Happy first days of fall. We hope everyone is settling well into cozy season. Here we are in a moment of balance – between light and dark, summer and fall, business and rest. We’ve earned the rest, after a big summer of fishing, gardening, gathering, building, moving, fixing, and challenging our bodies. Time to sink into the rhythms of a slower season and enjoy all the bounty that summer sun has nourished.
In our lives, this season means the end of a busy summer in Homer with our Fish Shop, Flagship and Mug Up Coffee Shop open in Homer. We celebrated the last day of the season in early September and got to work tidying up and rearranging our space for our winter operations, which means lots of online fulfillment of Wild Fish Boxes and our new product launches with SKHOOP and Kaladi Brothers and MiiR. We said goodbye to most of our amazing seasonal Salmon Sisters team, who went back to school to keep on honing all their amazing talents. We sure miss them already.
Emma welcomed a new baby boy–born on the last day of August, which felt like the perfect way to downshift into newborn days and the slower pace of fall. This week, in celebration of making it through one month of babyhood, we took him for his first boat ride across Kachemak Bay to spent a stretch of days at our cabin in Peterson Bay. The westerly wind blowing in reminds us of when we hosted Brad Ogbonna here to photograph the cover of Bon Appetit Magazine (September 2023 issue - some photos below), which featured our second cookbook, The Salmon Sisters: Harvest & Heritage and wild Alaska seafood recipes. It was another moody October day with the first snow on the mountains, but the black cod, salmon, oysters and crab we cooked and shared with our family still warms our memories.
We're relishing the feeling of lighting a cozy fire in the wood stove while still feeling the heat of the sun on the back porch during the afternoons. The smell of cinnamon and cranberries and chives lifts out of the earth around the house and we aren’t getting many projects done with a baby and toddler in tow, but its nice to watch the water, feed the funny jays that come by every morning, hear the waves on the rocks underneath the house and keep a fire burning. We saw beautiful northern lights dancing in the sky a few nights ago and it was nice to see stars in the sky again after all that summer daylight.
We are looking forward to checking our hedgehog mushroom spot tomorrow when the weather calms down. If it’s not too late to find some, we’re going to cook them up with some black cod and grits for a cozy fall dinner. This recipe is on the fall feast menu in our cookbook and we’ll share it here so you can enjoy it with any wild mushrooms you’ve been foraging. Black cod is one of our favorite fish to eat for its rich and oily flavor, and one of our family’s boats is out fishing for them right now in Western Alaska.
We hope you’re settling into this new season – it’s beautiful isn’t it? Take inspiration from the words above from Alaskan women on thriving in fall. Embrace the slow down, cook something new, jar everything, ground down and gather, find strength in kinship and our shared lives.
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