(Photo/KCAW/Katherine Rose)

“It’s a good thing I bought a lot of butter.” Shelby Williams giggles and hums as she whizzes around the kitchen, whipping up her favorite buttercream.

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“I’ve seen all kinds of recipes where you just throw some stuff in a mixer,” Shelby says. “I would say that’s not a real buttercream. That’s more of a frosting.”

She’s playful while she works, but make no mistake. She’s a trained pastry chef, and the language used to describe her craft is important.

“A buttercream is a buttercream. An icing is something that sets and hardens, and a frosting?” she laughs. “I had a professor who, any time someone would say frosting, he would correct them and say ‘Don’t use the f-word in this kitchen!’ It was a taboo thing. I don’t have as strong of feelings as he did. Just because something’s easy doesn’t mean it’s wrong.”

After stiff peaks form in the meringue, butter and chocolate are added to make a dark chocolate buttercream. (Photo/KCAW/Katherine Rose)

Shelby says there are a few different kinds of buttercream. French, American, English – the list goes on, each requiring its own careful technique. Today, she’s making a dark chocolate Swiss buttercream that will coat a moist, dark chocolate red wine cake.

Her recipe is in ratios, handwritten on a tiny piece of paper. And she’s making a big batch. Buttercream isn’t just sugar and butter. You have to make a meringue first. She separates twenty-five egg whites. She’s used to adapting recipes, whether she’s baking for hundreds or a few close friends.

“I like pushing the boundaries,” Shelby says. “I wouldn’t say that I stick to one tradition of baking. I like to get things down so that I really love them. There are certain recipes that I’ve honed in on. I’ve learned to make them in huge batches and tiny batches. I’ve learned to make things in ways that they work out just right for me. Like a certain pie pan that I’m using or a certain silicon mold that I’m using and they just plop out for me in perfect little cakes.”

Shelby, wearing a chef’s jacket she tie-dyed in pastry school, assembles the cake. (Photo/KCAW/Katherine Rose)

She slowly heats up the egg whites in a double boiler and pours in the sugar. When the sugar is dissolved she whips that mixture into a meringue. Then she adds the butter. Then the cooled chocolate.

“It’s the easiest buttercream I’ve ever worked with,” she says. “I don’t know what it is, I think it’s the balance of butter and chocolate that makes it still so soft and fluffy at room temperature. I don’t know. It’s magic, it’s a winner.”

Shelby may have trained at pastry school, but she first learned the art of baking at home.

“Actually in my household my dad made all the food,” she says. “In high school when I was feeling lost and didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, I was like, what do I actually look forward to? Baking with my dad.”

Her dad bakes everything. Pies, dinner rolls, sourdough. He loves bacon and appreciates fine food, and he’s taught her a lot. But he has one recipe that he’s kept to himself.

Using food dye, white chocolate and cornstarch, Shelby mixes four colors of mirror glaze that will be poured on top of the cake, creating a marbled effect. (Photo/KCAW/Katherine Rose)

“He makes this amazing very tall cheesecake that he got from an old friend of his that passed away,” Shelby says. “So it’s this cherished thing. And of course i don’t have it. It’s a secret.”

So she found her own recipe- and she’s made hundreds of cheesecakes. But she still looks to her dad’s as the standard.

“Every once in a while I get a really tall cheesecake turnout,” she says. “I’d get a 3 or 4 inch tall cheesecake. I think that’s a good standard for if you know if a cheesecake is good. If it’s tall and big and fluffy, almost like a big sponge.”

So whether it’s cheesecake or buttercream, the correct terminology in Shelby Williams’ kitchen is “indescribably delicious.”

