Alaska State Fair

The check in the mail was for over $150! Nine wines won various prizes including Best of Class, and I got a $50 prize for 2nd place in the SoftaSilk cake flour contest. That turned out to be my best year, 2002. The State Fair awards $6.00 for a first place, $3.00 for second place, and $2.00 for third place.
Throughout the 35 years we have lived in Alaska, I have been entering my home made items in the Alaska State Fair. My entrant number 000201, recently changed to 90021. The ladies always comment on how low a number it is when I bring in my entries. I have had seven careers where I made a salary, but my real time is spent with creative endeavors.
When we first came to Alaska, we enjoyed picking wild Alaska berries from which I made jams and jellies. Then I had too many berries and Mother said she had too much jam stocked up, so I discovered making liqueurs out of berries. I made every liqueur recipe in the book, and entered them all in the Fair. We still have a few drops of a bottle of 34 year old blueberry liqueur. It tastes like finely aged with a hint of blueberry.
I remember one year winning Best of Class for my fireweed jelly. Fireweed jelly is difficult to make because it is hard to find fireweed that is not by the side of the road where car exhaust pollution and dirt contaminate the blossoms. Once you find it, you have to collect a huge mound of the vibrant pink petals at the peak of their ripeness, and then process them immediately before they wilt. I usually pick wild clover blossoms as well, which are always growing in the same area. These are sweet and lend a hint of honey to the final delicately flavored product. Fireweed jelly is a lovely pink, glowing color, but sadly its color fades within a year.
Another year I won Best of Class for my Sourdough sauce. This sauce is similar to the one sold at Alaska Wild Berry products, but mine is thicker. I have been making it for over 30 years. Our family uses it for everything: alongside beef, chicken, fish, turkey, fried potatoes, you name it. It is never the same twice, but my kids can’t get enough of it. I just made a big batch (more than two gallons) this week, which will last a year or so.
When we started to have children, projects shifted to a beautiful layette knitted of yellow and white yarn, then embroidered in two bright blue and pink flowers. I also hand quilted a Sunbonnet Sue, Overall Bill quilt and pillow sham. In each quilt square Sunbonnet Sue is doing something fun like playing croquet or knitting. Overall Bill’s squares had him fishing or playing football or baseball. I didn’t know when I created the layette and quilt whether we were having a boy or a girl. Both of these efforts won first place ribbons.
Before I started knitting again, after raising two boys, I made cross stitch and embroidery pictures. They usually took a year or two to create, and had to be specially framed. These works of art are priceless to me. My Mother gave me several of hers, and I am honored to have them. She did two 24” X 26” embroidery projects of South America and North America with people in traditional costumes and names of the countries when she was in the hospital for two full weeks after giving birth. I display them in my dining room. I also did an embroidery sampler, similar to one I have of my Mother’s and Grandmother’s. All these items won first prizes.
I have also done needlepoint. I have a project going right now. My needlepoint pillows have also won prizes at the Fair. My Mother once did her own needle point design of daisies for her six dining room chairs. Obviously my Mother inspired my hand work, but my Grandmother taught me to knit.
I have never entered any plants from my garden, but the Garden Club chose it for the garden tour one year. I grow herbs every year, cut them all summer, then at the end of the summer I harvest them all at once and chop up heavy concentrations to make combinations of herbs mixed into soft butter , then freeze it flat and cut it into cubes. We have fresh herbs all winter for vegetables, fish, and eggs. I’ve also put up Russian pickles and made my own sauerkraut.
For a few years I was one of the special event entrants at the Fair. I tried the Spam contest, and lost to all the crazy creative entries. Then I tried the SoftaSilk cake flour contest with my ginger cinnamon cake and won Second Prize which came with an apron, a big red ribbon and cash. The Land O’ Lakes sour cream contest the next year with my rhubarb strawberry coffee cake also won Second Prize, a big red ribbon and cash. Then we entered the Chili making contest.
I talked my husband into helping me with this all day effort. Chili contests were a national pastime that had been brought for the first time to Alaska. People from all over the US came to compete. You have to have a portable stove, your own table, pot, spoons, ingredients and spices. You were not allowed to put beans in your chili. I thought we should mix it up a bit and use ground pork instead of ground beef, and substitute plums instead of tomatoes. I thought that would lend the chili a sweet taste and give the dish a different twist. All the other ingredients normal to chili were included. We had our table decorated with peppers and wore silly aprons and hats, but that was not the point. I guess we were too Alaskan. But we sure had a good time. There was an audience choice prize, and we almost won. But we discovered that for the diehard chili contest, you do NOT change up the ingredients. The way you win is how you combine the 20 to 30 different chili sauce bottles and spices. I don’t know how the judges can judge after tasting only two or three of the spicy hot concoctions, but somehow a winner is declared. Not surprising our winner was someone from out of state who had won before and did this all the time.
