August 26, 2024

Inspired by Alaska

THE MEAL

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The meal that started it all. Back in 2021, when I was first figuring out this state meal challenge, I was going to do the states in alphabetical order, starting with Alaska. I made a meal similar to this one for my family, but the dessert (a baked Alaska) was such a disaster that I hesitated to post it at all, and then I decided that geographical order would be better to use similar ingredients in different regions. That meal was pretty similar to this one, but I’ve come a long way since then and am much happier with the results this time around.

Grilled Salmon

Any Alaska-inspired meal had to include salmon, of course! It’s been a staple food in Alaska for millennia and has deep cultural significance for indigenous people in the area. Today, 80% of the world’s salmon comes from Alaskan fisheries! The King Salmon is the state fish of Alaska, and the biggest salmon ever caught there was 97.5 lbs!

Spoiler alert: I’m going to be making salmon for the next couple of state-inspired meals. So for this one, I kept the recipe simple, not using any marinades or sauces, just grilling with some salt and pepper and sprinkling with lemon after.

It turned out pretty great! I don’t know how people use grill pans indoors, though, because mine sets off my smoke alarm EVERY TIME. I should really get an outdoor grill one of these days.

Beet Salad

For one of the side dishes, I went with a really delicious beet salad. You might think (as I did) that vegetables would be hard to grow in Alaska because of the cold, but giant vegetables are actually very common due to the extremely long days in the summer! Root vegetables like beets and potatoes do especially well.

My family used to grow a lot of beets when I was a kid, so they’re a very nostalgic taste for me. I hate the canned kind, but a fresh roasted or even just boiled beet is great. This particular salad involved roasting cubed beets and tossing them with an easy vinaigrette dressing and topping with crumbled feta. (Goat cheese was my first choice, but the store was out.) It was bright and vibrant both in color and in taste, and is something I would definitely make again.

Mashed Yukon Potatoes

Like I said before, potatoes grow really well in Alaska. They were brought to the area by Native people trading up the coast from South America and were grown there before Europeans arrived. During the Klondike Gold Rush in 1897, potatoes were so highly valued for their easy storage and vitamin C content that miners traded gold for them! They’re still a very common and important crop today.

Yukon potatoes are from Canada, obviously, but I figured they represented the general region well enough. There are so many ways to make potatoes, but mashed is my favorite, so I went with that even though I’ve done mashed potatoes for this challenge already. 🙂 They’re very easy to make and are so good on their own that I don’t even bother making gravy!

Berry Cobbler

The first time I made an Alaska-inspired meal, I tried to make a baked Alaska, which was a nightmare. I still want to try it again someday, but I decided against it for this meal, not just because it was hard, but because while it was invented to commemorate the purchase of Alaska, it was created in NYC and isn’t really found in Alaska per se.

My next idea was to try to make akutaq (Eskimo ice cream), which is traditionally made with rendered fat from whales, seals, etc, and often has fish mixed in. But even the people posting recipes of it online said that it has a weird texture that people don’t like unless they grew up with it, and knowing myself, I chickened out. Sorry, Alaskans. So my backup plan was to make a berry cobbler instead! Alaska has tons of berries. I wish I could have used salmonberries or cloudberries, but they’re extremely hard to find if you’re not in Alaska. So I used a mix of raspberries, blueberries, and blackberries instead.

I’m a big fan of cobblers (comes from my Utah potluck/Dutch-oven upbringing, probably), and this one turned out SO GOOD. The berry sauce thickened up so nicely, and the dumplings were tasty on their own but were amazing paired with the berries. I liked it just fine plain, but adding vanilla ice cream took it up to eleven. My only issue with this recipe was that my dumplings were more liquidy than the source recipe said they would be, and I used my pie plate instead of my Dutch oven, and it spilled over so badly that I had to do a cleaning cycle on my oven immediately afterward. 🙂 Worth it, though!

I was very happy with how it—and the rest of this meal!—turned out. This is going on my list of favorite meals for this challenge.