The final product, a birthday cake with a thick layer of Shelby’s buttercream, coated in a multi-colored mirror glaze and gold dust. (Photo/KCAW/Katherine Rose)

Nina Vizcarrondo prepares arroz con gandules, a dish traditionally served in Puerto Rico during the holiday season. (Photo/Katherine Rose/KCAW)

Living in Alaska has its drawbacks, and for Nina Vizcarrondo specifically, access to food is a big one. But she and others have found a work-around. Like this “sofrito.” It’s a key ingredient in many Puerto Rican dishes, but you can’t get it in Sitka. So her mom mails it to her frozen.

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“It’s a mix of recao, which is kind of like cilantro. It has onions, cilantro, peppers. It’s supposed to give flavor to your food. Since we don’t have recao here, she mails it to me. That will go into our beans, into arroz con gandules.”

That’s what Nina is cooking today- arroz con gandules is a bright orange rice dish served throughout the holidays in Puerto Rico.

She starts by sauteing garlic, and throws an icy cube of sofrito in the pan, followed by rice, pigeon peas, a little water and lots of seasoning. “Puerto Rican cuisine is not really spicy, but I like spicy,” Nina says. Then she adds some chili powder.

Next, a packet of Sazon, another ingredient she can’t get in Sitka. This gives the rice its bright orange hue.

“Magic in foil. See how it changed?” Nina says.

As she’s stirring, Nina’s phone rings. It’s her mom, the person who makes it possible for Nina to cook with these ingredients.  “Sorry, let me tell my mom I’m busy because she will get mad. Hello, Mommy?”

“She’s one to call,” Nina says. “Every time I’m making something. What did you make to eat today? Did you put saison and alo on it? Oh you didn’t use Goya tomato sauce? I’m like, no, mom. I’m in Alaska, we don’t have that here. Well then that wasn’t the dish. So quick to judge,” Nina laughs. “But we’ve gotta make with what we have here.”

The rice has to cook for about 20 minutes, so Nina and I have some time to talk. She says globalization of food has its pros and cons.

“This is a pro,” she says. “You can maintain your culture identity no matter how isolated you are.”

After about 20 minutes you can smell the seasoned rice from across the room. It’s savory, flavorful but not too spicy, and the tender pigeon peas offer a nice contrast to the buttery rice.

“Food is how you remember things,” Nina says. “That nostalgia- oh I ate that and it smelled like this. Those memories come along with the smell and the taste. How can I teach my son about my culture if not through food?”

Chicken, beef and sausage, ready to be cooked atop a tiny raclette oven. (Photo/Nina Vizcarrondo)

If you’re a cheese fiend like me, try to find a friend from Switzerland. Luckily, I met Jeannette Farah who invited my family over for a traditional Swiss dinner called Raclette. Raclette is like fondue in reverse. Instead of lightly dipping food into a pot of warm cheese, you drench entire plates of food with melted goodness.

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“We Swiss people eat a lot of cheese” Jeanette says. “It’s good to share my little bit of Switzerland with somebody else. Because I like to try new things and I think for a while I always thought oh, so boring. Italians have all this fabulous food, or French people, or Mexicans. And Swiss? It’s really kind of just melted cheese and chocolate.”

The word raclette comes from the word ‘racler’, meaning to scrape in French. “Raclette has been around since the middle ages, when Switzerland was formed,” Jeanette says. Sheepherders in the Swiss Alps would melt big rounds of cheese by the campfire and scrape off the creamy top. “It’s not like the form we have now.”

Today, it’s a traditional holiday staple- but it isn’t cooked fireside. It’s cooked right at the table.

Walking into Jeannette’s dining room, everything is elegantly decorated in red. The Swiss flag is red with a white cross and it adorns everything from the glasses to the napkins. Dark wooden baskets on each side of the table hold big red and white pouches tied with red lace. They’re full of steamed potatoes, keeping them warm in preparation for the main event. And in the very center, there is a tiny oven, a Raclette, for grilling meat and melting creamy cheese to drizzle over boiled potatoes.

Assorted cheese and sauces (Photo/Nina Vizcarrondo)

We pass around a white ceramic plate piled high with raw meats, chicken, pork, beef, sausages, bacon and, not-so-traditionally, shrimp, her daughter’s favorite. Another plate of Swiss cheese Jeanette brought from home and locally bought Muenster cheese circulates around the table.

