June 4: Fresh yogurt and last year's smoked oysters

The first week or so here can stretch anyone's culinary boundaries. All the food for this season remains in the warehouse at AGS, on the barge on the way here, or in the freezer here or in Seattle, waiting to become someone's luggage. I have a strange attitude about the food in the freezer here - I feel like I didn't bring that up for me; it's for when the crew arrives. And I'm not ready to bring down all the stuff that's sitting in the warehouse - that's something that is best done when others arrive to help.

It's always hard for me to figure out what groceries to get when I'm feeding only myself. The first day here, I went to Naknek Trading (NTC, like Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery, it has most things that I need and if it doesn't have it, I can probably do without it) and found a dozen eggs ($5.49), a half-price gallon of milk ($5 was the sale price), a quart of Greek yogurt ($9.29) and a couple of cans of wet dog food ($2.79 each). (The milk, with some of the yogurt turned into even more yogurt - and strained, into Greek yogurt.) It's important to contribute to the local economy, but I also want to keep some and things are expensive here. So we ship up what we can think of in advance and buy the rest here.

Yesterday's tip of the day was about patience. Today's is how to get scalded milk (or burnt anything) off the bottom of a pan: a couple cups of vinegar and some soda - maybe a quarter cup or a half cup. Bring it to a boil. I don't know why it works but I haven't found anything that it won't loosen (and I have burned a lot of things to the bottom of a lot of pans).

The tides have been high and strange - water all the way to the cliff (26' tides) at 10 am. It isn't that it's uncommon to have so much water; it's just that for the 3 or 4 years before last year, even though we had plenty of 26' tides, they didn't come to the cliff. Tide magic that I don't understand. But it seems that those days are over. Here is the high tide a day or two after I arrived.

Last year we had a severe berm in front of the stairs that held the water from the high tides long after the tides were out. The effect of that is a very squishy area near the cliff. I can't think of a positive side of that situation, but the negative side comes easily to mind: the ground is very very sticky. So sticky that we can't drive a truck on it without fear of getting stuck (something we did plenty last year) and if we walk on it, we get a prodigious build up of mud on the bottom of our boots. Heavy, messy, and awkward. So at least to address the boot concern, I pulled down this little walkway to help us get from the stair to the gravel without gaining 10 pounds per foot.

The very high tides mean that I need to park the truck about a mile away, on the beach access road. One of the best things about that - besides keeping the truck from swamping - is that I get to walk a couple of miles on the beach each day that I want to use the truck. And in so doing, I often get to find agates. Here are this year's finds so far.