In Alaska, I have learned...

I had planned on posting this with pictures and in-depth...but it's been over a year and something mediocre now might be better than nothing.  So, here goes: Things I have learned in Alaska

That festivals don't require folks to have: shaved, gotten fully dressed, been sober, showered within a week, money, or shame.

Most folks that do go to Fairbanks (et al.) festivals tend to have: a free spirit, a love for facepaint and free haircuts, 

Terrible pickup lines ("I'm in an open marriage". followed by a response of "I'm not".), 

And insanely amazing instrumental and/or vocal skills.  

I stopped to try to think about how the hell everyone, and I mean honestly everyone who lives here, is musically talented?  I was trying to think how they have the time or patience....and then I remembered.  THE ENTIRE WINTER IS DARK and below zero!  Okay, the whole winter may not be below zero, but the fact that it can get to -60 F and dark.  Hell, as musically inept as I am, I might even figure out how to bang on a pan to a beat after an entire season of cabin fever. 

Things that make me happy

 Things that make me happy this summer:

That I have seen 2 double rainbows and 3 regular rainbows this summer!

Catching and eating fish!

Blood-red flowers

Shy flowers

Being a Tiger!

Learning new plants--alpine tundra here I come!

Prehistoric looking microscapes

Sushi out with my roommates

Sushi IN with my roomates for July 4th--yes we made it!

Living dry in Alaska, or "How I learned to love the public restroom"

Our little cabin has character.  That is to say that your friend has great "personality".  She's got her own sort of beauty.  One that you have to really appreciate, and once you do, you don't want to leave.  The floor to the cabin is cattywhomped and as my roommate described it "It's only straight when you're drunk".  But it's been home for the past couple of weeks (after vacating the crazies' house).  The Whiskey Tango Hotel has been and is one of the more unique and wonderful places I have lived.

The Whiskey Tango Hotel and my roommates

View from the second story balcony--complete with a mason jar

It has no running water.  It is a "dry cabin".  A term which seemed unusual to me.  So much so that I had to look it up to make sure that these dry cabins weren't so far out in the boondocks I couldn't bike to work.  They're very common up here in Alaska, apparently.  The -20 to -60 F winters make running water silly in most places not immediately hooked up to town.  The toilets actually have heated water in places hooked up to city water so the pipes don't freeze.  So, there's a hole covered by a toilet seat inside a 3-walled room outside of our cabin for us to drop trow in.

Notice I mentioned 3-walled.  There's no door.  In fact, there was no covering on the window that looked directly into the outhouse either.  Its got a picture of a frog with a saying that's almost witty the first time you read it and a little bit of graffiti I can mostly make out referring to a mask for when the house falls into the water (permafrost?).  We have to boil water on the stove to wash dishes.  We add the boiling water to the basin of cold water and add soap.  We have a rinsing dish that ends up as soapy as the washing container by the end of it.

Our fire pit outside the cabin.  We tend not to take pictures of behind the house.  It probably has something to do with the outhouse not having a door....

View of our driveway from our second story.  The driveway has obligate wetland plants in it (Beckmannia syzigachne).

Most of our crew showers at work.  Most or half bike to work.  All of us biked to work until my roommates and I moved for our sanity (safety?) to this cabin which is something like 15 miles to work.  Which isn't bad one-way, but I haven't biked 30 miles in a day before, after a day of field work.  Two or three of my coworkers make that kind of commute and hats off to them.  Considering I hadn't ridden a bicycle in 10 years save the two-weeks before I went to Alaska, I consider my biking ability about average, but certainly not exceptional.

So I tend to shower at work, not every day, but at least once a week.  We're camping for work now Monday through Thursday and I we get fancy dirt tans that wash off during the weekend.  We take whore-baths in between (wash basin and a cloth) to get our faces and arms or hands.  I've enjoyed my short-short haircut because I can wash my hair this way too.

Back to public restrooms.  It's so great to be able to "make a deposit" as my coworker would say in a restroom with a flush and a place to wash hands immediately.  I get excited when we're out in town and I think, not with dread at a public restroom, but excitedly that we're in a town and this bathroom is going to flush!  It's even going to have regular soap and not hand sanitizer!  A lot of out-houses really just make you want to find a tree and pop a squat, or dig a cat-hole.