“In Sitka, it’s hard to find good Swiss style cheese, but you can find high fat cheese like Muenster cheese,” Jeanette says. She says you can order traditional raclette cheese online, but shipping it to Sitka can be pricey.

Jeanette Farah demonstrates use of the Raclette oven. (Photo/Nina Vizcarrondo)

After choosing our meat, we place it on top of the searing hot grill. While it’s cooking, we fill small personal trays with cheese and maybe a few pearl onions and pickles. Then we slide the heaping trays in the slot beneath the grill. In a few minutes, the cheese melts into a bubbly, caramelized sauce.

“It’s fun. It’s interactive. Everyone has to cook themselves.” Jeannette says this is the ideal meal to invite people over for dinner without the stress. It’s a cozy way to spend a chilly winter night. Meat sizzles in the background as everyone chatters with occasional laughs.

“I’m not a very confident cook,” Jeanette says. “I like to have people over to entertain. But cooking is really stressful for me. So raclette is like the perfect dish for me.”

A bunch of the green stuff, before it gets a very well-deserved massage. (Photo/KCAW/Katherine Rose)

I’m standing with Renee Trafton in her restaurant kitchen, industrial refrigerators and other appliances humming in the background, as she rips kale from its stalk.

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Renee has worked in two famed seafood restaurants in New York City. But when I asked her what she wanted to cook for Sitka Platters…she said kale salad. And I wondered, “Why kale salad?”

“Kale grows really well in Sitka,” Renee says. “It doesn’t get that cold so you’ll have these enormous kale plants. Kale in December will be kind of tough. But, if you massage it, it’ll still be good.”

Kale isn’t hard to come by in Sitka. Whether you’re growing or buying it, it’s pretty affordable. But Renee has a secret for softening the chewy fibers into something bright and refreshing.

“If you want it to be delicious you need to really work with it,” Renee says as she chops the kale into really tiny, thin pieces. And then she gives the greens the royal treatment…she massages it.

“It bruises and breaks down the cell walls which makes it more tender,” she explains.

The big, forest green pile shrinks as she kneads and squeezes it until it breaks down. She balances the kale with a rosemary vinaigrette dressing. A shallot. Sugar, apple cider, fresh rosemary and oil.

“I take a lot of pleasure in eating myself,” Renee says. “If it’s well-balanced you can eat the whole plate, you don’t have to take a nap afterwards.”

Renee Trafton breaks down kale by giving it a massage. (Photo/KCAW/Katherine Rose)

Renee got into cooking when she was at Oberlin College. She lived in a co-op, and once a week would cook for all 110 of her housemates.

“I super loved it because it was like a dinner party for all of my friends once a week,” she says. “It was the thing I enjoyed the most. In my margins in my biology class I’d have my notes for my dinner next week.”

But it was in New York City where she worked as a line cook that she learned the importance of taste and, with a bit of trial and error, how to balance the flavors in a dish.

“It’s a habit to cultivate to say, what is this missing, what can i do? When you’re flavoring something you want it to be just so and have this particular effect on a person. I think that’s the cool thing about fine dining is that you want to evoke some kind of feeling in the eater.”

Renee says while she doesn’t do fine dining at her restaurant, she still uses what she learned to try to create an experience.

“I still want to evoke certain feelings in whoever is eating my food. I do put a lot of care and mindfulness into how it feels, both in the mouth and how you’re going to feel afterwards. Like this kale salad. You should feel pretty healthy, strong, like want to do stuff afterwards.”

In an episode of “The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” the lead, Kimmy, takes issue with the phrase “The World Is Your Oyster.” An unsophisticated white girl from Indiana who has lived in an underground bunker for the last 10 years, “Why can’t the world be my noodles and butter?” she asks.

