2020 Baking Highlights

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My friend David made fruitcake with so much candied fruit and booze that it is still mostly wet after three hours of baking.  It is delicious.  I'm trying to offset it by consuming actual pounds of kale, but I know it doesn't exactly work that way.

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January: lemon bars -- Hut 10 kitchen, McMurdo, Antarctica.  Aside from the first lettuce anyone had eaten in over a month, the lemon bars were the crowning glory of the Shuttles holiday party.  

February: chocolate chip cookies -- also Hut 10.  I disappeared for a while on a slow day of work to mix dough with a friend, and got to deliver a few samples to my new boyfriend.

March: croissants -- The Swedish Bakery, Nelson, NZ.  I didn't bake these, but I sure are the shit out of them.  

April: scones -- 273 Bealey Ave., Christchurch, NZ. a.k.a. my international shelter-in-place pad, temporary quarantine "flat" while abroad.  The buttermilk over there is incredibly thick.  And my clandestine meeting with a friend all the sweeter for a shared snack.

May: blondies -- Kelly's cousin's house, Montrose, CO.  I loved the gooey caramelization from the Betty Crocker recipe, and they went down pretty well with Kelly's friends.

June: biscuits -- tiny trailer oven, somewhere in western CO.  I baked off my frozen rectangles in a few locations, and they came out light and crisp and fueled high-altitude hikes.

July: potatoes in foil -- the campfire, Ironton(?), CO.  I guess technically they steamed, and perhaps were cooked by all three forms of heat (convection, conduction, and radiation).  Whatever the science, so delicious with ketchup.

August: fish -- mom and dad's house, Traverse City, MI.  Mom doesn't like the house to smell fishy, so I coated it with mustard and walnuts and shut it in the oven.

September: decadent pizza -- Pixley Pioneer homestead, Kalamazoo, MI.  There were multiple cheeses, olives, pepperoni, and we all chowed down.

October: whole chicken -- Katie and Ken's house, also Traverse City.  Beautiful juicy bird, beautiful jewel-like root veggies, beautiful picturesque dock on the lake, beautiful goofball friendship.

November: potato rolls -- Trucker's Cafe kitchen, Coldfoot, AK.  We make our own hamburger buns, and they are just really damn good, especially right out of the oven, with three pats of butter.

December: adolescent redemption -- also Coldfoot.  BUCHE!  I made a pretty great Yule log cake for staff dessert.  The secret?  Chocolate on chocolate on chocolate, with a scattering of crushed Oreo.

So it's been a good year of baking, despite the obstacles and shifting sands.  And hey, we had homemade lobster ravioli for Christmas, and the sun is coming back, and there's a new season of "Big Mouth," and so many more things to pop in the oven and transform into delicious goodness. 

dusky cafe

Regarded-vous les champignons mignons!

Adventageous

Presents started coming in almost two weeks ago, and of course I didn't wait to open them.  Chocolate, cheese, books, and cards to fix on the wall -- all very delightful.  The skies also delivered, with some big aurora on the solstice, as well as bright half-moon light and long-trailing meteors.  Solstice Silent Dance Party successfully traveled from the Antarctic to the Arctic.

I faced up to a self-imposed challenge tonight and tempered chocolate for the dipping of truffles and other items.  It didn't really go right, but at least there are now deliciously enrobed sweets.  A group of us also decorated sugar cookies, some less traditionally than others.  We have an army of pride-rainbow snowmen/persons and my raisin-bedazzled candy canes mixed in with wreaths and stockings.

About every third day, one of us night cooks cleans the deep fryer.  This is one of my more technical tasks, requiring screwing on a drain pipe, opening and closing a valve, floating creepy gunk on water, and cleaning around the heating element.  (Note: most of my job is moving chicken fingers from a big freezer to a little freezer to the fryer to a plate.)  The old oil gets dumped in a big plastic cube outside and, evidently, the maintenance guys burn it for some sort of fuel.  I bring all this up because, as it's difficult to pour the oil without spilling, we have attracted and -- it feels wrong to use this word in such a context -- nourished a large flock of ravens.*  I've counted as many as twenty shuffling around, cawing in human-like voices, pecking at the grease-laden snow surrounding the waste bin.

*whoa...an "unkindness," or "conspiracy," or "treachery" of ravens

Uhhhh, so, with that, merry Christmas!  Like the ravens, may we all feast on fat things, and look forward to the new that is coming.

our giant cafe tree

coming back from a walk about 3pm

Lords of the Fryer Oil

Mooses and Wolveses and Hares, So Shy

The Coldfoot Ski Team, as we jokingly refer to ourselves, drove up the road to Marion Creek the other day.  Dan generously plowed a path through the untouched snow with his wide, skins-on backcountry skis for me and Abby to follow.  We wound up the valley, which afforded broad, open vistas.  It was clear and the blue dusk hung on for hours as we glided over and around sugar-snow mounds and hillsides in the sharp -25F afternoon.

We also took advantage of the moonlight last week to night ski without headlamps.  You could see individual dark trees etched on the sides of the mountains, race your shadow cast on the snow beside you, and scan the distance for the makers of myriad animal tracks crisscrossing our trail and disappearing again into the woods.

A group of us managed to squeeze sixteen feet of spruce into the cafe and decorate it as our Christmas tree.  It is festooned with intricately cut paper snowflakes.  The thirsty fellow drinks a few gallons of water a day, and we hope he can hang on to his needles through the end of December.

I missed Antarctica and re-watched Frozen Planet for the tenth time.  But then I went to the kitchen and cut up a bunch of fresh vegetables, got a bowl of homemade caribou curry, and admired my friend's marinating ahi tuna.  Being able to cook and eat a delicious variety of foods that were not frozen for eight years and/or graded "For Institutional Use Only" is pretty nice.  I was even encouraged to request fancy cheese on our weekly food order.  Oh, and Will -- we grew our own alfalfa sprouts, openly, without breaking an international treaty.

fresh powder

whole lotta pipe

I tried but it was basically too cold for pictures at Marion Creek.