After cases and cases of jams, jellies and liqueurs, I decided that the berries should be put to another use. I started making wines. For ten years, I made over 100 different kinds of wine, usually in 6 gallon batches, mostly out of berries we picked in Alaska, many times from my own back yard. That’s over 600 gallons or 3,000 bottles.
My front yard has flowers in it, but the back yard is for wine and kitchen herbs and vegetables. I have black currants, red currants, rhubarb, strawberries, blueberries, gooseberries, raspberries, golden raspberries, aronia berries, crab apples, Nanking cherries, rose hips, service berries, Mt. Ash and nagoon berries. I have made wine out of these fruits, combinations of fruits, as well as onions, corn, parsnips, grapefruit, apricots, peaches, golden local plums, salmon berries, black berries, lilikoi (passion fruit), mango, crab apples, blackberry, fruit juices from Costco, and regular grape wine kits from the Arctic Brewing Supply. I even tried sake by fermenting brown rice. Three times I made sparkling wine by the traditional Méthode Champenoise out of golden raspberries or gooseberries. This type of wine tastes terrific, but is complicated and takes two years to complete. The last batch shot half fermented fruit juice all over my kitchen and inspired a very fine remodel.
My background as a Medical Technologist gave me the courage to play with winemaking, such as the acidity and the pH and different yeasts, different methods of sterilization, filtration, corking, and label making. The variables are endless. I invented (someone else has surely done the same thing) the way I start out the wine which is to pasteurize the fruit and sugar and water before adding the yeast, so I don’t have to add sulfites as preservatives. Wine labels are another story. I took pictures of flowers from by garden to create the labels and I have made transfers of all those labels ready to create a wine label quilt at some point.
My first venture into winemaking was with some rosehips I found next to the science section of West High School. I carefully cleaned and seeded and prepared the hips and then followed the now stained wrinkled, and thumbed through recipe book directions. I only had enough for a gallon and a half, and a carboy that held 3 gallons, so it wasn’t really correct, but I persevered. After the fermentation and before clarification, I tasted it. It tasted so awful I spit it out! But it was my first effort and I didn’t know the process, so I let it sit to clarify. It came out a beautiful golden color and the first taste was very strange, but then I realized it was not wine, it was sherry! It won Best of Show that year in the wine contest, and I got an engraved wine glass and a $100 certificate from the Arctic Brewing Co. where I was buying my supplies. I soon learned that you had to keep the carboy topped off and not let so much air into the process or you would get sherry. But that sherry was so good, I tried to do it again, and couldn’t. It was beginner’s luck. In fact, I haven’t been able, nor did I want to, recreate any of my wines. Every one of them is different. I have two bottles in my cellar I kept aside of every wine I’ve made.
That first year with the sherry was a fluke. I got my fair share of first and second prizes, but never again got Best of Show. I was the most prolific winemaker with the most entries in those days. I have several times gotten Best of Class. The last one was for my Red Currant wine. That made me particularly proud, because red currant wine is the category that has the most entries.
In 2000, we built an addition onto our house that included a 1,000 bottle wine cellar under the stairway. It has been filled many times with wines that I have made. In one year I made twenty separate varietals from blueberry to onion wines. I stopped making wine a couple years ago when I noticed my shoulders were sore and my wine cellar was too full. Now my husband and I don’t drink alcohol at all, so we have a lot of gifts readymade.
My girlfriends and I have now started knitting. I still enter my efforts in Palmer. Last year I received 2nd place for my double knit hat, which, except for the layette, is the best I have done in the knitting category. It turns out that you can’t have worn something in order to enter it. I can’t wait to wear something I worked so long and hard on, so many of my projects can’t be entered. I have knit over 50 pairs of socks. There have been so many weddings lately, that I will have to go back to knitting baby things soon.
A few years ago, my knitting friends and I decided to have a booth at the Girdwood Forest Fair. We call it Twisted Knits. We were interviewed on TV the last two years because our booth is so colorful. My friend Linda is a fabric artist and has a way with color and display. We put our knitted hats with balloons inside so you can see the shape of the hat, making a better display. In 2007 we made $5,000 in our three days of selling, and the previous three months of steady knitting and crocheting.
Right now I am knitting a felted bag, the inevitable pair of socks, a scarf out of stainless steel and silk threadlike yarn, a navy blue wool jacket, another double knit hat, and various other projects I put away for now. We go to knitting every Tuesday to the Far North knit shop, and Wednesdays for Knit and Snit, every second Thursday for Stitch and Bitch at Dana’s and then we sometimes have a Saturday morning gathering. Every day after walking at 8:15 we meet for coffee at Middle Way café and usually bring our knitting and stay until 10:30 or so. My thumbs are arthritic and it affects my other shoulder and neck, but right now about all I do is knit and play duplicate bridge.
Duplicate bridge is another story. There is no category at the State Fair for Bridge or for what I am now enjoying, which is creative writing.