An out-house done right keeps the lid shut and vents from the outside or behind.  Only about half of the ones I've seen are like this.  More recently, some omit any kind of lid and are just a bench (single person) with a hole cut in them with only mesh at the top of the building for ventilation.

My coworker mentioned that with a little less permafrost and a little higher population, it'd be easy to see a tragedy of the commons unfold in real-time over human waste in Fairbanks.  I don't think he was far off; groundwater contamination or developing country diseases don't seem to entice many people.    

Shaving is a luxury for those with running water or a steady hand and patience with a basin.  It's easy to see why the old men look like Santa Clause (ps--we're about 10 miles NE of North Pole, AK) and the womens' hair makes them look like hippies, even when they're not.  It's just too tough to keep shaven, especially, I assume, in the winter.  We use a lot less water having to haul it in at 1.4c / gallon.  We at least have a truck of our roommates to use to haul water in while our co-worker puts a few gallons in a bag he wears riding his bicycle.

Living simply has been, not an escape or retreat, but a pleasure I wish everyone could have.  While getting internet requires a lot of planning, and I will return home with an unappreciated respect (excitement?) for public restrooms, the quiet tap of rain on the tin roof while reading a book and occasionally poking at a fire is well worth peeing in the woods.

Cranberries et al.

It feels like I'm in Alaska!


Cranberry bogs are surreal!  By cranberry bogs, I really mean black spruce forests with sphagnum so deep you want to sleep on it (but for the mosquitoes).  The Ericaceous shrubs out here as an understory make sense.  I haven't taken any pH readings, but I'm sure its low (high acidity = low pH).  The heath family is an acid loving family and its Virginia members include Rhododendron, Blueberries (the vaccinium corombosum from a previous post plus another), mountain laurel, wild azalea, and probably one or two others I've missed.

Out here in the Interior of Alaska, there's Vaccinium uliginosum (blueberry), V. vitis-idea, V. oxycoccus (cranberry), Ledum groenlandicum, L. decumbens (Laborador tea), Arctostaphylos uva-ursi, and A. rubra (see below for common name).  So that's a lot of names, BUT, some of them are really cool!

Stunted Picea (likely P. mariana) in a bog

Kinnikinnick is the common name for Arctostaphylos uva-ursi (sometimes hard to tell from V. vitis-idea).  First off, I'm not sure how Kinnikinnick is any easier to remember than Arctostaphylos uva ursi.  It's also one of many "bear-berries" which would make sense with the "ursi" in its name.  Kind of like the constellation Ursa Major (big bear), but there are several bear berries up here.  Likely because bear like to eat just about any of the berries up here....

Anyways, so Arctostaphylos.  It sounds like a winged dinosaur and with the specific epithat being uva-ursi it sounds like a winged dinosaur resembling a bear.  A rather impressive name for the little plant with super-cute impressed leaves!



So out here there are decidous conifers (like Larix larcina or Tamarack), evergreen conifers (Picea Mariana or black spruce), evergreen decidouous shrubs such as the cranberry (Vaccinium vitis-idea), and deciduous broadleaves such as birch and alder (Betchula papyrifera or paper-bark birch, B. nanna, B. glandulosa, Alnus tenuifolia and A. crispa).

Picea mariana

Populus tremuloides

Larix larcina

Ledum groenlandicum

Not all broad-leaves lose their leaves in the winter time and not all conifers keep theirs in the winter.  All of these different types of growth strategies are up here!

There's so much more I want to write about.  The insulating moss, the neat epiphyte, the frogs up here, the permafrost, the many wildlife signs, tussock-hopping, and just more cool pictures!  But this will be a little bit for now.  I'll put up a few neat ecology stories with pictures soon!  My transfer cable is at work, but I'll have some extra exciting pictures soon!

Almost posting from Alaska.

I created this blog to keep up with the folks back in Virginia et al. while not in the contiguous 48.  I've been up for about 2 weeks and taken about 250+ pictures of which none have thus far made it into this blog.  I have good reasoning.  I managed to fall into some of the more unfortunate pitfalls of moving across the country without being able to vet landlords.