I hear you, Kimmy. I’d live on top of spaghetti if I could. But after spending an afternoon with chef Edith Johnson as she rolls out homemade fettuccine that melts in your mouth, I’m not sure noodles and butter will suffice anymore.

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“I would have no choice,” Edith says. “Everything I’ve done has kind of circulated around Italian food, so I just developed this sixth sense for it.”

I’m standing with her in the kitchen of her cozy restaurant. Food is Edith’s livelihood, and pasta her art form. Measurements aren’t exact here- she does it by feel.

“So I’m gonna start with about two cups of flour in a bowl. And in the center of the bowl, I’m gonna make a little well. So in the center of the bowl it looks like the top of a volcano.”

She fills the center of the well with a little olive oil, kosher salt, and two eggs. She pushes the flour toward the well, and begins to gently toss the mix together.

“You want it to be a little bit bouncy and a little bit sticky,” she says.

It’s a little too dry and mealy, so she adds a third egg. And then a fourth. She lets the dough sit for 30 minutes. Then grabs handful about the size of a baseball, flattens it, and rolls it into long thin sheets with a metal pasta roller that squeaks like a tiny wagon wheel.

Edith rolls the pasta out into long sheets before using a second tool to cut it into individual pieces. (Photo/KCAW/Katherine Rose)

She cuts it into long, thin fettuccine strips. She’s set aside a small saucepan full of water, just enough to cover the noodles.  It comes to a boil. You can dry the pasta. But Edith would rather not.

“I’m all about instant gratification so we’re going to go ahead and cook this now,” she says.

It only takes a few minutes to cook fresh pasta. But it took Edith a lot longer to realize that cooking would be such an integral part of her life.

“I was kind of in this limbo moment where I was like, ‘Do I go back to banking?’ which I had been doing for six years. Or do I try something crazy? So I went for the crazy,” Edith says. “I drove around St. Louis, Missouri and found a culinary school. Pulled up in the parking lot and I was enrolled in an hour and a half.”

She spent some of her culinary training in Italy. Then when she came back to the states, she worked for an Italian chef. And for the first year, she worked for free.

“He was a mad scientist,” Edith says and smiles. “He was everything you could ever think an Italian chef would be. Loud and proud. The passion that oozed out of him when it came to his food was nothing short of a miracle.”

Edith tosses the pasta with a bit of flour before throwing it into a small pan of boiling water. (Photo/KCAW/Katherine Rose)

And Edith took some of that passion with her when she became a chef.

“I really saw what food could be. When a farmer walks into your door and hands you a product they made with their bare hands, and put their love into. And you shake their hands, and make that transaction, you’re agreeing to use that food and do it justice.”

After a minute, she pulls the fettuccine from saucepan and tosses it with a reduced mix of olive oil, white wine, chopped olives.

She tops it with  a little fresh local basil cut into thin strips. And pours the starchy goodness into a bowl for me to try. It’s incredible, refreshing even, and the olives really pop in contrast with the rich pasta. It ain’t noodles and butter. It’s better.

The final product, tossed with olive oil, white wine, a smattering of mediterranean olives and fresh basil. (Photo/KCAW/Katherine Rose)

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Edith’s Fresh Pasta

2 cups flour

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 tablespoon Kosher Salt

2-4 eggs

Olive oil

White wine

Parm cheese

Mediterranean olive mix or tapenade 

Fresh basil

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1.) Make a well in the center of two cups of flour in a bowl.

2.) Add olive oil, salt and two of the four eggs to the center of the well.

3.) Gently mix in the eggs and oil, gradually drawing in flour with each stroke.

4.) Knead the pasta dough gently for a few minutes. It should be slightly bouncy and sticky. If the mix is too dry add another egg or two. If it becomes too sticky to knead, add a touch more flour.

5.) Let the dough rest for 30 minutes. Then flatten out a baseball sized handful on a floured surface.

