Good Food

 

Vacation is all about food, and we ate well in Maine. Practically every meal consisted of at least something getting cooked on the grill. But at this time of the year in Maine there are also lots of fresh vegetables available.

In the beginning of the trip we mostly ate down at Granny Thurby's house on the water.  Later on we mostly ate up at my mom's, Granny Coco's, house up on the hill.  We'd commute on foot or by bike between the 2 houses. My mom and I would play Scrabble while we cooked dinner.  She's pretty good at Scrabble and I never did beat her at it.

I think my favourite meal was lobsters on the lower deck.  Nothing quite like eating lobsters and throwing the shells directly off the deck and into the water.

Patrick

First night chaos - this was the meal the evening we arrived

Lobster and wine on the deck - an annual tradition

Blue mussels at a restaurant on the Harbor in Camden

Gumby Soup

 

Cup of Gumby (seaweed) soup

On Shuyak we cooked the usual meals on the wood stove with one notable addition. The very first night Philip asked if I wanted seaweed soup.  We were just out of town so I was not very hungry, and it did not sound very appetizing.  But to be polite I said, 'yes'. 

Philip collected a couple cups of rock/pop weed from the beach.  He collected just the tender ends and cut them up.  He heated water and added the correct amount of Knorr chicken stock (from package) and the seaweed.  Then brought it to a boil. The soup went from brown to neon green.

It did not look very good. But it was delicious - way better than miso soup. I was amazed. The seaweed thickened up the broth too. We ended up having it every night for the first half of the trip. We called it 'Gumby' soup because the twin seaweed pods look like the bottom of survival suits - locally known as 'Gumby suits'.  So Gumby soup it was.

Patrick

Fucus (popweed), water, and Knorr chicken stock cube

teepee set up - we spent 4 nights here

Evening in the teepee

Breakfast cooking on the wood stove

Reading a book and waiting for dinner to finish in the first cabin (note old frying pan used as heat diffuser)

Mulch View Cabin - the last place we stayed

My Kraft dinner fix

Maybe I should not admit this but I love the macaroni and cheese that comes in the little blue box.  The stuff Canadians call 'Kraft dinner'. It used to be a stand-by quick dinner when the kids were small. But on occasion I still like to make it just for myself. It's too good just to be wasted on small kids!

Anyway, to make it more of a meal I generally add a vegetable of some sort to the boiling water just before I drain the pasta.  Usually I add broccoli or kale, but yesterday I decided to add nettles from my garden. 

Another trick I use is to make it even cheesier by adding a baby bell cheese to the mix. I break up the baby bell cheese ball with my fingers and tuck the pieces in with the hot noodles in the colander while they are draining. 

Last night I ate the whole 'family sized' box.

Patrick

 

Canned Salmon Pot Pie Recipes

 

Salmon Pirok

The canned deer meat pot pies worked out so well that I decided to make canned salmon pot pies.  I also can (or in reality glass jar) a lot of salmon, and a good pot pie recipe for my canned salmon would come in super handy.  And I loved how easy it is to use the pre made pie pastry to cover the pies!

Rather than the corn starch I used to make my deer pot pie, I made a béchamel sauce for the fish pies (flour in butter with milk added). I basically adapted this recipe (click here for recipe) for my canned salmon. This recipe worked out GREAT, but I forgot to take any pictures. 

This is the béchamel sauce pot pie recipe I used (from https://www.amummytoo.co.uk/salmon-pot-pie/)

But I did not stop there.  Kodiak is famous it's own local, Russian influenced, variety of salmon pie known as 'Pirok'.  It is basically a salmon pie made with rice and root vegetables.  Click here and here for 2 good Pirok recipes. I decided to use the more traditional of the 2 recipes. 

Basic Pirok recipe that I used (from https://ediblealaska.ediblecommunities.com/recipe/recipes-russian-pirok/)

Since I had 2 pie crusts and the 10 inch pie plate, I also decided to just forego the pot pies and go by the recipe for the first time.  Next time I will make pirok pot pies, but this time I just made salmon pirok.

Next I adapted the recipe somewhat.  Generally I don't like to add bacon to recipes because I think it tends to overpower everything else, but both of the recipes called for bacon.  And so I used bacon, but not the ONE POUND suggested for the recipe.  I used 4 slices of thick cut bacon instead (or around 1/2 pound), and a dollop of bacon grease from a jar where I pour the drippings (I don't save bacon drippings but do put them in a jar so the grease does not clog my pipes).

I also do not have any rutabagas - so I used one of my garden potatoes instead.  I also have a lot of fresh carrots from my garden so I added more than called for - I also used a whole head of garlic from my garden because it is weaker but more flavorful than the store bought soft neck garlic. 

I did not add the hard boiled eggs because I was lazy, but did add more onion to make up for it. I had a lot of leftover rice on hand too. In any case, I basically mixed and matched, substituting this for that, and came up with the same general proportions called for in the recipe. Then I put it all together and cooked it following the directions in the recipe (I did NOT do well with the egg and water on the crust).

And it all came out GREAT.  It tasted just like (or better) than the pirok I have had in the past. Stuey and I gobbled it up for dinner!

Patrick

Deer Pot Pie

 

The other day I was picking out soup to buy at Safeway and noticed a recipe for beef pot pies on a can of Campbells soup.  I love pot pies and it seemed super easy.  I've always been intimidated by the pie crust aspect of making a pot pie, and did not know, as it said in the recipe, that you could get them pre made for pot pies. So I bought a couple pre made pie crusts, and some small 'pot pie-sized' glass dishes and went home.