I'll admit it, I was so busy and blinded by completing my thesis that I'm not sure if I even showered or ate as often as I should.  In Feb/March I ordered a plane ticket and forgot it/left it in my e-mail until 4 days beforehand.  I found a bicycle guy and told him I'd call when I got to Alaska, saved his e-mail and left it until I left.  I worked with the other techs and found a room to rent off Craig's list, called her when she was actually awake (whoops...time difference...), confirmed I'd be one of the new tenants from the ad. off Craigslist and then went back to my thesis.

If you're wondering if my thesis seemed to take almost every waking minute the answer is yes.  If you've never been a graduate student trying to get a manuscript to a committee and then organize them all together at the same time, the phrase "herding cats" always gets thrown in there.  My committee is wonderful, supportive, and helpful.  My graduate experience has been meaningful, fulfilling, and positive.  My manuscript is just shy of 100 pages, all of which require a specific format and my data couldn't even be completed until March.  So I was writing my first book in a month.  As I mentioned, I was living, eating, breathing, crying, and sweating over this document.  I was not, in fact, as worried as I should have been about the particulars of Alaska.  I wasn't nervous, or excited, or even thinking about this state.  I was too myopic and focused on worrying about things I felt were within my control on my thesis.  So....back to living arrangements...

I was picked up by one of my new roommates at the airport (the one that has a truck) on May 29 at 2 am and said "Hi" to my landlords on May 29 at 9am.  They mention they want checks before the first of the month and when I try to give them one they give it back to me and said it wasn't the full amount.  I have them write out the breakdown of the price.  The next day and we sit down and discuss it.  The advertisement said $860 for 2 bedrooms, which we planned on putting 4 people in.  Expecting 860/4 = $280, come to find out she decided the price would be higher.  I explained that the price she wanted per person did not in fact split the rooms as was discussed via phone by my roommate.  So I have already unpacked and don't have a place otherwise, so I eat the $400 (including electric) she charges because I figure I should have had it in writing.  I could have packed my bags back up and couch surfed but I didn't want to back out and stick my roommates with my portion of the month's rent either.  I tell the landlord that night that this wasn't the price I was expecting and that I will have to rework my budget and talk to my husband.

Two days later I tell them I can't afford this place, it's not the price I was expecting (and advertised) and I'll be out before the month is through (I've already paid for the month).  I get told that I should have told them the price wasn't what we were expecting and "we could have talked about it".  ....I had already told them that the price was higher than I thought it would be according to the add.  

So there's the typical roommate drama.  Their dogs eat my sweet potatoes and they don't pay me back (after offering).  They drink all the milk and ask us to buy more (still while owing me for the groceries the dogs ate).  The dogs shit on the carpet and we wake up to it smell that gags us all the way upstairs in a room with the door closed.  The dogs shit in the garage and its left there for > 18 hours knowingly by them.  They babysit yelling kids and the landlords have fights while my roommate tries to sleep during the day.  This is after being told that my roommate was working night birding hours (midnight to 8).  Really, this is the more petty, annoying, uncomfortable stuff.

I'm more pissed about the bait and switch they performed getting us up there and changing the price.  On the one hand there's no written agreement.  On the other, there's no written agreement so I don't have to stay.  I told them 3 days after I moved in that I wasn't staying past the end of the month.

Fast forward 2 weeks and we find a cabin to rent.  We can pay $400 total a month for a dry cabin to then split 4 ways.  Most places not hooked into city water, where the pipes are insulated as they travel into the house, are dry cabins.  Outhouse and no running sink water.  So we carry water in and poop outside.  Work has a shower and lockers; that's how common dry cabins are.

We tell our landlords that we're going to check out a cabin and we're likely to be all moving out at the end of the month and it's just that what we found is cheaper.  One roommate goes out to work, one goes with me to check out a garage sale in the neighborhood, and one is finishing some lasagna prep.  Not when we're all together, not when it's two of us (including me), but only when we left one alone with them in the house did the lady of the house corner my roommate and attempt to lay into her.  Keyword attempted 

When I had my discussion about moving out, we didn't have a place secure and I didn't want the rest of my roommates to have to deal with me laying some truth on the crazy-bitch and still having to live there for 2-4 more weeks.  We found a cabin willing to take us.  She didn't have to bite her tongue nearly as hard.  I have yet to bring this blog into more of a personal realm and way more hesitant to use this language in something my family will read.  But calling this woman a crazy-bitch is leaving it as polite as I possibly can.  

