Living Within the Wild: Personal Stories & Beloved Recipes from Alaska

by Kirsten Dixon, Mandy Dixon

Overview

Living Within the Wild features over 100 original recipes, accompanied by personal stories and stunning photographs, to illustrate the lives of one Alaska family that has learned to live well amidst the intense but scenic backcountry of Alaska.

James Beard Foundation Semifinalist, Outstanding Hospitality (for Tutka Bay Lodge, Homer, AK)

Finalist, 2022 IACP Cookbook Award, Culinary Travel

"When I stayed five nights at Winterlake Lodge in Alaska, I looked forward to my breakfast, lunch, and dinner to see what delicious creations chef Mandy Dixon would serve me and my crew. She did not disappoint and these dishes are all in her terrific new cookbook, Living Within the Wild. Some are so good, I just might steal them and put in my next cookbook. Don't worry, I'll give Mandy the credit."
—Nancy Silverton, James Beard Award–winning chef, author, co-owner of Pizzeria Mozza

The Dixons have been running award-winning adventure lodges in Alaska for over thirty years, celebrating the bounty that the land has to offer with guests from around the world. Their lodges and restaurants are known not just for the rare adventures and incredible views of the Alaskan wilderness, but also for appealing dishes created from the freshest local seafood and produce.

Chefs Kirsten and Mandy Dixon’s combined culinary experience has been recognized nationally and internationally, from cooking at the famed James Beard House in New York City to serving private dinners for National Geographic guests. In this book, mother and daughter offer their favorite recipes, featured on their menus at the lodges and café but specially recreated for the home chef’s kitchen. They also share their unique experiences of life at the lodges—from embracing entrepreneurial challenges to working with family, to sharing the deep purpose and meaning in living in the natural world and wilderness.

Chapters are organized thematically, weaving through stories about the seasonal shifts that make this women-run business unique. A final chapter honors the men in Kirsten and Mandy's lives by sharing quick profiles along with a favorite recipe.

From your own kitchen, learn to make delicious dishes such as Black Bean Reindeer Chili or King Salmon Bowl with Miso Dressing; snack on Dried Tomato Sesame Cookies, or dine on Smoked Caramel Blueberry Brownies. And along the way, experience a sense of backcountry Alaska through the flavors of seasonal and regional ingredients as the Dixons welcome you into their secret world in the remote wilderness.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781513264370
Publisher:	TURNER PUB CO
Publication date:	04/20/2021
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	1,044,634
Product dimensions:	8.60(w) x 10.30(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Chef Kirsten Dixon has been cooking in the backcountry of Alaska for more than thirty years. She attended the Le Cordon Bleu in Paris and earned a Master’s in gastronomy from Adelaide Universityin Australia. She is one of the owners of Within the Wild Adventure Company, which the Dixon family owns and operates from their Southcentral Alaskan restaurants and lodges at Winterlake Lodge, Tutka Bay Lodge, the Cooking School at Tutka Bay, the home goods boutique RusticWild, and La Baleine Café. Kirsten has been featured by the James Beard Foundation and in national and international publications including National Geographic, Fine Cooking, Forbes, Saveur, and more.

Chef Mandy Dixon is one of the partners of her family’s Within the Wild Adventure Company, and the owner and chef of La Baleine Café in Homer, Alaska. She grew up in her mother’s kitchen, later going on to train at Le Cordon Bleu in Pasadena, California, and the Culinary Institute of America in St. Helena, California. Mandy worked as a pastry chef for the Thomas Keller restaurant Group in Yountville, California, for several years before returning to the family business. She has been featured by the James Beard Foundation as well as a number of publications including National Geographic, Fine Cooking, and more.

Read an Excerpt

LET’S JUST BEGIN OUR STORY HERE...

It’s an early July morning in Southcentral Alaska. The sun is streaming through low-lying clouds as a gray fog shrouds the harbor. It’s a moody weather day for summer, but perhaps it will improve later. The La Baleine Café, with its twinkling lights, is an inviting bright spot against the intense blues and grays of Kachemak Bay. If you peek inside one of the café windows, you’ll see a warm and convivial scene of a room filled with fishers and locals, tourists, and weekenders from Anchorage. Mandy is cooking eggs and grilling salmon in the tiny kitchen of her tiny café.

The thing about owning a small café in a seaside town in Alaska is how quickly you learn to know the most colorful regulars. There’s Breakfast Mike, who likes his egg sandwich cut in half so he can eat part of it later. And, the Friday Morning Breakfast Club, a group of long-retired friends that meet once a week to talk about any adventures they’ve had. There’s John, the owner of a bear-viewing guide boat who lives in Alaska year-round. He brings in his entire eclectic work crew into the café for big meals as they work on their boat moored just behind the cafe. The cast of characters goes on, and they all breathe life into the La Baleine Café. The people who inhabit this space create a kind of kinetic energy that inspires Mandy to work hard, to do her best, and to be creative. She doesn’t ever want to let these people down.