6.) With your pasta roller at the highest setting, slowly roll the dough through. Do this several times, gradually adjusting the setting to be thinner and thinner until you’ve achieved the desired thickness. (If you don’t have a pasta roller, a rolling pin should do the trick!)

7.) Use a pasta cutting tool for thin noodles like fettuccine. For wider pasta, you can use a pizza cutter.

The pasta can be dried or cooked fresh.

Lisa Sadleir-Hart makes her smoothies from berries and other fruit, kale and homemade yogurt. (Photo/KCAW/Katherine Rose)

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On the morning I meet with Lisa Sadleir-Hart to make homemade yogurt, I’m a little frazzled. It’s early, I’m not sure if this is the right house, what sound does yogurt make, anyway? I take my shoes off and walk into her quiet, dimly lit home, sunlight pouring in from the kitchen windows. And I’m forced to relax. Because Lisa isn’t just making yogurt. She’s doing yoga.

Lisa says yogurt is her  power food. She eats a lot of it, mostly in breakfast smoothies. But she realized that buying so much yogurt had its drawbacks.

“I have a love of nature and creation. And I realized that all of those yogurt containers that I was buying. I can only use so many of them to put things into the freezer. And I was like, this is craziness. I can’t do this in good conscience anymore.”

So now, once a week, Lisa makes her own yogurt by hand.

“First thing I’m gonna do is take my non-fat dried milk. As you can see I’m not an exact measurer, so i’m going to take some robust ⅓ cup scoops and scoop them into my pan.”

Lisa says this gives her more calcium and curbs cost. She adds six cups of water to the powdered milk and turns up the heat on the stove. She has a special yogurt thermometer.

“I’m gonna heat to 180, but I’ll cool it down to this green safe zone where I know the bacteria will be able to grow the best. Cuz if it’s too hot, I’ll kill all the bacteria in the culture and that’s not what I want to do. I want loads of those good bacteria in my yogurt to feed my gut.”

While it’s cooking, Lisa stirs slowly. This processes takes about 7 minutes. It’s quiet, so Lisa takes this time to do a morning meditation. She slowly stirs the yogurt as she chants, “Hari om, Hari om, Hari om,” and her voice reverberates through her kitchen. 

After it’s frothy at 180 degrees, Lisa cools the mix while stirring in a bath of water in the sink. Once it hits the right temperature, she pours the milky mixture into a yogurt maker to solidify.  

She whisks in a spoonful of yogurt starter and some of last week’s yogurt. The cultures meld together to make something new.

(Photo/KCAW/Katherine Rose)

The mix will sit in her yogurt maker all day. Then with the small bowl of thick white yogurt left over from last week’s batch, she makes her daily morning smoothie.

“I try to get a good two cups of greens in there. It’s a great way to get more green vegetables into your diet.”

But she also adds berries, a banana, ground flaxseeds, and today – a California persimmon.

Yoga is all about paying attention. To your breath, to your posture. And for Lisa, that discipline- that mindfulness- carries over to her palate.

“When I pay attention to what I’m eating there are a couple of things that happen. I become incredibly grateful. And you also taste food so much better. You can taste the kale. You can detect that hint of orange essence. From the persimmon to the raspberry to the black cherries. It puts me in connection with- where did those foods come from? Whose hands touched the food. Who were the farm workers who harvested the food so I could benefit?”

Benefit from the sustenance, and the thoughtful routine it provides.

“I’ve been doing this for at least 7 to 10 years. And I never get tired of making yogurt.”

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Tracy Turner has a recipe for you. One that moves her to song. 

“Isn’t it amazing…what baking can dooooooo oooh oooh oooh,” Tracy sings and laughs. “Cookies have been a big part of my life since forever. Even when I was a little kid, my mom would make these super hearty survival cookies.”

Cookies are still a big part of Tracy’s life and home. She got her first cookie jar as a wedding gift.

“My sister-in-law held up a negligee, and said ‘Hey, how about this?’ and my brother said ‘That’s my baby sister. We’re getting her a cookie jar,'” Tracy says.