The lady catches the roommate I went to the garage sale with after we get back and lets us know that our other roommate got into it with her and that she wanted to square us away to what happened before it gets twisted after she leaves.  She delves away from reality into topics that any sane person would realize weren't even brought up in the conversation she just had.  She tells me my roommate tried to blame it all on me, but that she, the landlord, didn't have a problem with me even though my roommate tried to sell me out.  I am the oldest person in that house.  I had even given my roommates permission to say I was the reason they had to leave b/c rent would have gone up without me.  Even with that permission to "sell me out" as needed, she never went there.  She didn't need to.  Reality seems to be something our landlord might have some difficulty with.

Her husband, by the way, just sits there the entire time they were talking not saying a word.  If he felt his 5-month pregnant wife was being verbally attacked he would have stepped in.  Pretty sure he just knows by now she's crazy.   It's a bit draining to go into the details of their conversation as relayed, but the short of it is that she's nutso and we're moving out.  That night they have a shouting match around midnight and discuss fidelity and some name calling (including sasquasch) and then I hear their truck leave.

So, whenever I'm home I haven't had either the energy, proper working internet connection, or ability to concentrate due to Mr. and Mrs. "ignorant trash" as some confidants have described after parts of our story have been relayed.
 
To my cohorts in Virginia I'm supposed to be helping create graphs for a conference, thank you for your patience with not only a 4-hour time difference, but also for my tense demeanor at times when home as well as my delay in providing the synopsis of such a large document (my manuscript).  I know my thesis is very large to sift through when all you want is 2 or 3 graphs.

To my family wanting pictures and updates (who aren't on facebook) I'll have pictures up as I can.  The new cabin has an undulating floor, a brand new hole in the floor at the bottom of the stairs (the landlord's foot fell through as she was showing us the cabin), mosquito swarms like a cool summer evening squared, a living room with a view straight into the doorless outhouse, and no internet.  It will feel more like a home, and be more comfortable than where I am living now.  It looks like Alaska and has a certain charm I'll have to show in pictures.  So I will have more energy, but I'll have to bike a few (5 or 6 miles) to get internet.  I'll update with pictures and cool Alaska stories soon!  There's tons of neat events we've gone to avoiding being in the house and I've seen some neat ecology already!

Cooler stories and updates with actual pictures to come soon!



   

You say focaccia, I say Fugassa...

So if you remember from last time, I managed to show you the mess I made out of our kitchen making fugassa.  I thought I'd share some pictures of how it turned out.

Fugassa, warm and just out of the oven

So it looks like I was able to snag a picture before it got devoured with it looking all golden and crispy yet soft at the same time, right?

Not so much.  By the time I managed to get the camera we had already done damage:

The bread never had a chance

That pizza stone had about twice as much bread on it as shown.  The diameter of that stone is not less than 15".



Three Hours. 



Three hours is how long, total, that these survived.  The answer is yes, this bread is delicious.

 

Fugassa and roasted veggies with wine

I had mine pretending I was at a sidewalk cafe in a cute downtown area (maybe not in this city...).  Complete with wine and roasted veggies.  What was special about these roasted veggies?  I roasted radishes.

Yep, roasted radishes.  Also, I forever want to add an extra "d" in there to make it raddishes.

Roasted radishes with potatoes and garlic, don't mind the roots

I made this after trying to find something else to do with them aside from "toss them in a salad" and came across this recipe.  It couldn't have been simpler, really.

  I cut the raddishes (I left the strangely roots in, that's not needed, no one ate them anyways) and put them in a dish with whole garlic cloves and quartered potatoes my roommate had brought home pre-cooked.  

  They were tossed with olive oil, some salt and thrown in the oven until they looked done.

  When they looked golden and tasty, I put some soy sauce and sesame seeds on them and threw them back in the oven until it looked like the soy sauce had almost burned.

  The recipe said to toast the sesame seeds separately, but I figured throwing it on last was probably doing the same thing?  Okay, maybe it's because it would have dirtied another pan and you've already seen my husband's face with the mess I had made...

And this is what came out:

Roasted radishes with garlic and potatoes

The original recipe came from a south beach page, which is probably why there were no potatoes in it.  I found it made it a main dish instead of a side.

