Last month, the Susitna River Coalition celebrated their fourth annual Wild Su Feast. In the past, the event was characterized as a large gathering, with locally sourced food to taste. But this year, because of the pandemic, the event looked a little different. KTNA’s Colleen Love has more.
The Wild Su Feast has become somewhat of a fall tradition in the Upper Susitna Valley. The event is held to celebrate the bounty of our local watershed. Participants prepare dishes, harvested from the land, and attendees of the feast sample the tasty results. The celebration has grown every year, bringing people in from Anchorage, Fairbanks and Valdez. But this year the organization grappled with the question: “How do you host a dinner without convening?”
The Susitna River Coalition decided to hold an online feast, and instead of just one evening, they hosted a two week affair. Participants cooked at home and sent in photos, videos, and recipes using social media. Some told anecdotal stories. Melissa Heuer, Executive Director for the coalition described one of the entries.
“One that I hadn’t seen before, new this year to me, was porcupine sausage gumbo and, it was pretty hilarious, it was someone who was actually going to submit something from their greenhouse, but they were having porcupine issues all summer and so they ended up having porcupine sausage gumbo as their submission, and it just looked delicious.”
A perusal of the other entries this year included cranberry muffins, rhubarb currant sauce, and a fiddlehead, morel mushroom, and moose pizza.
The coalition grappled with how to involve local harvesters and chefs without access to internet or social media, and they worked personally with some folks to get their submissions in. Despite the challenges of a socially distanced dinner, spread over a couple of weeks, Melissa says the turnout was excellent. She also explains that the event is not quite over.
“Yeah and then our plan this spring is to turn all these recipes and photos that we got, into a cookbook that will be for free on our website, so folks who didn’t have a chance to see or couldn’t find some of these recipes, we’ll have those available to everyone so they can try to make some of these things themselves, or things to be inspired by ideas for next year.”
And according to Melissa, this last phase of the event might become a new custom for the feast.
“I think it might be a really cool new annual tradition because all the recipes every year are so different. I wish we had had this since the beginning because it would be great to go back and look and see and remake some of these.”
She says, while the coalition didn’t know how the feast this year would turn out, they were happy they found a creative way to host it. From all accounts, it appears that the spirit of harvesting flourished this year. And from a virtual perspective… it appeared quite tasty.
