April 12, 2010 by Charles Bingham

• Sitka Seafood Festival steering committee to meet on Saturday, April 17

The next meeting of the Sitka Seafood Festival steering committee is 10 a.m. on Saturday, April 17, at Harrigan Centennial Hall.

During the April 10 meeting, the committee voted Lily Herwald in as secretary and Phyllis Hackett as bookkeeper. The committee also decided to book “NANDA: Acrobaticalist Ninja Action Heroes,” a four-man juggling, acrobatic, martial arts and comedy troupe that is performing at the Southeast Alaska State Fair on July 29-Aug. 1 in Haines, the weekend before the Sitka Seafood Festival (Aug. 6-7). A headline music group also is being booked.

Committee members will be canvassing local businesses for donations to cover the costs of hosting the inaugural Sitka Seafood Festival, and the deadline for donations is May 9 (Mother’s Day). A donation/sponsorship letter has been approved and committee members soon will distribute it to local businesses. Donations will be accepted after May 9, but that’s the deadline to be included in the event promotional materials, which uses a tier system based on the amount of the donation. Donation/sponsorship checks need to be written to the “Sitka Conservation Society” with a memo of “Sitka Seafood Festival” or “SCS/SSF” (the Sitka Conservation Society is letting us share their 501(c)(3) permit until we can get our own next year).

Also, committee members are seeking prizes for a raffle and raffle prize commitments are needed by Wednesday, April 14, to either Alicia Peavey (alaska_al33@hotmail.com or 1-928-607-4845) or Linda Olson (747-6985 or Baranof Elementary School). The raffle will feature 800 tickets at $5 each, with the drawing to take place on May 9 (Mother’s Day). Donations of merchandise, including locally caught seafood or gourmet meals of Sitka seafood, are greatly appreciated.

During the April 5 meeting, the steering committee decided to hold the inaugural Sitka Seafood Festival on Friday and Saturday, Aug. 6-7. The tentative plan is to have an opening dinner on Friday night with a guest chef and the possibility of live music. The main events will be on Saturday, with vendors set up all day, contests, a parade, cooking demos, music and educational activities. The headliner music guest will play a concert/dance on Saturday night.

To learn more about the Sitka Seafood Festival or to volunteer to help on one of the committees, e-mail sitkaseafoodfestival@gmail.com. You also can contact Alicia Peavey at alaska_al33@hotmail.com or 1-928-607-4845.

Sitka Seafood Festival minutes from the April 10, 2010, meeting

Sitka Seafood Festival committee breakdown and job tasks (updated)

Sitka Seafood Festival business donation assignments (who asks) (updated)

April 7, 2010 by Charles Bingham

• Sitka Seafood Festival steering committee to meet on Saturday, April 10

Sockeye salmon hang in a smoker in preparation for the 2009 ANSWER Camp program

The next meeting of the Sitka Seafood Festival steering committee is 11 a.m. on Saturday, April 10, at the Bayview Wine Bar (on the second floor of the Bayview Building on Lincoln Street).

Sitka Seafood Festival committee breakdown and job tasks

Final draft of Sitka Seafood Festival donation letter

Sitka Seafood Festival business donation assignments (who asks)

April 5, 2010 by Charles Bingham

• Sitka Seafood Festival steering committee meets tonight (April 5)

Grillmaster Rick DeGroot checks salmon fillets barbecuing for a 2007 prostate cancer awareness event in Sitka

The Sitka Seafood Festival steering committee will meet at 7:30 p.m. tonight (Monday, April 5) at Harrigan Centennial Hall. The meeting times have been moving around in recent weeks as they try to find a time that can get local restaurant people involved.

Tonight’s meeting will finalize a sponsorship letter for fundraising, discuss a raffle fundraiser, discuss work committees and duties, discuss budget for music and possible guest chefs, etc.

At the last meeting on April 1, the group finalized the mission statement, “The Sitka Seafood Festival’s mission is to celebrate wild Alaska seafood.” The steering committee also decided that this year’s inaugural event will focus on culinary experience, entertainment (music) and education.

Sitka Seafood Festival committee breakdown

Sitka Seafood Festival tasks

Rough draft of Sitka Seafood Festival donation letter

Sitka Seafood Festival business donation assignments (who asks)

March 31, 2010 by Charles Bingham

• Sitka Seafood Festival steering committee to meet on April 1

Salmon ready for canning in jars (Photo courtesy of University of Alaska Fairbanks Cooperative Extension Service)

The Sitka Seafood Festival steering committee will meet at 6 p.m. on Thursday, April 1, at the Sitka Economic Development Association (SEDA)/Greater Sitka Chamber of Commerce office on the second floor of the Troutte Center Building on Lincoln Street (above Seasons card store).