Here are a few breakfast dishes on the menu today:
• Yukon Jack pepper bacon
• Hot barley cereal with birch butter
• Homemade walnut toast with berries

Across the bay, about twenty-five minutes by boat, Carly is setting out yoga mats onto the large wooden deck overlooking the ocean. The sun has broken through, and tiny beads of dew are evaporating around her. Grace Ridge, a 3100-foot rise in the lush maritime landscape, looms just to the east of the lodge, displaying a hundred colors of green in the early morning light. The lodge is coming to life, hummingbirds dart in and out of the feeders surrounding the back deck, and the aroma of coffee fills the main room. Carly faces her students and begins her morning routine, stretching and breathing in the salt-kissed morning air.

Down near the tide, naturalist guide and resident scientist Karyn, is guiding a small group of guests along the shoreline, delicately pointing out creatures so small they would go otherwise unnoticed. Tiny oblong nudibranchs, mollusks that abandoned their shells a few million years ago, swirl amidst the bits of algae, amongst the sea anemone and sea stars. Karyn is gathering bright green sea lettuce into her basket to dry and use in the kitchen.

Later in the afternoon, Karyn will ready kayaks on the other side of the deck for the guests she’ll take out after lunch. The group will silently paddle along the edge of the deep fjord of Tutka Bay into the Herring Islands, looking for whales, sea otters, and the dozens of shorebirds Karyn will point out along the way.

The thing about running a lodge in Alaska is that every little detail is essential. The lodge-based team is required to remember the arrivals and departures of the day, special requests, who are going bear-viewing or deep-sea fishing, which guests have special diets or want to go sea kayaking. They must organize and remember the menus of the day, which employees are off, what lodge chores need to happen. Seemingly, a thousand details are orchestrated and always in motion, from music playing softly in the background to flowers on the table. As an eagle swoops overhead, Carly tries to clear her mind and just think about her breathing, her movements in the moment, the people who are right in front of her.

Kirsten is making her way along the tall wooden boardwalk that bridges the lodge and the cooking school, wrapping around the back lagoon. In her tote-bag, she is carrying a new cookbook to add to the school collection, a few culinary items she’s carried down from Anchorage, her black Moleskine notebook she carries everywhere, and packets to give to students for today’s class. On the schedule: make a summer dish from the garden and a wild salad from foraged greens, topped with crab from the Bering Sea. But Kirsten is not quite as “in the moment” as Carly is. On her mind, as she walks along to the school, is the sizzling sake-yuzu dumplings she wants to make later in the day for appetizer hour.

At both Tutka Bay Lodge and to the north of Anchorage, at Winterlake Lodge, front house managers are overseeing final touches to the morning guest tables; herbs are picked from the garden to press gently into butter, orange juice is squeezed, and napkins are folded just so. These and other small luxuries of lodge life are practiced throughout the day, the little grace notes to the rhythm of our lives.

Kirsten and Mandy will fly later in the week to Winterlake, where the lodge flora and fauna (and the menus) are entirely different than its seaside sister. In summer, the landscape at Winterlake is splashed with rich, vibrant greens and the thick ribbons of steel-blue riverbeds that braid across the valley. And, in the winter, deep white snow glitters against pink and blue skies, showing off a low-lying winter sun. The lodge is surrounded by spruce and birch forests and a million-acre mountain range that feels like a private park. All things here are about the dense forest of trees, the sled dogs, the bears, and the sheer wildness of the land.

So, how do we, this adventurous and hard-working band of women, along with our equally formidable male counterparts, a precocious, third-generation boy, as well as twenty sled dogs, manage to run two far-flung lodges, one busy café, and a cooking school? It’s a piece of cake. Literally.

Our favorite cakes that get us through any situation:
• Zucchini Cake with Miso Walnut Frosting (page 86)
• Chocolate Beet Cake (page 152)
• Black Currant Jam Cake (page 184)
• Wild Honey Cake with Lemon Thyme and Ricotta (page 202)

Our solution for stress or worries: pick any one of the above cakes, find the recipe in this book, gather, scoop, stir, pour, and bake. Then, sit down at a table with a lovely view, with your lovely cake, and glide a fork through a healthy slice. Take in a deep breath and realize that nothing is quite as busy or bad as it may seem.

Join us through these stories as we share our lives with you, as we describe why we have chosen to live here, why we live the way we live in this often harsh and still-wild place, close to nature, away from many of the things of the modern world.

Table of Contents

Dedication
A Note from Mandy
A Note from Kirsten
Our Kitchen Philosophy
Let’s Just Begin Our Story Here
Springtime in the Harbor
Girls Fish Camp
A Cuisine of Our Own
The Healing Garden
A Million Acre Picnic
A Fisher, A Musher, A King
Illumination
Snow Day
We Live Along A Trail
It Takes A Lodge
The Pantry
Acknowledgements
Index

Interviews

"A talented chef, Kirsten Dixon regales us with culinary treasures that pay tribute to Alaska's rich bounty."

