Muktuk and Mr. Frost

The first "jack" frost of the season came through yesterday. Unlike cold weather down in Washington, where it will frost on Tuesday and be 80 degrees on Thursday, the frost in Shaktoolik is here to stay. According to the natives, it will be frosty here pretty much every morning for the next, oh, 5 months or so. Woohoo! I had to go berry picking one last time...





The crannberries can only survive a few frosts before they turn to mush. Here is some juice that I processed last week (I needed to make room in the freezer). According to my students, I've either made it "too sweet" or it "needs more sugar." Hmm, I like it just fine!



Also a new experience for me over the weekend--muktuk! There is the "white" muktuk, which is beluga skin & blubber, and "black" muktuk, which is bowhead whale. The white muktuk is pretty tasty, like chicken, but...a little chewier...with a sort of scrambled-eggish flavor. It's mighty fine when it's pickled! The black muktuk has an even stranger flavor, and chews like a hard piece of gristel. You can't really chew it down, you just have to swallow the lump of cartilage-y blubber. It tastes more like...fishy walnuts...with...almonds...and chicken again. It has sort of a weird nutty flavor. Here's a close-up:



Then here's my leftovers from a wedding reception that I took home. Homemade bread is a staple here, as is desserts involving berries. You can see the remnants of the delicious "agutuk" I had (eskimo ice cream: made with berries, seal oil, and rendered fat of some kind, a real treat if you can get past the aftertaste), and next to the fork is some pickled white muktuk.



Other than that, we had our last cross country meet in Nome. I took 6th place in the open race, but none of our runners went to state. Kotzebue and Nome have fierce cross country teams that know the course. The course has a brutal one-mile uphill climb through the tundra that just kills your legs--and it's at the beginning of the race! We got to ride in the short bus though, classic!



Here's the sprawling, 3,500 population town of Nome. They have a Subway, 9 bucks for a footlong was a real treat for the end of the season.



And one last picture, the north side of Shaktoolik at low tide.