The meeting agenda will finalize the event’s mission statement and the vision for the festival, set committee members and leads, and take care of other business related to creating a new festival of this nature. The Sitka Seafood Festival tentatively is scheduled for Friday through Sunday, Aug. 6-8, at various locations in Sitka.

Notes from the March 24 meeting and an initial breakdown of committees are attached as PDF documents. For more information about the festival, contact Alicia Peavey at alaska_al33@hotmail.com or 1-928-607-4845. (Editor’s note: The next meeting will be at 7:30 p.m. on Monday, April 5, at Harrigan Centennial Hall.)

Notes from March 24, 2010, Sitka Seafood Festival steering committee meeting and vision session

Sitka Seafood Festival committees

Kerry MacLane grills black cod for the Alaska Longline Fisherman's Association booth at the Sitka Farmers Market

March 24, 2010 by Charles Bingham

• Group to meet about organizing a Sitka Seafood Festival this summer

Black cod (aka sablefish) on the grill from the Alaska Longline Fisherman's Association booth at the Sitka Farmers Market

A group in Sitka will meet at 6 p.m. tonight, Wednesday, March 24, at the Sitka Economic Development Association’s conference room (second floor of the Troutte Center building on Lincoln Street, the Sitka Chamber of Commerce office above Seasons card store) to plan the inaugural Sitka Seafood Festival.

The group first met on Saturday afternoon, March 20, to brainstorm ideas for the event. The group discussed the event’s mission, name, slogan location, music, the scope of the event (just salmon or multi species, very local or grander scale, etc.), committees, funding, event partners and other organizational aspects. Suggestions from the first meeting included having local and/or regional chefs provide cooking demonstrations, honoring the life cycle of the salmon (or featured species of the year), etc. The tentative dates for the first Sitka Seafood Festival are Aug. 6-8, 2010.

If you have any questions about the Sitka Seafood Festival, contact Alicia Peavey at alaska_al33@yahoo.com. (Editor’s note: The next Sitka Seafood Festival steering committee meeting will be at 6 p.m. on Thursday, April 1, at the Sitka Economic Development Association office in the Troutte Center building on Lincoln Street.)

Sitka Seafood Festival steering committee meeting notes from March 20, 2010

Sitka Seafood Festival steering committee meeting agenda, March 24, 2010

Chohla Moll grabs some sockeye salmon out of the brine mixture so she can hang it in the smoker.

February 27, 2010 by Charles Bingham

• New feature added — Sitka Local Foods Marketplace (for in-season local food in Sitka)

There have been some requests for a Sitka Local Foods Marketplace, where local gardeners and fishermen can post notes when they have in-season local food available in Sitka. So we’ve added a Sitka Local Foods Marketplace page (please click this link), and the marketplace page can be found at the top of our main Sitka Local Foods Network gateway page.

The Sitka Local Foods Marketplace will give local gardeners and fishermen a place to let people know when local food is available, and this will be an all-year marketplace for local food. The way this will work is people with local food for sale will use the comments to post the news about their extra heads of lettuce or fresh king salmon available for sale. Sellers will be responsible for all licensing required before they can sell fish or cooked goods. Please no selling of subsistence or sport-caught fish due to Alaska Department of Fish & Game licensing regulations.

When posting your comment about local food you have available for sale, please use this format:

• Your name (first and last names, please)
• Your contact information (phone number and/or e-mail address)
• What type of food is available (for example, fresh-caught winter king salmon with most fish in the 12-16 pound range)
• Your price (both single item and any quantity discounts)
• Expected time items will be available (one week, two weeks, all summer, etc.)
• Any other comments about your local food

Please be aware that all comments are moderated on this site (thank the spammers), so it may take a day or two to be posted. If you posted a marketplace comment that didn’t show up on the page within a day or two, please send me an e-mail at charles(at)sitkalocalfoodsnetwork.org — replace (at) with the @ symbol. Also, if you have your own Web site for your local food products, send me the link and I will add it to the Sitka Commercial Food Producers category (toward the bottom of the long list of links on the right side of the Web page).

