Speaking of little projects, we’ve been making some great batches of pickled salmon in the warehouse and selling it both at the farmers markets and to stores.

Amy and I made the trip down to Portland to do some demo’s at the New Seasons Markets the week after Christmas. We were sampling smoked keta, keta lox and pickled salmon. We spent 4 hours each day at their two newest stores: Fisher’s Landing and Progress Ridge. We really love the New Seasons Markets! Not only do they walk the talk in terms of working directly with small producers like ourselves, their stores are distinct in their extremely helpful brand of customer service. All in all, a great reason to get away to Portland for a couple days.

Our spring is projecting to be fairly quiet and mellow. In terms of our inventory, we are going to be running out of some products far before the boats leave for Alaska next June. We are going to do our best to keep the farmers markets stocked, while still keeping product on the shelves at our wholesale accounts for as long as we can. Every year is a little bit different, and it’s always a challenge trying to project our inventory over a number of months, since we put up almost all of our product for the year in a 10-12 week season. The longer we do it the less stressful it is though, generally speaking!

A couple healthy kings fillets from week 1 of the 2011 summer season.

On July 17th, I had the pleasure of working with Tamara Murphy at Burning Beast. Her new restaurant, Terra Plata, is slated to open in the Melrose Market on Capitol Hill. When Tamara initially approached me about the event, I didn’t know a lot about it except that it was a bunch of chefs getting together and cooking lots of meat. It’s actually a benefit for Smoke Farm, which is a really amazing 365-acre arts and education center in Arlington, WA. I had a great time and will definitely be back next year. I highly recommend checking it out. Here’s some pics from the event:

Fresh Keta fillets getting ready for the heat.

First the fillets were placed on cedar planks, and tied down with wooden dowels, string and wire.

Tamara and Rion getting the salmon just right on the fire.

The fillets were then rubbed with some delicious spices (cardamom!), and hung around a firepit that Tamara welded. There was re-bar sticking through the grating, and the fish was hung by wires around the fire. It was like a magical Christmas tree of salmon!

Amazing, creative food art at Burning Beast 2011.

The salmon was served on top of couscous with a nice yogurt sauce. Unfortunately my iphone died so I didn’t get a good picture of the finished product.

We also had a great demo around the 4th of July at the University District Farmers Market with Becky Selengut, who has recently written a book on sustainable seafood called Good Fish.  Becky filleted and cooked a coho and a sockeye for the audience.  Unfortunately we were slamming at the stall so I couldn’t get away to check it out.  I would really recommend anyone who is interested in seafood to check out her book.

Otherwise, the summer has been relatively uneventful.  The summer always goes by fast once it gets going.   A couple more weeks and the boats will be back.  We’ve got Puget Sound Pink Salmon in September, and fall Keta fishing in October/November.  I’ll check in again soon when more exciting stuff happens

-F/V Njord is hauled out of the water at Fishermen’s Terminal and getting a complete interior remodel, including all new electronics and wiring. Pete had a bad boat fire last August, which melted most everything on the inside of the boat above the engine room. Luckily the work is covered by insurance. For the 2011 fishing season Pete will be sporting some new gear!

-I’ve been pickling salmon in the warehouse, and selling it at the farmers markets. So far we’ve had great customer feedback. I’ve been packing 4 different jar sizes: 4 oz, 6 oz, 8 oz and 24 oz. We rolled it out right before the Christmas season and quickly sold out of the first batch. We’ll keep pickling and get it up on the online store soon as well.

-Jonah has been doing store demos and adding new wholesale accounts. Among others, we’ve established a new account with Talin Market out of New Mexico, who originally found us at the University District Farmers Market. Connecting the dots!

-F/V Loki will be getting hauled out in the spring. Among other things, Jonah will be putting a new bug shoe on the Loki, which is a piece of hardware that keeps out saltwater teredos, a little boring insect that can wreak havoc on a wood boat. He’s also planning on installing a larger freshwater system on the boat!

The online store has been going great, and we’re in the midst of adding new products, more shipping options and a mini-redesign.

We’re looking at adding new farmers markets when they start up in the spring. We had a great year in 2010 at the markets and are excited to see what other markets we can fit into our schedule to keep growing the local food movement.

I’ll try to keep checking in about what we’re up to during the rest of the off-season. No promises though!

Last Saturday at the University District Farmers Market, I, along with Billy of Billy’s Tomatoes, Jay from Alm Hill, Brent from Olsen Farms and my main Loki market man Danny chased and recovered $360 which had been stolen out of the till of one of our fellow vendors, Appel Farms. I was happily enjoying my Patty Pan quesadilla when I saw Brent yelling “hey! HEY! HEY!!!” at a suspicious looking dude, who in turn fled the market at high speed from the southwest corner. I dropped my lunch, turned and gave chase, and found myself running after him down 12th St, through a residential alley, all the while yelling “That guy stole from the market!! Stop him!!”. A random punk rocker jumped off his porch and gave chase with me. The robber, running out of breath after sprinting 5 blocks, looked back and saw us gaining on him, and began to curse. At that point, he threw a large handful of twenty dollar bills on the ground and said “That’s all the money! Leave me alone!”. We gathered up the money and the large contingent of farmers caught up to us. We walked back to the market and returned the money to Appel Farms, who still had not realized she had been robbed. Let that be a lesson to those who might consider stealing from the market: you probably won’t get away with it!

