Matt came home with two chinook salmon this afternoon. They were each about 30 inches long, and now we've got something like 15 lbs. of salmon in our freezer. Yay for Matt!
I forget (or maybe I block out) every year how messy the whole salmon experience is. We have a rather small kitchen with only one countertop that you can do much work on. So Matt holds the fish by the tail with one hand, then tries to fillet the damn thing with the other. It's quite a spectacle.
I love putting food up for the winter. It makes me feel like such a good ant, rather than a lazy grasshopper. We dehydrated roughly 12 lbs. of morels earlier in the month and now we have the salmon. Next will come huckleberry season. Huckleberries are tough because it takes a tremendous amount of patience to pick any kind of quantity. I usually pick for 10 minutes, look at the handful I've got, then just eat them and go do something else. If I am industrious though, we could have plenty enough to at least do a pie or two at Thanksgiving. And after huckleberry season comes hunting season, and Matt drew a tag this year to hunt a cow elk. An elk would pretty much fill our back-porch freezer right up. Yes, I'm a cracker with a freezer on her back porch. At least it's not a washing machine.
Behold the bounty of nature! (Whew, the bounty of nature was evidently just too much for one of the dogs. I'm suffering through a toxic dog fart at the moment.)