September 29, 2009 by Charles Bingham

• Aliens from Running of the Boots fundraiser show up in Daily Sitka Sentinel and Juneau Empire

Screenshot of the Daily Sitka Sentinel site on Monday with the aliens photo from the 2009 Running of the Boots

Screenshot from Tuesday's Juneau Empire featuring the aliens photo from the Running of the Boots

The green-headed aliens were the hit of the Running of the Boots on Saturday, earning spots on the front page of the Daily Sitka Sentinel on Monday and in Tuesday’s issue of the Juneau Empire. The Running of the Boots is a fundraiser for the Sitka Local Foods Network, and we greatly appreciate race founder Sheila Finkenbinder and the Greater Sitka Chamber of Commerce donating the proceeds from the event to our organization. A photo gallery from the race is posted just below this one, or click here to go directly to the gallery.

In other recent local foods news, Sitka filmmaker Ellen Frankenstein and her movie, “Eating Alaska,” are featured in Wednesday’s Anchorage Daily News. Ellen will be in Anchorage to show her film on Sunday night at the inaugural Alaska Local Food Film Festival, which runs Oct. 2-8 at Anchorage’s Beartooth Theatrepub and Grill.

Click here to read a “Local Flavor” column by chef Ginny Mahar about chanterelles from Sunday’s Juneau Empire, which local mushroom enthusiasts can find throughout Southeast Alaska about this time of the year. Ginny, who works for Rainbow Foods in Juneau, writes the Food-G blog where she has posted several recipes that use chanterelles. Chanterelles are popular this week, because Carla Peterson also writes about them in Capital City Weekly.

Click here to read a letter to the editor in Tuesday’s Juneau Empire about how to eat healthy foods on a budget. The letter, written by staff members from the Juneau office of the University of Alaska Fairbanks Cooperative Extension Service, was in response to a Fairbanks Daily News-Miner story (that appeared later in the Juneau Empire) about Alaska lawmakers trying to live on food stamps for a week.

Click here to read a Seattle Times article about how Northwest cooks are falling in love with the sablefish (aka, black cod), a fish frequently caught in Sitka waters and available at the Sitka Farmers Market. The article includes a recipe.

Click here to read a blog post on The Atlantic Food Channel called “Local Food Comes To Alaska,” by New York University nutrition, food studies and public health professor Marion Nestle (author of “Food Politics,” “Safe Food,” “What To Eat,” and “Pet Food Politics,” as well as the “Food Matters” column for the San Francisco Chronicle).

If you haven’t visited the “Eat Local Northwest” blog, it’s worth a look. This blog is maintained by two friends — Stephen lives in the Mat-Su Valley and works in Anchorage, while Audrey is from the Seattle area. In the most recent post (as of Tuesday night), Stephen writes about his happy discovery that some of the prices at the South Anchorage Farmers Market actually were comparable or lower than what he was finding at several of local grocery stores. There is a link to this blog in our blog roll on the right side of the page.

Click here to read a story from KTUU-TV (Anchorage NBC affiliate) about Meyer’s Farm in Bethel, a project started by Tim Meyers that now involves a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) program where local residents pay a fee and get weekly boxes of fresh, local produce. You can click a video link in the upper right corner, too. Meyer’s Farm was featured in the April 2009 issue of Alaska Magazine (link opens a PDF file of the article). There also is a Flickr photo gallery that shows nearly 100 photos of Meyer’s Farm.

Finally, the new farmers market near the White House isn’t about Alaska food, but it does promote and encourage people to eat local food. Click here for a story about the new farmers market on National Public Radio and click here for an article from the Washington Post. Click here for an article from USA Today about the growth of farmers markets across the nation.

September 19, 2009 by Charles Bingham

• Sitka Farmers Market says thanks for a great summer

Sitka has many wonderful events that happen year after year; the Monthly Grind, Whalefest, the Running of the Boots and the Sitka Summer Music Festival, just to name a few. Our hope and dream has been to create one more tradition that people can look forward to year after year, summer after summer. Our goal was to create a Sitka Farmers Market that brings Native and non-Native people together to celebrate Sitka and the wonderful things people can do here, which includes growing, harvesting and sharing nutritious local food.

For the past two years, we have seen our dream come true and the seeds for even bigger and better markets have been sown. This happened because of tremendous amount of community support. To every vendor, shopper and sponsoring group that has made this happen, we would like to extend our sincere appreciation.

The Sitka Conservation Society (SCS), SEARHC, the Sitka office of the University of Alaska Fairbanks Cooperative Extension Service, Alaska Native Sisterhood, Kayaaní Commission, Baranof Island Housing Authority and the Women, Infants, Children (WIC) supplemental nutrition program have been tremendous and true partners. The delicious smell of grilling local black cod was made possible by the generous loan of the Reindeer Redhots cart to the Alaska Longline Fisherman’s Association. To our friends at the historic Alaska Native Brotherhood Hall, who have provided the perfect gathering space for a Sitka market, we say Gunalchéesh. We are grateful to the media in town, who time and again helped us to promote our market and our cause. Last but certainly not least, we’d like to recognize the vendors.

