—they're swollen sepals. The leaves are edible, too, and were used by Native Americans. I haven't tried them myself. Salal's main economic use today is for floral displays. The foliage is harvested by brush pickers and exported all over the world.

Most hikers aren't enamored of salal. A thick understory of salal can be nearly as impenetrable to the bushwhacker as a forest of devil's club, and while the berries are much sweeter than that other iconic Northwest shrubbery—Oregon grape—they're also pulpy and nutty in a way that is unfamiliar.

It's getting late in the lowlands of the Pacific Northwest to harvest salal berries, but you're likely to still find some at higher elevations, along with Oregon grape. I gathered mine a few weeks ago and made preserves. Not quite jelly and not quite jam, this is more like a salal spread. I used a limited amount of sugar to retain the salal flavor and tartness. It will be perfect for breakfast scones and dinner cheese plates.

8 cups salal berries
2 cups water
4 tbsp lemon juice, divided
1 cup sugar
1/2 pouch liquid pectin

1. Simmer the berries, water, and 2 tablespoons of lemon juice for several minutes. Mash with a potato masher. Strain through fine-mesh seive and/or cheesecloth. My yield was 3 cups.

2. Return strained berry juice to pot. Add sugar, 2 more tablespoons of lemon juice, and pectin. Bring to boil.

3. Pour into sterilized jars. Secure lids and process 10 minutes in hot water bath.

My yield was 4 half-pint jars.

Fascinating Fungi

I spent the first 22 years of my life in and around New England, oblivious to the diversity of fungi in the neighborhood. The other day my brother was visiting our parents in Connecticut and noticed a parade of mushrooms on the lawn. Identifying fungi via smart phone is a notoriously dumb idea, so I'm sending them a copy of Lawrence Millman's new field guide to the Fascinating Fungi of New England.

Millman is a mycologist and adventure writer living in the Boston area. I first met him virtually when we exchanged copies of our books a year ago. His Last Places: A Journey to the North is a witty jaunt to the bleak yet beautiful ports of call at the top of the world. A field guide may seem like a different sort of embarkation for a writer of Millman's abilities—and we should all be thankful for this detour.

Millman joins David Arora as a practitioner of an increasingly popular genre—the nature field guide—who refuses to sacrifice points of style and wordsmithing. Because of their work, mycology enjoys a clear advantage over other related disciplines (birding, botany, butterflies, and so on) in the reading department. You might just as likely read Millman's description of Amanita muscaria before bed as leaf through the book looking for that strange Agaricus in your compost pile.

The "fascination" of the title is well earned. Through sidebars and species descriptions peppered with oddball details, Millman explores any number of fungal fronts, from the bioluminescence of mushrooms to the world's largest organism, a species of honey mushroom (Armillaria ostoyae) covering 3.5 square miles of Oregon's Malheur National Forest.  On the bleeding tooth (Hydnellum peckii), he explains that the red droplets oozing from an otherwise white fruiting body are not the result of a "bad dental problem"; rather, the fungus is engaging in the little understood act of guttation—exuding reddish water—possibly to allow for better sporulation. The train wrecker (Lentinus lepideus), with a mycelium resistant to creosote, gets its common name from a tendency to fruit on milled timber such as railway ties or telephone poles.

Millman's identifying tips are clear and detailed, and the color illustrations by Rick Kollath are quite good, with handy visual cues such as spore prints and gill types (e.g. adnate, free, etc.). But it is the rest of the text that will inspire closer outdoor observation and keep you thumbing through the pages—to see whether that cluster of morbid protrusions in the flower bed is the dead man's fingers (Xylaria longipes) or whether the ruffed grouse look-alike on the maple out back is the tasty and salubrious hen of the woods, aka maitake (Grifola frondosa).

Camper's Fettuccine Alfredo with Smoked Salmon & Asparagus

Any idea what this is?

Okay, let's take a step back for a better look.

Yes, it's my smoker. I think I may be in lurve with it. Smoked food is good food. Smoke up a whole chicken and you might never roast one again. Pork shoulder, brisket, oysters—it's all good, as the kids say.

