Culinary Arts Alaska With Chef Keem - Fishing, Cooking, Salmon, Bear!

Take a very large plane to Anchorage, Alaska, continue with a smaller aircraft to Cordova, AK, and then take a single-engine Cessna air taxi across the Copper River delta and the Bering glacier, and you'll end up in the remote wilderness of the Tsiu river system. Close to the mouth of the Tsiu, right by the Gulf of Alaska, you'll find the Driftwood Lodge, operated by the Alaska Expedition Company.

During the silver salmon run, starting at the end of August, we welcome up to 14 guests weekly, until mid-October. The housing is very comfortable and the fishing and dining is outstanding.

Take one quail, clean well...

Actually, you want to get some frozen semi-boneless quails and thaw them overnight in your refrigerator. Or, if you're in a hurry, thaw under running cold water for about one hour. Rinse the birds and pluck any remaining feathers from the skin.

Prepare a thin paste with canola or olive oil and your favorite spice mix.
This can be salt, pepper, paprika, garlic and onion powders, dried herbs, etc., or any commercial poultry spice mix or smoke dry rub. Coat the bird lightly with your paste, inside and out.

Now it gets really interesting. There is this fantastic device that let's you smoke small pieces of fish or fowl right on your stove top. You can get this stove top smoker from Hudson's on the Bend restaurant in Austin. Click on the pot "store", dangling from the top of the page, and there's a picture and ordering info. The box includes instructions and different kinds of wood chips.

Line the bottom of the smoker and the dripping pan with foil for easier clean-up. Put a heaped tablespoon of wood chips in the center on the bottom. Replace the dripping pan and rack, apply a little cooking spray so the skin won't stick, and set the seasoned birds on top of the rack. Close the lid and set the pan on your stove, with the flame or hot plate centered underneath. At the lodge, I turn the propane gas flame on high, you might want to start with a medium to high setting. Within a few seconds you will smell the aroma of smoking wood, with barely a wisp of smoke escaping through the fairly tight lid. No asbestos overalls needed here.

Smoke the quail to "rare", which will take about 10 minutes. You can do this a few hours ahead and refrigerate the birds until you're ready for the finishing touches. Right before serving time, finish the quail in a hot oven (375 to 400 degrees), for 3 to 5 minutes, to a "medium rare". Dip it into a small pot with your favorite glaze, or apply the glaze with a pastry brush. Serve on top of your favorite salad.

For a glaze, I recommend to melt any of your favorite pepper jellies with a little hot water. A healthier way is to drizzle some of my Agasweet flavored agave nectar over the birds. Enjoy!

It was 11:30 p.m., on a clear and chilly August night at the Driftwood Lodge in SE Alaska - when I had to pee. I stepped outside, behind the lodge, where one can stand at the edge of a 3-foot dip giving way to a vast expansion of the tundra surrounding our piece of land - and I went about my "business". During the day, one can see the Chugach Mountain Range, about 20 miles away, and the dense growth of alder and cottonwood stretching across the area. At night, all I could see was the moon and the mountain tops in their yellowish luster.

I had just arrived 2 days ago, for the first time in the last frontier, to work as the chef of the lodge during the upcoming silver salmon season. And I was star-struck, so to speak, by the dramatic beauty of the land and its views, especially on this beautiful summer night near the Gulf of Alaska's thrashing surf.

As I was standing there in the moon light, spraying my arc of relief into the bushes across the night-black dip in front of me, I noticed the outline of a strangely familiar shape rising slowly from the darkness of the ground, about 5-6 feet away. The "shape" became taller than I, and the "outline" became clearer, while I was "holding on" to the last, somewhat hesitant phase of my "business" at hand.

And then everything seemed to happen at the same fraction of a nano second: the "shape" turned into a definite live brown bear hovering 6 feet away in wonder and puzzlement over my "wet approach", me remembering everything they told me about encountering a bear (wave your arms, holler, DON'T run!), dismissing it at the same moment, turning around and racing back into the safety (?) of the lodge, where a couple of our fishing guides finished their last beer of the evening. One of these brave young men grabbed his rifle and went back outside to chase off the "wet one". He was still there, in the shrubs, exploring the origins of those wonderful kitchen scents he had probably picked up from miles away. We could hear him moseying around for a while longer, until our guide's profanity yells must have persuaded him to move on. At least, I have a witness - I was not hallucinating!

I had peed on a bear!

Angela used to come into my lodge kitchen to chat a little in Bavarian dialect. Some years ago, she had come all the way from Munich (my home town) to Anchorage, to start a new life of adventures. Jody was an experienced bush pilot and had fallen in love with Angela. So they got married, Angela earned her co-pilot's license, and together they built their bush pilot business with Jody's sturdy DC-3. Our lodge hired them quite often to bring building materials to our spot in the wild.

One day, about 4 years ago, they took off in border-line weather conditions and never returned. A few days later they were found, crashed into a mountain side.

Bush pilots live a dangerous life. Often, the pressure to generate revenue is so great that they take the risk and fly, even in bad weather. Many of them are very good-hearted men and women who know that thousands of small, remote communities depend on their service. Their sense of duty and responsibility can influence their judgement in the face of potential dangers.

Let's hear it for these brave men and women of the last frontier!