Jupiter’s crew spends far too much time looking for things they cannot find. In rural and remote communities people have an abundance of many things: fresh air, clean water, forests and fish. But not many vegetables.
Naupathia
Fruits and vegetables make a long voyage from Seattle on barges in refrigerated containers delivered weekly to larger towns, or onward by truck or boat to remote villages. Time, handling and seasickness take their toll, and supermarkets allocate a lot of freezer and shelving space to more reliable frozen or canned produce.
Jupiter’s Cook, however, demands FRESH and interrogates every store manager and memorizes every produce delivery day of food stores along the thousand nautical mile passage from Victoria to Haines. Cook often crosses a store threshold at the exact moment fresh beets, bok choy, or broccolini hit the cooler.
Captains of tugs with barges are on a first name basis, and Jupiter often hails these to check their progress and food delivery timing. Jupiter’s itineraries are subject to alarming course corrections on the rumor of mushrooms or microgreens at one town or another.
Reefers
We eat well aboard Jupiter, and our reefers—fridges—are always full of a labyrinthine nesting of vegetables so tightly packed and protected from intrusions that written permission is required before dirty deckhands can attempt access. Food is stowed in a complex first-in last-out chron-geometry using menu-sequencing-demand practices that have stumped all AI modeling.
Recent supermarket successes are no longer enough. Cook has declared searching for super-situ food sources to be the next great adventure. Kelp and sea asparagus are fine, but a true voyage of discovery now includes small dirt-under-nails local producers often overlooked by itinerant mariners.
Wrangled in Wrangell
Unable to harvest from her greenhouses due to an injury, Katherine of Ivy Patch Produce invites Cook to pick for herself from the harvestable produce. A haul of fennel, parsley, sweet sugar snaps, spring and bulb onions, collards and kale, lovely lettuce, broccoli and orach (a justifiably rare leaf) find their way to Jupiter’s galley.
Vegetables taste better when they put up a fight.
~ Cook
All summer Annabelle and Cook trade photos of chickens and egg dishes; soft boiled with smoked salt and buttered toast, whisked up into a frittata, or simmered until jammy to top a salad. Like many people in Wrangell, Annabelle has several jobs, working in a dental office during the day, tending her chickens and children morning and evening, and making jams and jellies to sell out of her backyard honor-shed.
Roads rarely connect the settlements within Southeast Alaska, however many towns have a few miles of road leading to the end of the road. People choose to live “out the road” rather than in the center of town, and addresses are given in mile-markers. On the way to dinner at an out-the-road house of local friends, we stop at Oceanview Gardens at mile 5.9, a community source of provender.
Many things work on the honor system when manpower is in high demand during the busy summer fishing and tourism season. Scanning a venmo QR code or cash in a basket are common systems of recompense for anything you might find. You do the math, the mouth does the rest.
Here we find garlic scapes, microgreens and a rainbow of ranunculus along with vegetables, house-roasted coffee beans and infused sea salt. A bouquet for us, and one for our out-the-road hosts.
The Herman family grows oysters in an nearby inlet selling them at a small storefront in Wrangell. We ice them them until we are swinging on anchor of a tranquil evening. Cook conjures a raspberry mignonette by mashing a few overripe berries into the usual suspects – finely diced shallots, sherry vinegar and a pinch of sugar, then we schuck without injury, slather without spills, and slurp without patience until empty shells are tossed to the briny depths.
Fresh-caught spot prawns donated by an over-stocked neighboring mariner are sauteed in butter and garlic, and curl up with zaftig sugar snap peas.
Our little Derbyshire veg plot hosts a giant Lovage plant that grows so vigorously (even in a shady spot where nothing else will grow) that every 3 years or so I have to dig the whole thing up and chop it into 3 sections; two to give away to unwary gardeners, and one to replant. Much too big to grow onboard Jupiter unfortunately.
Do you eat it?