Yum!

Lauri can bake. Well, bake and cook and make pasta and smoke salmon and put up the summer harvest. It's in her DNA. She can make your mouth water from 3 miles away. Her upbringing was very much about food and its correct arrangement. What she doesn't know, isn't worth knowing. I've eaten the best meals ever in her kitchen. The first year she lived in Alaska, I went up for the summer to help build her house. She was living in a trailer the size of my laundry room next to the building site on her 5 acres. The pilings were already done when I got there and the floor joists were hung. The trees that made the walls of the cabin came from Lauri's land and some she bought. I sat for days scraping the bark off the logs. It was incredible to watch this construction. In Alaska, construction can only be done for about 3 months -- after the summer, forget about it, it's simply not going to happen. Needless to say, her cabin site was a flurry of activity. But there was always, always, always a fabulous dinner. It didn't hurt that there was so much fresh salmon and halibut around. And she didn't have this great kitchen, the evening meal was done on a barbecue or in her wok. I remember one time she stir fried some pork that had been marinading in beer and then, at the very end, she added fresh peaches. Yum!