Meanwhile, on Sunday in Southeast Alaska, we almost lost F/V Njord to a boat fire. Pete’s stove, which heats the inside cabin, malfunctioned and caught on fire. Pete and his two deckhands were out on the back deck cleaning fish, and Jonah saw the smoke billowing out from his boat a couple hundred yards away. By the time he got close enough to alert Pete as to what was happening, it was too hot to get inside the boat, and the wiring had been burned out which left Pete with no way to pump water to put the fire out. They ran a long hose over from Jonahs boat, and doused the fire with seawater. All of Pete’s electronics are totaled, and the inside of the boat has extensive damage. Luckily, they caught the fire before it hit any hydraulic or fuel lines, which would have quickly made the situation much worse. Pete also has insurance, which will help out with replacing all of the damaged equipment. Pete missed about half of the fishing opening, but it was still a decent week of fishing between the two boats, all things considered.

With any luck, the rest of the season will be relatively uneventful

Pagliacci’s seasonal Salmon Primo Pizza debuts this week. The pie features our fresh smoked coho on an olive oil base paired with red onions, ricotta cheese, and capers. Yummy.

We are also working with a German film crew from the show “Ocean TV” this week which is a doing a piece on Seattle that we will be featured in. They’ll be coming up to Bellingham on Friday to document the receiving and sorting of the fish, and then filming us at the University District Farmers Market on Saturday. So many things to keep track of!

Here’s some visual samplings of what’s been going on the first three weeks of the season:

Fresh Wild Alaskan Pink Salmon fillet bagged for the farmers market, from week 1 of the 2010 fishing season.

A strikingly similar looking piece of Wild Alaskan Pink salmon with Cindy's cabbage, Oxbow carrots and Tall Grass bread.

A tote of de-iced Fresh Wild Alaskan Sockeye Salmon from week 1 of the 2010 season.

Fresh 4 oz. jars of Keta Ikura from week 3 of the 2010 season.

The boats will be catching fish in Clarence Strait the next 4-6 weeks. I’ll keep you updated as we get there.

I talked to Pete after their first set. Fishing was slow to start which is normal, but they have some fish on board. We will be receiving the weeks catch on Thursday night, and will have limited amounts of fresh available at University and Bellevue Farmers Markets on Saturday, and Broadway, Ballard and West Seattle on Sunday. We will have pink, keta, sockeye and king as well as fresh ikura. I’ll update more when I hear from Pete how fishing is going. Looking forward to it!

Pete Knutson, co-owner of Loki Fish Company, holds the first Loki fish of the 2010 summer season, a bright keta salmon.

F/V Njord deckhand Andrew holds a 15 pound king from the first set of the 2010 season at Tree Point, Alaska.

View Larger Map
Tree Point, Alaska.

Sampling smoked salmon on a chilly winter day at the University District Farmers Market. December 2009. Photo courtesy of Alana Rios.

This off-season has seen one of, if not the biggest change to Loki in recent years. We finally moved out of Pete and Hing’s house in West Seattle, and into a commercial warehouse in the South Park neighborhood of South Seattle! We’ve got a big new (used) walk-in freezer that holds a lot more product, and has the perfect amount of room for packing, staging and organizing all of our product. It’s awesome! We also have put our application in with the WSDA to certify the space, so we can start doing our own custom-processing. That should all be squared away in the next 6-8 weeks. We are open for warehouse sales by appointment.

We’ve been busy at our year-round weekend farmers markets all winter: University District, West Seattle, and Ballard. Oddly, we didn’t have a single torrential weekend of bad weather. Even when it rained Monday-Friday, somehow the weekends were always relatively nice! I’m sure the scales will balance out on that in the coming winters This coming season, we are going to be at:
Tuesday-Carnation every other week
Wednesday-Columbia City
Thursday-Queen Anne and Bellevue
Saturday-University District and Bellevue
Sunday-West Seattle, Broadway and Ballard

We’ve added a couple new markets from last season, and we will be using the first month of the season to see what our final schedule will be.

Jonah has been putting in a lot of energy doing sampling demo’s at stores, including the New Seasons Stores in Portland, Sno Isle Coop in Everett, and our range of stores and coops in the Greater Seattle area.

Pete was recently featured on the Seattle Channel show “Citystream” talking fishing and sustainability. You can check it out here and fast forward to 8:24.

We’ve got some new faces at the farmers markets, as well as some old ones coming back for another season. Jonah will be fishing with Ben again this season as his deckhand, while Pete will be taking two new guys up North. More introductions to come.

We’ve got a little less than eight weeks to go before the boats are back in Alaska catching more salmon, but we will be getting busy with all our new farmers markets and getting everything ready for Alaska in the coming weeks. I’ll keep you updated!

-Dylan

The Alaskan season was a good success, and we have plenty of fish put up for this winter. The Puget Sound season was not huge, but we were able to get fresh salmon to the farmers markets an extra month, which is always nice.

We have some plans this off-season, including moving out of the house and into a bigger warehouse space, doing more in-store product demo’s, and launching a much more in-depth shopping cart on the website.

We’ll be around all winter direct marketing our fish at the Farmers Markets and the West Wall at Fishermen’s Terminal. If you get a chance, drop by and say hi!

Jonah and Ben getting ready for the evening light change in Puget Sound.

Pete sets the net on F/V Njord.

Pete picks the first fish of the night in Puget Sound.

Fresh Keta ready to be cleaned and chilled to 30 degrees in the Njord refrigerated seawater hold.

Dylan cleaning fish and sorting Keta salmon roe on the Njord.

We have another opening this Wednesday, with fresh for the weekend markets. We may get an extension for a week or two, or this may be the end of the fall season for this year.

When fresh season ends, you can still find us at our three year round markets: West Seattle, University District and Ballard. We’ve recently had some great posts by our customers at the University District Farmers Market, Mixed Greens Blog and Sustainable Eats.

In addition to the farmers markets, you can also buy directly this weekend from F/V Njord, 10am-5pm Saturday/Sunday at the West Wall at Fishermen’s Terminal. If you haven’t visited us at the terminal before, take a left when you enter, and we are at the first stretch of water that you will see on the right-hand side.