In the past two years we’ve had almost 50 local entrepreneurs who made this event happen. Your creativity, your enthusiasm, your customer service and your willingness to share your time and talents is most appreciated. You and the shoppers who buy local are the backbone of our market.

The 2009 Sitka Farmers Market season has come to an end. Plans for next year have already begun. We hope to see you there, and thanks again to everyone who is supporting the local foods movement.

Even though the Sitka Farmers Market season has ended, the Sitka Local Foods Network will be active throughout the year. We will continue our work on expanding community gardens, getting a community greenhouse built in Sitka, encouraging the sustainable use of traditional subsistence foods and providing educational opportunities to Sitka residents who want to learn more about producing local food. The next Sitka Local Foods Network event is the Running of the Boots fundraiser, which takes place at 11 a.m. (register at 10) on Saturday, Sept. 26, at the Crescent Harbor shelter. For more information, click here.

Sincerely,

Sitka Local Foods Network
Kerry MacLane, Peggy Reeve, Linda Wilson, Doug Osborne, Natalie Sattler, Sharon Romine, Tom Crane, Maybelle Filler, Lisa Sadleir-Hart, Ellen Frankenstein, Charles Bingham (2009 SLFN board members and/or Sitka Farmers Market volunteers)

September 15, 2009 by Charles Bingham

• Mike Wise of Raven’s Peek Roasters/Sailor’s Choice Coffee wins Table of the Day Award from fifth Sitka Farmers Market

Mike Wise, center, of Raven's Peek Roasters and Sailor's Choice Coffee receives the Table of the Day Award from Kerry MacLane, left, and Linda Wilson, right, during the fifth and final Sitka Farmers Market of the 2009 summer on Sept. 12.

Mike Wise of Raven’s Peek Roasters and Sailor’s Choice Coffee won the “Table of the Day Award” for the fifth and final Sitka Farmers Market of the 2009 summer on Sept. 12. Mike and his wife, Dr. Marilyn Coruzzi, have had a table at all five markets in 2009 and all three markets in 2008.

The Sitka Local Foods Network selected the table — which featured a variety of locally ground coffee and locally roasted nuts — to receive the $25 cash prize, an Alaska Farmers Market Association tote bag and a certificate of appreciation. A similar prize package was awarded to a deserving vendor at each of the five Sitka Farmers Markets this summer.

This was the last Sitka Farmers Market of the 2009 summer, but the Sitka Local Foods Network will be around all year with other events. The next Sitka Local Foods Network event is the 15th annual Running of the Boots at 11 a.m. (register at 10 a.m.) on Saturday, Sept., 26, at the Crescent Harbor shelter. Proceeds from the Running of the Boots support Sitka Local Foods Network projects. Click this link for more information.

Also, a new photo gallery from the fifth Sitka Farmers Market on Sept. 12 has been posted on Shutterfly (an online photo-sharing site). Click this link to check out the photos.

Black cod on the grill from the Alaska Longline Fisherman's Association

Keith Greba and his art

Lisa Bykonen and her knitted hats

Natalie Sattler, left, holds parsnips, while Lisa Sadleir-Hart, center, and Doug Osborne, right, hold turnips for sale at the Sitka Local Foods Network booth

August 31, 2009 by Charles Bingham

• Evening Star Grutter wins Table of the Day Award from fourth Sitka Farmers Market

Fabian Grutter, left, and Evening Star Grutter, right, of Eve's Farm receive the Table of the Day Award from Linda Wilson during the fourth Sitka Farmers Market of the season on Aug. 29.

Evening Star Grutter and Fabian Grutter of Eve’s Farm won the “Table of the Day Award” for the fourth Sitka Farmers Market of the season on Aug. 29.

The Sitka Local Foods Network selected the table — which featured a variety of fresh produce and homemade jams and jellies — to receive the $25 cash prize, an Alaska Farmers Market Association tote bag and a certificate of appreciation. A similar prize package is awarded to a deserving vendor at each of the five Sitka Farmers Markets this summer.

The fifth and final market of the season takes place from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 12, at Alaska Native Brotherhood Hall. Keep your eye on this site for more information.

Also, a new photo gallery from the fourth Sitka Farmers Market on Aug. 29 has been posted on Shutterfly (an online photo-sharing site). Click this link to check out the photos.