And nothing beats smoked salmon. This is how I eat salmon year-round. Brined, smoked, and vacuum-packed. You can keep it in your freezer for a long time, too. Truth be told, we still have a few packages left over from the epic pink run of oh-nine. This year's run was just as big and I put more poundage away for a rainy day.

The pink salmon is an ideal fish for kids. They're eager biters and small enough—usually around five pounds—to be landed on light tackle. This year's run had some noticeably bigger fish. I netted one pushing 10 pounds, and my boy lost a monster at the beach.

One of my kids' favorite camp meals is Tuna Noodle Surprise. We gussied up this classic comfort meal with pink salmon right out of the smoker, fresh fettuccine, alfredo sauce, and asparagus. 

9oz fresh fettuccine

1/4 lb (or more) smoked salmon, cut into bite-size pieces

1/4 lb asparagus, cut into 3-inch segments

4 tbsp butter

1 cup heavy cream

1/3 cup grated parmesan

fresh-ground black pepper

grated nutmeg to taste

Melt butter over medium heat in a small saucepan and whisk in cream. Reduce until slightly thickened. Add smoked salmon and several grindings of pepper to sauce. Meanwhile, cook pasta. Add asparagus to boiling pasta water for last minute or two of cooking, depending on thickness of asparagus. Drain pasta and asparagus. Toss in large bowl with the sauce, salmon, and parmesan cheese. Season with salt and a few grindings of nutmeg.

This can all be accomplished quite handily on a Coleman two-burner camp stove. Heck, you could make it on a single-burner stove. The salmon smokes up easier at home when you have a couple hours to kill and a six-pack of Rainier, but even that task could probably be managed on the camp stove with a sheet of aluminum foil and a few twigs of green alder. Eating well in camp is an art form, after all.

Veal Shank with Saffron Cream & Chanterelles

The fall mushroom season here in Washington looked promising back in July and early August. We had a wet spring, there was good snowpack in the mountains, and another "marine layer" summer seemed likely. All that changed by mid-August. The weather turned hot and dry. Chanterelle pinheads—those baby mushrooms barely visible in the moss—either dried up or went dormant. Lobsters called it quits. And porcini never got out of the gate.

We finally got a significant rain the other day, but it may be too little too late. We'll see. In the meantime, there are chanterelles if you hunt in the likeliest microclimates. I got a bucketful at a go-to patch in the Cascade foothills last week, and this week I brought a class, along with Andrew MacMillen of the Kitsap Peninsula Mycological Society, to a patch that had just started cranking out both goldens and white chanterelles. Andrew scouted the patch last week and covered plenty of ground before locating this microclimate in a north-facing gully that was cool and wet enough to produce chanterelles while the rest of the area was bone-dry.

This is what I love about mushroom hunting. It's a game of skill and you need to know how to play all the cards in your hand. In this case, the main cards were meteorology, topography, and tree composition. Tree composition is the easiest and best card to play with Northwest chanterelles: young second-growth Douglas fir. The meteorology card was a little more difficult: we knew we had to take our Bainbridge Island class due-west to the southern Kitsap Peninsula where there was more precipitation. The topography card: shady pockets within north-facing slopes.

Using our knowledge gained from years of chanterelle hunting while wearing the prognosticator's hat led us to this one small ravine where two different species of chanterelle were flushing in profusion. What a treat to watch the students experience the thrill of the hunt. Shouts of "I've got one!" rang out through the woods, and everyone filled their baskets. Back at the kitchen facility we made Chanterelle Duxelles.

The first chanterelles of the season are always my favorite. They're firm and flavorful, without the large, tattered caps that are typical later in the season after multiple rain soakings. I like to save my smallest chanties for meals like the one I made last night: Veal Shank with Saffron Cream & Chanterelles. The recipe came from an excellent new cookbook by Jennifer McLagan, Odd Bits: How To Cook the Rest of the Animal, just out this month.

As you know by now, I'm a fan of nose-to-tail cookery, not just because it makes economic and conservation sense but also because the odd bits often taste best. Shank, though less adventuresome than organs, is one of those bits that's loaded with flavor—and in the case of veal, marrow. It's a rich cut, no doubt, which is why the chanterelles made such a perfect pairing, with their light fruitiness that lifted the dish from its heavy underpinnings of braised meat and cream sauce.