The roasted garlic was soft and a little sweet, almost caramelized and so were the radishes.  I'll let you in on a secret to our fall and spring gardens...we don't water them almost at all, ever.  So our radishes are hot.  Our lettuce is a little on the bitter side and we don't know much about the carrots yet.

But the radishes were sweet cooked this way.  The saltiness of the sesame seeds/soy sauce was a nice contrast to the sweet smooth flavors of the root crops.  

This too, was gone within the three hours (probably less), maybe except for the little dangley roots I left in...


What's a dish in your house that never makes it to leftovers or is gone before you could ever think to get a picture?  I had never had roasted radishes before, have you?  And what was your experience?

A Kitchen Mess!

Today I was trying to make fugassa.  I have no idea how to spell it.  Some people from other regions call it focaccia and I think there's a regional difference.  I never realized that thing people ate at Panera was supposedly the same thing.  The pronunciation's totally different and the bread itself is--fluffier than I ever remembered.  

Other things I don't know how to spell:
   Tocu
   Tajing Verde
   Pasta chuto con pesto
   Torta
   Poulenta
   Pondusa

And the affectionate:
   fetchabrutta
   fatchabella
depending on if we had behaved or if our grandfather (PopPop) was teasing us : )

There's also a couple of lullaby's we have as a family that I only know the phonetics to, but I digress back to fugassa. 

For the longest time I didn't actually know how to say "Fritata", so forget spelling it.  When my dad made these great leftover Italian omelette's (that aren't omelette's) he'd ask if we wanted a "Fri-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta", but maybe with a few more "ta-ta-ta's" on the end.

I remember my grandfather making fugassa and that it wasn't like a regular bread dough.  It was smoother and we sometimes got to be the ones to poke our fingers in it.  It was drizzled with olive oil and salt on top and it was amazing.    

The recipes I have found are often a mix between pizza dough and a flatter focaccia bread.  Something in between seems about right.

So I mixed up a batch of dough. We let the water, yeast, olive oil and flour (and a touch of dried rosemary) rise while we went out to the store to buy some garlic for another dish.  I think milk might be in the regular recipe, but we were out.  I let it rise once on our little rise spot, punched it down, and set it on the counter to rise again while we were out.  

Here's what we came back to:

"Yeast, When Spores Attack!" 1950.  Scarier than a tomato monster.

 
I am a Messmaker.  It's not really a hereditary "in my blood" kind of thing but I am absolutely a Messmaker.  I can use a pinch of cornstarch to thicken a gravy or dip and it will manage to get all over the entire kitchen and me.  Only a tablespoon may have come out of the container, and I swear a tablespoon went into the dish, but somehow it manages to defy some fundamental laws of matter creation and populate every surface in the kitchen.

I'll admit it, I'm a pretty good cook.  I can creatively and tastefully make use of just about anything and re-purpose leftovers into almost totally new dishes.  My husband (isn't just saying this as a newlywed) enjoys my cooking.

However, he may not always enjoy my messes.  He, I think, affectionately calls me his Messmaker.  I really can't deny that I am the hurricane that manages to spread papers over an entire room while I'm studying for a test, or that I knock over neatly arranged piles because I have yet to remember where this table-corner has always been since we have moved in.

I love my very patient husband.

He loves me, he really does!

  He's a good man.  He's also great with taxes, I'd throw out a solicitation for him, but tax season is over.

Also:

This is what he's so happy about!

So I used the recipe I found from Simply Recipes but I knew the one I was trying to make shouldn't feel quite as much like bread.  So I stopped counting cups of flour and went until it felt like a 3rd grader made pancake batter as sticky as possible.  I have since found a recipe (which again, I can't spell half of) on a forum: http://www.gennarino.org/fugassa.htm  The consistencies of the two doughs are very different, with the latter being less....less like dough.

With my big big big exam tomorrow, I thought a nice fast bread would be tasty.  I'll post more pictures, including the finished, tasty product, when I'm done with this comprehensive exam.  Enough procrastinating, time to redraw the Nitrogen cycle.

I think my goal as a cook and a scientist is sometimes to see how many red squiggly underlines I can get in a single post.  What things that you write about has word processing not caught up with?  What are some dishes your family makes that you either don't have a recipe for, or don't know how to spell because it's an oral tradition?