Kirsten’s Pantry

It’s a wonderful opportunity to own several different kitchens (kitchens in our three lodges, one in our Anchorage office, and one in our little Anchorage house where we stay when we are in the city). The best part of that is we do different kinds of cooking in each kitchen, proving how influenced we are in our cooking by our surrounding environment.At Redoubt Bay Lodge, the kitchen area is on the far wall of the main lodge room. The lodge is so small there, we don’t have much room and it is really like a galley kitchen on a ship. We get to talk with guests as they sit in the main room. We don’t do much teaching at Redoubt Bay Lodge, only because of the space limitations, but since it is such an open atmosphere guests can always ask questions. Winterlake Lodge has the most recent kitchen Carl has built. It is still a work in progress because we have to fly all the supplies in to the lodge by airplane but every year we make improvements. This past year we installed a commercial walk-in refrigerator which is slowly replacing our root cellar for storage of our summer veggies. In the winter, the refrigerator actually insulates from the cold. The room is divided by a big work table. People can pass in and out as they please but they can’t go beyond the table. We are adding in a new pastry area of the kitchen for Mandy, a private employee dining room and a dishwashing room. At Tutka Bay Lodge, the emphasis is on the ocean-based cuisine of Kachemak Bay. I have learned to harvest oysters this summer and how to face a lingcod in the eye! In Anchorage, we have our office in a small Cape Cod-style home in midtown Anchorage. The nicest thing about the office is the big kitchen where we have staff and other business meetings, we sometimes convert it into a mini-catering center making cookies and pie for our favorite customers. In all my kitchens, I keep a few standard things: Good cutting boards, a rice maker, an ice cream maker, good All-Clad copper pots and pans, half and full-sized sheet pans, lots of small towels to use for everything from pot-holders to cleaning rags, cardamom pods in the cupboard, and lots of types of tea. Check out the details and recipes from my lodge kitchens in this section and look for recipes as we try new dishes throughout the year.