Now over two-dozen line the walls of her kitchen. From a Campbell’s Soup can to an antique bear from the 1930s. She finds many at garage sales. But her two favorites — a ceramic jar made to look like an oatmeal container, and an Archway cookie truck — have a special connection to one of her favorite cookie monsters.

“Both of those, my husband saved up the box tops to get me the cookie jar,” Tracy says. “For the oatmeal, he was actually taking instant oatmeal to work and eating instant oatmeal for lunch without me knowing it.”

Today, Tracy is making a cookie recipe that’ll fill one…or two… or three of those jars. A classic chocolate chip cookie dough she divides in three parts, adding different ingredients to make each batch stand out. Chocolate chips go into batch one. Coconut, oats and Rice Krispies in another. And for batch three? She tells me I have to do a taste test to decide.

TRACY: Our job now is to decide, and so what we’re going to have to do is sprinkle out a few of these. And then you’re just gonna have to take a little bit of each thing with a little bit of caramel. This is all you now.

KCAW: I don’t know if I want the responsibility. 

TRACY: You know, it’s like making a quilt. The worst that can happen is you end up with something great.

She watches and narrates as I try the different flavor combinations. Cherries and sea salt chips. Apricot jam bits. And finally pecan and salted caramel chips.

“Yeah that’s like a classic,” Tracy says. “Oh my gosh, your face. Yeah, that’s the one.”

Now that we’ve decided on our three cookies, Tracy starts to prep the dough, chopping pecans, beating butter and cracking eggs. 

Her recipe book is full of notes, from her daughter’s handwriting highlighting favorite recipes, to her own suggestions.

“Matt and Grandma like the not-flattened better than flattened in this particular cookie,” Tracy reads one a note in the margins of a recipe. “Lots of notes in my cookbook. And lots of stains. Remember, it’s your cookbook. Do whatever you want.”

She measures all of her ingredients with the same glass measuring cup. She uses her hand to measure too, airing on the generous side when she puts in ingredients like pecans and chocolate chips. But one thing is certain.

“I do, always always always use a recipe for baking.”

She has tons of tips. A bit of vinegar gives the cookie some crispiness. A few tablespoons of corn syrup make them chewier.  Baking is a science and the chemistry is important.

“I think baking is also an art, but I’m a big fan of combining the arts and sciences. I think they’re just all part of the same game,” Tracy says. “And again, it is a science, but I’m not that exact.”

After mixing the dough, dividing it into three parts and adding the ingredients that make each cookie stand out, she scoops them onto a sheet-pan with a cookie scoop so they’re all evenly sized and spaced.

“A cookie? About 50 calories,” Tracy says. “Most cookies run around 50 calories. What I would tell you is that there is very little in life that can give you that much pleasure for fifty calories.”

And there’s another role cookies have played in Tracy’s life. Conversation starter with her kids.

“I would make a whole bunch of doughs and stick them in the freezer. Then, every day when it was time for them to come off the bus. I would pull out a roll and slice off a few and bake them. That way they came home to warm cookies. They would sit and they would relax and they would really talk and open up about what was going on. Instead of ‘how was your day? Fine. Did you do your homework?’ No, it was the real deal, it was ‘who’s passing notes, who broke my heart, who’s cute. All of it. That was huge in the lives of our kids growing up.”

And when the cookies come out of the oven, they’ll cool and go in the jar for anyone passing to take one or two, or three.

“That’s how I love people. I make them food. And cookies are something that anybody can appreciate.”

Tracy’s Cookie Recipe, adapted from the King Arthur Flour Cookie Companion

1 1/2 cups butter

1 1/3 cups dark brown sugar

1 1/3 cups granulated sugar

4 tablespoons light corn syrup

2 tablespoons cider or white vinegar

4 large eggs

2 tablespoons vanilla extract

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1/4 teaspoon almond extract

4 1/2 cups unbleached, all-purpose flour

1 1/2 cups chocolate chips

1 1/2 cups sea salt and caramel chips

1 cup chopped pecans

2 tablespoons milk

1/4 cup oats

1 cup shredded coconut

2 cups Rice Krispies

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Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Grease two baking sheets.