At home I googled pot pie recipes and came up with one that I thought would work with my canned deer meat. Click here for my elaborate canned deer recipe.  This winter when I canned deer meat I simply browned the meat and added carrots and leeks to the jars with a little beef broth. In any case, I have a great many jars of canned deer and elk meat.  So I thought a pot pie recipe that used my canned meat would make for some easy tasty meals in the future.  

Unlike the recipe on the soup can I decided not to use the condensed soup as a base.  Instead I mixed a couple of table spoons of corn starch into cold water for a thickening agent.  I basically followed this recipe from the internet (click here), but adapted it to use canned deer. I made it once just for me (pictures in this post), and it was so good that I made it again a few days later for Stuey (no pictures).  The second time I made it I did a few tweeks - like adding my own garden carrots and a little bit of Campbells 'condensed golden mushroom soup' (click here for recipe from the Campbells soup can)

What's amazing is that from start to finish it took less than an hour to make and there is no need to de frost anything from the freezer!

Here is my recipe - I did not measure out the ingredients but they are close to what I came up with below.  Also I did find that 1 pint jar made 2 pies just about perfectly.  Then when I made it for Stuey I used a 1 pint jar and added another 1/2 pint jar and it made 3 pies just about perfectly. I included links to all the recipes I looked at because I think it is a good idea to mix and match, and you may want to do it slightly differently.

Ingredients - 

1 pint jar of canned deer meet for 2 pies 

1 cup of frozen peas

1/2 cup of frozen corn

1 cup chopped fresh carrots

1/2 cup of chopped celery

2-3 tablespoons of corn starch

1/2 cup of water

dash of thyme

salt and pepper 

1 tablespoon of Worcestershire sauce

1 Pillsbury read made pie crust (from refrigerated section at Safeway)

1 tablespoon oil

1 1/2 tablespoons of Campbells condensed golden mushroom soup (I did it for the mushroom flavor)

Method:

1) In a sauce pan I added the chopped carrots and celery and browned them in the oil for a few minutes.

2) Added jar of canned meat and its gelatinous meat sauce to the browning vegetables, and broke up all the meat chunks with a fork and butter knife.  

3) Added the corn starch to a glass with the cold water and condensed golden mushroom soup base, and stirred it all up.

4) Heated the sauce pan until meat, carrots and celery were simmering and then added the corn starch, water and soup base to the mix.  This should thicken it all up.

5) Added all the frozen vegetables to the simmering mix and stirred it all up.

6) Added Worcestershire sauce, salt and pepper, and a dash of thyme.

7) Spooned the pot pie mix into the small pie dishes and cut the pie crust to shape to fit over the tops. I found that one pie crust could cover 3 small pot pies but that I had to use multiple strips.

8) Put the pies on a pie sheet and put into oven pre heated at 350 degrees.

9) Bake for 45 minutes or less - until the tops are golden brown.

10) take them out of oven and enjoy!

Post script: The last time I cooked this instead of corn starch I tried flour.  I browned the flour with the carrots and celery.  I think this tasted better than the corn starch. And I used dried mushrooms that I re hydrated in water - I used this instead of the 1/2 cup of water.

Whole Lot of Meat

 

Sunday evening Philip and I completed the annual burger grind, and the 2024 hunting season is complete. Every year, a couple months after the end of the actual hunting part of the hunting season, we grind up all the meat slated for burger, and I also add in all the meat from the prior year (2023) that did not get finished. Last year (click here) we ground up 176 pounds of burger and sausage. This year we ended up with 195 pounds of burger and sausage.  These weights include the beef and pig fat, pork shoulder, and spices - as well as all the elk and deer meat.  So almost 20 pounds more pounds of product.  But what's interesting is that I also ground elk burger for an extra person this year.  So when you subtract his portion the totals from this year's to last year's haul is almost identical.  And last year all the burger and sausage got eaten.  So while it is a Whole Lot of Meat - it is also sufficient.

As far as burger and sausage techniques go - we do grind all of our meat and fat 'soft' frozen.  I pack the meat in coolers Wednesday morning and it is barely thawed by Sunday evening.  It is still so frozen that it is hard to cut into grinder sized chunks. The knife barely cuts into the meat.  I have found that the fat thaws more quickly and so I take that out of the freezer only a couple of days before the grind - and I am thinking I'll even leave until the last day next year.

It is important to have almost frozen meat because it goes through the grinder so much more easily.  The grinder blades shave the meat like ice rather than mashing the meat and creating a meat goo. With meat that is not frozen hard enough the grinder heats and gums up, and we often have to stop to let the grinder cool and to clean the blades. This year all the meat went through the grinder without issue.

Another trick we have learned is to add the Italian sausage spices directly to the sausage, little by little, on the first grind (we always do two grinds for both the burger and the sausage).  In the old days we used to work and mix in the spices by hand at the end.  This was hard on the hands (they'd freeze tossing the meat), and we found the sausage turned grey from getting over-worked.  Now for both the burger and the sausage we try and touch the meat as little as possible.  This way you end up with bright colored burger that stays that way.

Anyway, I now have enough burger and sausage for the next year!

Patrick

All the elk burger

All the deer sausage

Whole lot of elk burger!

All the wrapped elk burger

sampling the deer Italian sausage

wrapping the Italian sausage

Our Boneless Turkey

 

This is the Turkey I cooked up for our Thanksgiving dinner.  Just like I do every year, I de boned it first before cooking it.  This year my sister Polly took some pictures of me stuffing the deboned bird with stuffing and sewing it up.  They show a bit of the process.

The advantage of deboning the turkey first is that you do it the day before and use the bones to make stock.  Then you use the stock to make the stuffing better and also for the gravy.  And, best of all, a deboned bird is far easier to cut up, and makes leftovers easy. It also cooks more evenly.  All and All my favorite way to cook a turkey.  That's why I do it this way every year!

Patrick