Editorial Reviews

04/19/2021

The Dixons (The Tutka Bay Lodge Cookbook), a mother-daughter chef duo, combine fascinating stories and delicious food in an enticing work inspired by their Alaskan adventure lodges. Drawing from their experience of having cooked for guests for more than 30 years, the Dixons transport readers to snowy southcentral Alaska, walking them through their favorite seasonal dishes. In spring, that means wildflower semolina pancakes, while come summer, it’s shrimp honey puffs and fire-roasted fish collars. Autumn is welcomed with black garlic yolk and honey pasta, and winter’s made a little cozier with cast iron sweet potato cardamom bread. Notable recipes include a tasty seaweed and nutritional yeast popcorn seasoning, savory spiced lentil doughnuts, and a spruce-tip buttermilk cake (flavored with the “bright green new buds” that surround the lodges in early spring). Main courses highlight the versatility of salmon—it shines in such recipes as spicy rice dumplings with smoked salmon, and salmon scotch eggs—and local game, such as reindeer braised in a stew with dark beer. “We want others to ‘feel’ our love of the place... like they might through a poem or a story or a song,” the Dixons write. Home cooks wanting to bring the outdoors in, or those simply looking for an escape, will cherish this heartfelt work. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

"The Dixons (The Tutka Bay Lodge Cookbook), a mother-daughter chef duo, combine fascinating stories and delicious food in an enticing work inspired by their Alaskan adventure lodges. . . Home cooks wanting to bring the outdoors in, or those simply looking for an escape, will cherish this heartfelt work."
—Publishers Weekly

"A talented chef, Kirsten Dixon regales us with culinary treasures that pay tribute to Alaska's rich bounty."
—Country Living

"Collects rustic yet elegant recipes that serve as 'snapshots in time and place,' highlighting local ingredients and the melting pot of cultures. . . The outside comes inside through desserts infused with spruce sugar, or topped with crystallized cranberries that look frost-kissed. The food and landscape photographs are superb. . . The beauty of Alaska and its tempting culinary offerings come through equally in Living Within the Wild."
—Foreword Reviews

"Kirsten and Mandy Dixon are truly Alaska's biggest culinary champions. No family has done more to put the state's bounty on the map and raise the bar for Alaskan cuisine. When I first visited Alaska, I was warned not to make comparisons to the lower 48. The meals I had at Winterlake Lodge and Tutka Bay rivaled any restaurant experience I could have had in New York City or L.A. in terms of quality of ingredients and presentation. What made the meals so special, was that each dish was rooted in place and left me with a deeper understanding of Alaska. Kirsten and Mandy's dedication to showcasing regional ingredients in an elevated, unexpected, yet thoroughly delicious way is admirable. This book truly captures the spirit of Within the Wild and the family behind the magic."
—Jen Murphy, writer, editor and Wall Street Journal contributor, former editor Food & Wine

"Living Within the Wild is the new cookbook from Chefs Kirsten and Mandy Dixon. The Dixons are known for running award-winning adventure lodges in Alaska. But you don’t just visit these lodges for the adventure, you go for some delicious and unique meals, featuring some of the region's best ingredients. In this cookbook, the mother-daughter team share some of their favourite recipes from the lodges (and their cafe in Homer Spit) as well as stories of what life is like living in the wilderness of Alaska."
—Veggie Table for Two

From the Publisher

"Collects rustic yet elegant recipes that serve as 'snapshots in time and place,' highlighting local ingredients and the melting pot of cultures. . . The outside comes inside through desserts infused with spruce sugar, or topped with crystallized cranberries that look frost-kissed. The food and landscape photographs are superb. . . The beauty of Alaska and its tempting culinary offerings come through equally in Living Within the Wild.

Foreword magazine

"Kirsten and Mandy Dixon are truly Alaska's biggest culinary champions. No family has done more to put the state's bounty on the map and raise the bar for Alaskan cuisine. When I first visited Alaska, I was warned not to make comparisons to the lower 48. The meals I had at Winterlake Lodge and Tutka Bay rivaled any restaurant experience I could have had in New York City or L.A. in terms of quality of ingredients and presentation. What made the meals so special, was that each dish was rooted in place and left me with a deeper understanding of Alaska. Kirsten and Mandy's dedication to showcasing regional ingredients in an elevated, unexpected, yet thoroughly delicious way is admirable. This book truly captures the spirit of Within the Wild and the family behind the magic."

Jen Murphy

"A talented chef, Kirsten Dixon regales us with culinary treasures that pay tribute to Alaska's rich bounty."

Country Living

"A talented chef, Kirsten Dixon regales us with culinary treasures that pay tribute to Alaska's rich bounty."

Country Living