In a large mixing bowl, cream together the butter, sugars, corn syrup and vinegar, then beat in the eggs. Beat in the vanilla, almond extract, salt, baking powder, and baking soda. Slowly mix in the flour to combine.

Divide the dough into three parts.

In cookie dough #1, add chocolate chips. 

In cookie dough # 2, add oats, Rice Krispies, shredded coconut and milk. 

In cookie dough #3, add chopped pecans and salted caramel chips. 

Drop the dough by the tablespoonful onto the prepared baking sheets. Bake the cookies for 10 minutes, until they’re just set. Remove from the oven and transfer to a rack to cool.

Smoked king salmon bellies, dripping with fat as they’re removed from the smoker. (Photo/Katherine Rose/KCAW)

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Jerry Fleming has a recipe for you. It’s a pretty simple one with just four ingredients. Alder chips, chopped from trees growing in Jerry’s backyard.

“That’s what it is is charcoal when I’m done. Hopefully it doesn’t catch fire in there,” Jerry says. “But sometimes it does. Hope I stop it quick enough.”

A big bucket full of water. Four scoops of salt.  All compliments to the main event. Something you can’t get just anywhere- king salmon bellies. But Jerry gets them delivered to his door in massive bags. And then he just gives them away.

“They’re too hard to pack for one thing. If they’re going to process them it takes too much time- they’ll never make out on it financially,” Jerry says. “I give it all away, just about. I go to the science center, I go to the fine arts camp. I don’t keep much. If I get extra I’ll can it.”

After soaking in salt water for a few minutes, these bellies will sit on the counter overnight before smoking. (Photo/Katherine Rose/KCAW)

He’s rigged an entire wall of his garage with a metal seafood processing table he salvaged from a local plant.

“It was down in front of Sitka Sound Seafoods,” he tells me. “It was down there laying on the ground and somebody had run over it and dented it. And they gave it to me.”

Soon, dozens and dozens of pink bellies will line this silver counter. But first he has to cut and glaze them. He sharpens his knife quickly. “Bet you can’t do this,” he says as he shows off his skills. 

He slices the bellies into small pieces, puts them in the bucket full of salt water and sets the timer. While he waits, he has a couple of visitors looking for a snack.

“Tinkerbell! How are you! See if I can find some goodies for you here. There tinker, there you go,” Jerry says as he hands some scraps to the tiny Papillon, Tinkerbell. “Yes,” he says to his fluffy black dog, Neva, “I’ll give you some too.”

Jerry Fleming slices king salmon bellies on a table he recycled from Sitka Sound Seafoods. (Photo/Katherine Rose/KCAW)

But with the smells of delicious salmon wafting through the garage, it’s hard to keep the pups out from under your feet.

“I got my hot water tank, I got my table here,” Jerry says, and he’s interrupted by a loud yelp from Tinkerbell. “Oh! Excuse me! Excuse me! Yeah, I stepped on ya’ didn’t I? But you get right underneath me!”

Now the bellies come out, they’re rinsed off and then sealed.  They’ll sit here overnight. Jerry sets up a fan at one end of the counter to dry the glaze.

Tomorrow he’ll be up at the crack of dawn to get them in the an old, blackened smoker. To say it’s seasoned is an understatement.

“I hope I have it all in the smoker by 5:30 or 6:00. I hope. If I don’t make it, I don’t make it, that’s also okay. Everybody is different. I’ve had some that aren’t good, but they all turn out basically pretty good. Just gives me something to do. You gotta be busy. I enjoy doing it, and they enjoy it, so why not?”

The final product, before it’s pulled out of the smoker. (Photo/Katherine Rose/KCAW)