The author recommends a whole shank for this dish; I was only able to purchase a pre-cut section of shank normally used for Osso Buco, but this turned out to be just right for two. Otherwise I used almost the same amounts with a few minor exceptions.

1 veal shank section, about 1 1/2 lbs
salt and pepper
2 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp butter, divided
1/2 onion, chopped
1 carrot, chopped
1 stalk celery, chopped
2 cloves garlic, peeled and crushed
1 bay leaf
1 tsp dried thyme
1/4 tsp saffron threads
1 heaping tsp tomato paste
1/2 cup white wine
1 cup veal stock
1/4 cup heavy cream
1/2 lb chanterelle buttons, halved
parsley for garnish

1. Pre-heat oven to 300 degrees. Pat dry shank and season with salt and pepper. In a large, heavy casserole or dutch oven, brown the shank in 1 tbsp olive oil and half the butter over medium-high heat.

2. Remove shank and add remaining 1 tbsp olive oil along with onion, carrot, and celery. Cook until softened over medium heat, about 10 minutes. Add the garlic, thyme, saffron, and tomato paste, stir, and cook for a couple minutes.

3. De-glaze with white wine. Add the stock (I used Demi-Glace Gold from a package). Return the veal shank to pan with any juices, cover, and cook in oven for 1 hour. Turn shank, cover, and cook for another hour. Uncover and cook for final 30 minutes or so, until meat is tender and almost falling off the bone. Add water to braising liquid if necessary at any point while it's cooking in the oven. When done, transfer shank to a plate and cover loosely with aluminum foil.

4. Strain braising liquid through a sieve, making sure to press vegetables to extract juice. Reduce liquid in a saucepan to 3/4 cup. Stir in cream and check seasoning.

5. Meanwhile, saute chanterelles in remaining butter over medium-high heat.

I plated the veal shank over home-made gnocchi, scattered the chanterelles around the plate, and finished it with a generous pour of sauce and a sprinkling of chopped parsley.

The Barter System

Tonight's dinner was the result of ways old and new: the barter system and social networking. Last fall a friend of mine on Twitter, Corky Luster, back-channeled me with a request: might I have some wild mushrooms to trade? As a matter of fact, I did. I set aside vacuum-sealed freezer bags of porcini and chanterelles. In return, he would give me a package of wild duck breast fillets.

Corky, besides being a duck hunter, is also a bee keeper and the proprietor of Ballard Bee Company. In the small-world-that-is-Seattle, his bee's wax was an ingredient in a medicinal balm made from cottonwood bud that my friend Melissa Poe gave to me in exchange for a jar of my Oregon grape preserves. For his part, Corky got some of the cottonwood bud in addition to the mushrooms.

And so it goes. We're physically connected by our diverse appreciation and use of nature's  bounty, and those connections spread out through society and loop back to us with the help of technological connections and associations. Is that too much for some believers in the American mythology of go-it-alone rugged individualism?

Because something is happening here
But you don't know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?

Dylan was thinking about close-mindedness and the social change of the sixties when he wrote those lines to "Ballad of a Thin Man," but we might as well flash-forward to today and consider all the Joneses who scoff at any idea that doesn't fit into their narrow box. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, unknown and unheralded, there are committed folks trying to make their own small repairs to broken institutions such as our food system (corn subsidies, anyone?).

As the world continues to spin off into increased turmoil, I believe it's instructive to examine old ways and make them new again. The barter economy is just one example—and if such a seeming anachronism is nudged back into vogue with a little help from Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and other gizmos of the New New Age, so be it.

Back to those wild duck fillets. They got lost in the freezer for a while, but I found them the other day while inventorying my stash of frozen razor clams and immediately thawed them out. I took Corky's advice and did a quick grilling over high heat. First, I made a teriyaki marinade and sauce.

Teriyaki Marinade

1/3 cup aji-mirin
1/2 cup soy sauce
1/2 tsp sesame oil
1/4 tsp hot oil
1 tsp black vinegar
1/4 cup white sugar
1 tbsp garlic, minced
1 tbsp ginger, minced

Bring aji-mirin to boil, then reduce heat to low simmer for 5 minutes. Add soy sauce, sesame oil, hot oil, vinegar, sugar, garlic, and ginger. Simmer for another 5 minutes.

