The plane rocked as the not-so-lazy tourmaline-colored river zagging through the Alaskan wilderness below prepared to receive us. I remember glancing nervously at our unlit cigar-chomping bush pilot, who also happened to be State Representative Con Bunde (Northern Exposure was not all fiction), and the two women in the back seat--one a confident Alaskan journalist to whom this was no big deal, the other an excited but queasy chef from the James Beard house in New York City, as he looked for a still patch of deeper water in which to set our pontoons. The river itself was almost too wide at this point spreading the low late summer water rather thinly, and it was going to be a bit tricky once we set down to not catch on one of it's craggy sandbars until we had floated closer downstream to the place a small boat waited to take us to Riversong Lodge.
I had just made a comment about preferring to "meet my meat" that made the journalist scramble for a pad to write that on. And she would remind me of it later, wanting to know if I really really meant that, as we found the rough little path between our cabin and the lodge itself blocked by a pissy, snorting sow named Arnoldina, whose former husband Arnold had provided the bacon, the sausage, and the succulently tender roasted meats that were about to be our first feast of the weekend. Arnoldina had not been present when we received the welcome talk by hosts Kristin and Carl, the one in which we'd been warned she might charge if provoked, but now here she was in the flesh and living up to the advance billing.
As soon as meat ran low again, it would be Arnoldina's turn.
And so it was that I met, on one of the absolute best weekends of my life, Kim Severson, a gifted writer who moved on from her post at the Anchorage Daily News to the San Francisco Chronicle to the plummest of all plum food-writing jobs, the New York Times. Maybe you've noticed her by-line, or maybe you don't read the Times at all, but I have a feeling a lot of people are going to know her name soon as she's written a book, Spoon-Fed, a foodie-memoir of sorts that tells her life story thus far through the lens of the eight chefs that have inspired her and her writing the most. Like Alice Waters.
I can't wait to read it. If you're curious, here's a review:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-05-28/kim-severson-interviewed-on-spoon-fed/