Steinmetzer visit Round 1

Ma and Pa Steinmetzer came for a visit with Sister Deanna this August. We had great fun showing them the Alaskan wilds!!!!

We showed them the woods around town, and this beautiful amenita muscaria was at one of our trailheads. Mushrooms abounded for their trip! It was the perfect week for mushroom picking in Seward, so we brought home more than one bag of mushrooms to identify over their stay. Our little apartment was overrun with fungus and family.

At the end of the trail, a bridge crosses a stream. Virtually every stream in Alaska is a salmon stream, so Ma and Pa are dutifully watching the drama of Salmon Smackdown taking place in the spawning bed below. As males fight for females, they chase and bite each other in a much more epic and gruesome war than

any Ultimate Fighting Championship battle you'd see from your couch on the telly. More mushies!! These are some king boletes along the trail. We picked them, and were all quite excited to try them for dinner. They're a large and very choice edible, but Tyler and I had yet to actually find them and try them. Unfortunately, when we cut them open to finish the ID process at home, we found the maggots had already made their way inside the mushroom. Sadly, we had no harvest fo

r the family to try. Deanna and I went on a hike by ourselves while my parents went fishing. We came across three moose swimming across a pond only about 3 miles from our apartment. Swim, moosies, swim!

We spent a few days on the other side of the penninsula in Homer, where we saw our very first Alaskan slugs! We had always been told that slugs couldn't live this far north, but there they were, those 3 inch long little beauties. Oh, the slimey things we miss about Washington...

We ended up with AMAZING weather while there and took this nice fresh family portrait. A very Alaskan view, I think.

Summer Synopsis

I know, I know, we've been terrible about updating our blog since the start of last summer. We're just too happily busy with our time off! So, I am hoping to briefly sum up our fun turbo speed summer, and I assure you the dreary dark of the winter months will promote a more post-savvy Barenjager.

Berry picking is an essential part of being Alaskan. Every time we venture to the woods, we bring a bag for any goodies we might fine, so we did plenty of berry picking this summer. Here, we're on Lost Lake trail, just outside of Seward. We found blueberries, raspberries, and watermelon berries on the trail, all of which ended up in a very stuffed sack by the end of the excursion. Deanna and I ended up making a delicious wild berry meringue pie with it when she was here for the family visit!

Tyler shows off his man-berries. Yes, those are penises. Yes, you can chew them up and swallow them. Our good friends Sara and Chad got married this summer, and as the only bridesmaid actually living in Alaska, I threw the bridal shower. No bridal shower is complete without a penis of some sort, at least you can eat these! I made most of the food for the wedding. These were some carmelized onion pinweels. I even made the pastry dough from scratch! I didn't realize how time consuming that project would be--I don't recommend it, even though the handmade dough turned out far superior to the store bought variety. Homemaking it just isn't worth it. The food was a hit, and we had a good party! I didn't take many pictures the day of the wedding, but here I am with the bride. Worshipping her loveliness, of course. They married on top of an Alaskan mountain....quite beautiful!

Adventure Summer!

Here I am crouched over a 5 gallon bucket (free from NAPA), in a camp chair (free from transient campers) plucking a free range spruce grouse. Spruce grouse is damn tasty, very dark for a bird, with a slight tinny flavor and hints of saffron and llama.

Way too proud, but hey this is big game according to how this year is going, damn you Fortuna. Cool burgundy colored bolete, some of the boletes up here are almost black! Blue bruisin, a nice contrast to the warm ochre underside of this mushroom cap. Tyler's mom came to visit this July and we enjoyed the greater Kenai Peninsula's sights. Here we are in Nikiski at the Rusky Orthodotsky Churchy. Babies here are born with full beards and are baptised in vodka.A trail near moose pass AK. The plant we see in the foreground here is monkshood. A poisonous plant that was utilized by the natives as poison to tip the darts of there atl-atls to kill humpbacks and other whales. Did i mention it's free. Free gold for the taking!!! OK, so we didn't find any this time, but we have found flakes here before. someday I'm gonna strike it rich enough to get a new tattoo. A tattoo of a shovel and a pick axe of course. A secret pond with a rustic looking picnic table i hand hewed for the occasion. Around the campfire this night while i was sipping on a cool MGD a beaver actually climbed out of the water, to within 4' of my ankles so that he could cut a choice piece of alder. I have two witnesses to this event, booyah. There was also a loon nest amongst the lily pads in the background. A forestfirey sunset. It was a rather dry summer after a wet summer the year before, thus we had 300 forest fires in the state by mid july.