I used about half the teriyaki to marinate the duck fillets, along with 2 chopped scallions and heaping teaspoons of minced garlic and ginger. Next I added a couple teaspoons of corn starch to the remaining teriyaki to thicken it into sauce. This got poured over the grilled duck fillets along with a quick sauté of chopped scallions, chanterelles, and more garlic and ginger.

It was nice to see my boy, with his inherited trait of thalassemia beta minor, devour his iron-rich duck and ask for more. His world will hopefully do a better job of reconciling new ways with old.

Mountain Huckleberries

I ate a bowl of blueberries the other morning, and while a bowl of blueberries is always welcome, it also reminded me why I take the trouble to head up into the mountains and spend a day picking huckleberries. The domesticated blue ain't got nothing over a wild huck. Just saying.

This year isn't looking like a banner huckleberry harvest in the North Cascades, but anything is better than last year. Last year the bears got into all kinds of trouble in town because the huckleberry crop failed so miserably. This year the bears should be a little more content. At least my go-to spot had ripe berries on the bush the other day, if not good quantities. Last year the only reason to go huckleberrying was to find porcini under the bushes.

Per usual, I spread the hucks on cookie sheets and popped them into the freezer for a couple hours. Once the berries were frozen I scraped them into freezer bags. This way we can reach into a bag and grab a handful whenever the need strikes. This need strikes my daughter quite frequently. She's a huckleberry fiend, so I need to get back up into the mountains soon or she's liable to get ornery. You don't want an ornery huckleberry-hankering six-year-old at home. It's like having a bear loose in the house.

Pickled Kelp

Recently I camped out with the family at Deception Pass State Park, one of the true gems in Washington State's park system. While beach combing and fishing for humpies, we came across a six-foot long strand of bull whip kelp (Nereocyctis luetkeana) that had washed ashore. The kelp looked like it was still in good shape (it didn't have the white splotches characteristic of an over-the-hill specimen), so we bagged it up and took it home.

Healthy kelp forests are the old-growth stands of the ocean. A hundred feet or more in length from sea floor to surface, they support a diversity of life. I've seen this diversity first-hand while free-diving in Puget Sound. Lingcod, greenling, and rockfish forage among the kelp forests; sea otters, seals, and other critters seek refuge from predators; and countless invertebrates make their homes there.

Our find immediately put me in mind of Jennifer Hahn and her wonderfully useful and poetic Pacific Feast: A Cook's Guide to West Coast Foraging and Cuisine. Hahn calls seaweeds the "most nutritious vegetables on Earth"—and the only vegetables that dance: "They jump and jerk to the bass thunder of waves. They shimmy and shake to the ebb and flood tide." I just knew she would have a good recipe for the kelp. Sure enough, when we got home I thumbed through my copy and found this recipe for pickled kelp.

I've eaten plenty of kelp pickles over the years but never actually made  them myself. For this recipe, imagine a typical bread-and-butter pickle, with its crunch and spicy sweetness, and add to it a subtle hint of the sea. After tasting these pickles, you'll look at a seaweed-strewn beach in a whole new way.

I cut Jennifer's recipe in half since my strand of kelp was on the small side, and I probably could have cut it in half again.

2 cups kelp rings
1 1/2 cups white vinegar
1 clove garlic, diced
1 1/2 tbsp pickling spice
2 tsp turmeric
1 1/2 cups white sugar
1/2 red onion, cut in crescents

1. Make the brine. Mix vinegar, garlic, spices, and white sugar in a sauce pan. Set aside.
2. Cut the kelp into foot-long sections. Peel each section with a potato peeler.
3. Slice each peeled section into 1/4-inch rings.
4. Add the kelp rings into the brine and set aside for 2 hours, stirring occasionally.
5. After brining for 2 hours, boil contents for 5 minutes.
6. Spoon kelp rings and juice into canning jars and process in hot water bath for 10 minutes.

The pickles cure in three weeks, although we couldn't wait; after just a week in the jar they tasted darn good and brought back fine memories of a sunny long weekend at the beach.

Note: check state and local regulations before harvesting seaweeds. In Washington it's only legal to harvest beached bull whip kelp; cutting a living kelp stipe is illegal.

