Liz had a hair appointment and an impromptu evening with our youngest, leaving me an opportunity to smash some canned salmon, caveman style.
Dinner was simple: two small, cold ’taters (RS3!), a couple tablespoons of Duke’s no-sugar mayo, a dusting of Dune Sand (a seasoned salt recipe Liz and I came up with during our travels), and a half-pint jar with a sockeye steak, set into a bowl of boiling water to warm.
This was sockeye from the summer of ’24—our best year there, if you were wondering. We’d hit our stride, started to feel like we were finally getting a handle on life in Alaska, and took our resident allotment of 35 salmon in a 36-hour, door-to-door adventure. That included five hours of driving, setting up camp, catching, dispatching, marking, icing, breaking down camp, five more hours of driving, trimming and sorting, and finally packaging our limit. Even old sourdoughs who were born and bred up there were mildly impressed with our rapid results.
And after a couple of bad-to-worse salmon seasons for me, it was a point of pride in my journey to become as Alaskan as I could.
We froze some of the nicer fillets in vacuum-sealed bags, turned the bellies into pressure-canned “Candied Salmon Bacon,” and pressure-canned a good portion of that year’s salmon as steaks.
That’s what was waiting for me tonight: a half-pint, wide-mouth jar of a sockeye salmon steak I’d harvested in Kenai, Alaska, in 2024 with my wife, some excellent friends who were instrumental in our mutual success, and our dogs.
Thirty-six hours of my Alaska that will always stand out.
And tonight’s dinner?
The salmon was so good right out of the jar that I ate a large portion of the mayo by itself (I said “caveman”). I drank the broth. I ran my finger around the jar to get all the chunks—twice—and gave the second swipe to Fergul to lick off my finger.
It was a very good moment for me and my dog, sharing the last few nibbles of a meal we harvested and put up together in a far-away place.
Accidentally timely, too—written 364 days and a handful of hours after I stepped onto a plane and left.
Thanks for reading this far.
db
PS: To answer your question—yes, I miss Alaska. But I’m happier back here in Florida, with family, friends, and fishing. In that order.