Glitter & Glow

The moon shone so bright last night the snow sparkled. In places, the frost on branches was indistinguishable from stars in the collapsed depth of field.  The aurora also streamed and gaseously spiraled across the sky, gilt edges shimmering.

I received a much-anticipated box in the mail containing a handsomely patterned quilt from Carissa. The colors brighten my room and disposition.

Both the radiant heat from the kitchen grills and the frosty nip of the outside air redden my cheeks.  I keep my furnace stoked with vegetables and cookies.

Sunlight is getting scarce but still lingers on the mountaintops.  Another sort of light somehow translates through the satellites that connect my phone with Antarctica each week: eyes shining on a small screen.

And sometimes the sudden illumination of that screen delivers the next bit of dialogue in an ever-evolving work.  It's surprising how much that screen lights up.

lights above the heavy machinery graveyard

attempting nighttime photo shoot

soooo much sunset

Good Reads at the Lie-berry

There is a fantastic collection of books here left behind by previous coworkers.  I'm plowing through the memoirs, tickled to find titles that have been in the back of my mind for years and others that so closely fit my interests.  The fascinating and heart-wrenching "Educated," a young woman's coming-of-age story and reconciliation of her fundamentalist upbringing with the wider modern world; the acerbically funny "The Sex Lives of Cannibals," an American-abroad take on a tiny Pacific island; "Reading Lolita in Tehran," the passionate, sobering recounting of one professor's struggle to maintain and teach independent thinking under an oppressive government; "Rowing to Latitude," an adventurous couple's ambitious and exhausting self-supported trips along Alaska's coast and the length of its biggest rivers.  Lots of food for thought, and inspiration for travel...

When not scrubbing the burger-gristle-encrusted flat-top grill with a charcoal-like brick or individually wrapping sandwich components for pipeline workers and longhaul truckers, my own adventures have tended toward trying to photograph the pinkest and purplest moments of sunsets.  Technically, the sun no longer clears the nearby mountains, but the internet tells me "daytime" is about 10:30am - 2:50pm now.  And just about all of it appears as sunset.  

Also, my friend Abby accompanied me on my first night ski. Her headlamp revealed all kinds of animal tracks, including some hefty moose prints; my headlamp promptly quit about twenty seconds in.  I thought the batteries had had plenty of time to recuperate after being submerged in a stream six months ago -- they still work, I just turned the light on! -- but perhaps they've earned a nice quiet retirement. 

Per John's request, here is the location of Coldfoot (plus other places I've been in Alaska).

catching some of the last real rays

view from the airport loop road

Also, I baked a very tasty chocolate cake.

I know I can be very tardy getting back to comments, but I could really use your feedback, friend-readers.  After a 15-year hiatus, I'm going to regularly spend time in a gym.  It felt really good to get the fan whirring on the rowing machine, but I broke down in confused laughter several times because I just couldn't find the right tunes.  In normal life I'm pretty picky and, I'll be honest, judgmental about music.  But the rules don't apply for kitchen jobs or the gym.  I had a good streak of Lady Gaga songs, and a bit of luck with remixed-for-120-140bpm-90s-pop-hits, but dozens of workout playlists were ridiculous and/or awful.  I'll stand by my No Rap, No Country policy, but otherwise I'm desperate for your suggestions.  (Or maybe I'll just loop "Born This Way" for 45 minutes.)

That's really my only problem.  Otherwise, life is good in the way north.  I mean, stumbling across the snowy path to the rickety pallet you stand on to dump the old fryer oil promises to continue being a weekly issue for me, but there are some basic solutions I can employ, like letting it cool off first, and walking slower.  Ditto with cold hands while skiing: bring extra gloves.

Looking over a few notes from the past weeks, two fantastic things happened that restored my faith in civilization -- the election results, and my friend helping me obtain a space heater for my room.  I'm fairly self-reliant (and experienced with wearing several sweaters at once), but being able to count on and contribute to our communities and shared resources truly strengthens us.

This is a really charming cabin the summer forest service people live in.  Look at the snow!!!

Dusk is now happening about 4:15pm, and it is lovely.

Interior

Rather than feeling on the outskirts, the edge of habitation, Coldfoot has the sense of being at the center.  Of course, yes, it is a hub, the only coffee around for 250 miles in any direction, but it's also in almost a bowl, surrounded by mountains, the sun revolving around it in a low arc.  And in the camp is a den of repurposed construction trailers, and in that den is my room, and in my room is a pile of clothes semi-successfully insulating a human.

It's actually pretty nice out (10-20F), often sunny and rarely even a breath of wind.  That stillness adds to the centrality of interiority: my snow-crunching steps generate the only sound, and that sound radiates out.  I mean, there's the occasional bird flitting past, a stream burbling nearby, the weary farting of a truck engine braking along the highway -- but you don't have to go far into the woods for triangulation points to melt away and a little sphere of "you are here" to reorient where the median is.

This all sounds pretty ego-centric; rather, I mean it in the way of my old pal Emerson and his transparent-eyeball theory (you'll have to google it, hyperlinks are beyond my ability on the phone).  I'm certainly not the center of the universe, nor is Coldfoot.  But here is accessible a sense of the center, the interior of the interior.

And evidently this generates in me a strong desire for tuna melts.  With an entire diner menu at my disposal (they're feeding me while I quarantine for a week), that is the sustenance my soul yearns for.

a very winding river

some very frosty fireweeed

some sunny peaks behind some fog