High Tide Soup

Recently I had the pleasure of hanging out with a couple mad scientists of the kitchen in Washington's San Juan Islands. Eric (besides being an '80s pop aficionado and rapper-in-training) is a sous chef at Blueacre Seafood in Seattle and Scott is a software developer by day and the proprietor of the restlessly inventive Seattle Food Geek blog the rest of the time. It was my job to supply these two gastronomic alchemists with foraged wild foods so they could do their culinary magic.

If you're a regular reader, you know I'm mostly about comfort food, the kind you can make in your own kitchen without an arsenal of specialized tools and exotic ingredients. I don't pretend to be a trained chef or a molecular gastronaut. But I like to eat, and I'm open to all forms of eating. On Lopez Island Eric turned me on to a soup he likes to call High Tide because it evokes the sea with all its shifting flotsam and jetsam.

Despite the "high concept" appearance, this dish is right in my wheelhouse. First of all, it takes the principles of nose to tail eating, which we generally associate with landed livestock, to the oceans, where most of our prey is still wild yet diminishing. The backbone of the soup, so to speak, is the backbone of a salmon, the sort of leftover piece that usually gets chucked in the trash if not used for crab bait. Not in my house. It was the backbone of a silver salmon that supplied the meat for the risotto Hank Shaw made at my house, and my Salmon Head Soup distinguished itself enough to be included in the Foodista Best of Food Blogs Cookbook.

This time around the salmon was a pink, or humpy, as it's also known, and its backbone was the key ingredient in a satisfyingly complex salmon broth. A quick word on pinks: at one time, when the rivers of the Northwest teemed with salmon, the pink was reviled in comparison to its more toothsome cousins, the chinook, sockeye, and silver. Now it's the most plentiful wild salmon species in Puget Sound and demands our gustatory attention. Though not as versatile as its fattier relatives, pinks are still worthy with the right preparation.

The "meat" of the soup was entirely vegetarian—and terrestrial at that. Looking like weird sea creatures washed in by the tide, the leek bottoms and carrot tops, like the salmon backbone, are the sort of things that usually get tossed away. Shaved red cabbage completed the picture. I butter-poached these vegetables in clarified butter for a good 20 minutes or so, until the carrots were tender and the leeks and cabbage slightly caramelized with hints of brown.

It's impossible to overstate how impressed I was by this soup. The tidal broth was a hit of umami—not too fishy, with an earthy balance of leek flavor—while the sea creatures within absolutely bursted with flavor from the butter-poaching. The carrots tasted like the best sort of stewed carrot and the leek bottoms had a toastiness that was almost as unexpected as the chewy texture of the tentacles...err...roots.

This will be a dish that I serve at the next dinner party.

The Tide

2 small to medium salmon backbones (or 1 large)
1 onion, chopped
2 carrots, diced
2 celery ribs, diced
1 tbsp olive oil
3 leeks, just green tops, chopped
1 handful parsley, chopped
1 quart water
salt and pepper, to taste

Saute the onion, carrot, and celery in olive oil until softened. Add water and heat to a low simmer. Add the salmon backbones, leeks, and parsley. Do not allow to boil. Cook at least 2 hours. Adjust seasoning. Strain soup through colander and again through fine mesh and cheesecloth, until clear. Return to pot. Add thinly sliced rounds of leek bulb and keep warm until ready to serve. Cooking the broth at low heat will prevent it from being too fishy, while the leeks—both the green tops and white slices—will balance the flavor, amplifying the wonderfully comfortable umami.

The Sea Creatures

1 stick butter
3 leek bottoms, with roots, rinsed
4-5 carrot tops, with green nub
1 handful shaved red cabbage

Clarify the butter, then in a small sauce pan butter-poach the leek bottoms, carrot tops, and red cabbage for 20 minutes or so, until the cabbage is starting to brown at the edges and the carrots and leeks are tender. Use tongs to turn the vegetables periodically.

Plate the butter-poached vegetables in bowls and ladle broth. Serves 2.

This was just one of 10 courses that Eric prepared with Scott's help in the islands. I'll be posting more on this extraordinary feast in the future, when the video treatment is edited.