Sisters Emma Teal Laukitis and Claire Neaton learned to fillet a fish before they fit into their , harvesting��salmon aboard their family’s commercial boat in Alaska’s remote Aleutian Islands. Now they’re champions of the region’s fishing industry and have become the state’s most beloved influencer duo. They campaign for responsible fisheries management and fight��to preserve Alaska’s working��waterfront culture. In 2012, they launched a successful brand that sells sustainably caught fish as well as a trendy clothing line. As their business��grew, however, the sisters��started noticing that many of their customers weren’t very confident cooking��seafood. “We realized that once we get fish into people’s hands, a lot of folks are still uneasy about preparing��seafood, largely because they don’t want to mess up such a beautiful product,” says Neaton.��

The siblings’ latest endeavor aims to address this problem: a cookbook called . It’s a collection of 50 recipes��from their childhood dinner table. The dishes are curated by their mother and use ingredients abundant in most Alaskan communities—straight-from-the-sea fish, vegetables from personal gardens, and wild plants and berries—but easy to purchase anywhere. “Once people get used to cooking seafood at home, they realize how simple and easy it can be,” says Laukitis.��“It’s really difficult to mess it up��as long as you don’t overcook it. Right now, with people working and spending more time at home, so many folks have expressed their excitement to learn about cooking fish.”

The average American has a relatively small appetite for seafood, consuming just 14.9 pounds of it in 2018 compared to 55.4 pounds of beef and 90.1 pounds of poultry, according to the USDA. While market research shows that��, it has also found that many of us don’t feel equipped to identify ethically sourced��products, nor do we know how to prepare them properly. Sockeye salmon fillets seem easy to overcook and char beyond saving, steaming an enormous Dungeness��crab is quite a task for dinner, and who even knows what a geoduck is, let alone how to cook it��(for the record, it’s a species of large, odd-looking clam, and it’s pronounced “gooey duck.”) Further, the market research found that when consumers��do make an attempt, they��pick the cheapest seafood option so it isn’t a waste when they mess it up.

The Salmon Sisters’ cookbook aims to be an entry point for anyone looking to add more seafood to their diet and support the nation’s small-scale fishermen in the process. They start from square one: how to source it. Laukitis and Neaton��recommend keeping an eye out for wild-caught American fish in your grocery store and��looking for labels from either the ���ǰ� ��to��ensure it was sustainably caught. Local Catch’s�� is a great way to purchase directly from fishermen in your area. And don’t be afraid of frozen or tinned fish if you live far from a coast, or, say, are in quarantine for the foreseeable future. “We love tinned smoked salmon, sardines, tuna, oysters and octopus,” says Laukitis. “It is shelf-stable, which means you can take it on adventures, camping trips, bring it to work with you, and it doesn’t need to be refrigerated until it’s opened.”

Neaton adds: “Sure, there’s nothing like fresh fish straight from the fishing boat, but frozen fish is processed and frozen quickly after it is harvested to maintain quality and freshness. It also keeps in your freezer for up to nine months, so you can enjoy it at your own pace and have a healthy reserve of protein on hand.” You can order Alaskan seafood directly from the Salmon Sisters without leaving your house: they have frozen sockeye salmon, cod, and halibut , as well as a few��.

Once you have the ingredients, pick up their new cookbook, which provides context on how U.S. commercial fisheries operate and then explains how to fillet a whole fish properly. Afterward, the book lays out dozens of delicious recipes from easy (a wild-salmon poke bowl) to expert (a massive pot of spicy��cioppino—an Italian-American fisherman’s stew). Below are two recipes excerpted from the book that were family staples for the sisters growing up.

Coconut Curry Fish Soup

This Thai-inspired coconut curry soup is comforting like a chowder but also light and alive with fresh lime juice, ginger, and cilantro. We love making it on the boat because the ingredients are simple and readily available, yet the flavor is fresh and tangy. Red curry paste (we used store-bought) brings the broth to life with its red chilies, coriander, lemongrass, garlic, and shallots. This soup is tasty made with salmon, halibut, rockfish, or shrimp—or throw in a combination! You can double the recipe for a big pot that will last you all week,��adding fresh garnishes to each bowl you enjoy. When we’re fishing in Prince William Sound during the summer, we like to add fresh spot prawns that we’ve caught and serve the soup over steaming white rice for an even heartier meal.��

Makes six��to eight��servings.

Ingredients

• 2 tablespoons coconut oil
• Half a yellow onion, diced
• 3 to 4 cloves garlic, minced
• 1/2 cup red curry paste
• 1 tablespoon light brown sugar
• 2 (14-ounce) cans coconut milk
• 2 1/2 cups fish, vegetable, or chicken stock
• 1/4 cup freshly squeezed lime juice (from about 2 limes)
• 1/4 cup finely chopped fresh ginger
• 2 tablespoons soy sauce
• 2 cups thinly sliced carrots
• 1 1/2 cups chopped green beans
• 2 cups cubed wild skinless salmon, halibut, rockfish, or whole shelled shrimp
• 1/2 cup fresh cilantro leaves, for garnish
• 2 limes, sliced, for garnish

Instructions

Heat the oil in a large saucepan over medium-high heat. Add the onion and sauté until translucent. Add the garlic and sauté until lightly browned. Add the curry paste and cook for one minute, stirring constantly. Add the brown sugar and cook for one minute. Stir in the coconut milk, stock, lime juice, ginger, and soy sauce.��

Reduce the heat to low, cover, and simmer for 30 minutes. Add the carrots and cook for five minutes. Add the green beans and cook for five��more minutes���ǰ� until the vegetables are crisp-tender. Add the fish and cook for two minutes. Garnish the soup with cilantro and slices of lime.

Superfood Salmon Cakes

Our friend Jan has worked for many years as a commercial-fisheries manager for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, which is partly to say: she knows fish and she knows how to cook them. Jan’s salmon cakes often fuel the women who play on her ice-hockey team before tournaments��and herself on long open-ocean swims, but yours might be the perfect protein-packed weeknight meal. These salmon cakes are our favorite way to give leftover salmon a second life���ǰ� to use the canned salmon in our pantry cupboards. Serve with the spicy dipping sauce for maximum enjoyment.��

Makes four to six��servings.

Ingredients

• 1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil��
• 1 medium yellow onion, diced��
• 2 (15-ounce) cans wild pink or red salmon, or 4 cups cooked salmon, bones removed
• 1 1/2��cups Italian bread crumbs, plus more for dredging
• 1/2 cup chopped fresh parsley
• 1 teaspoon kosher salt��
• 1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
• 3 large eggs, beaten
• 1 tablespoon mayonnaise
• 1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
• 1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
• Vegetable oil, for frying

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• 1/2 cup mayonnaise
• 1 tablespoon Tiger Sauce or other favorite hot sauce��

Instructions

Heat the olive oil in a large frying pan over medium heat. Sauté the onion until translucent, then transfer to a small plate and set aside to cool. Wipe out the pan to reuse.

In a large bowl, mix together the salmon, bread crumbs, parsley, salt, pepper, and cooled onion. In a small bowl, whisk together the eggs, mayonnaise, mustard, and Worcestershire. Add the dressing to the salmon mixture. Form the mixture into one-third-cup balls and then flatten into burger-shaped patties. Dredge in bread crumbs.

In the large frying pan, heat the vegetable oil. Carefully lower the salmon cakes into the hot oil, frying them until golden brown, about three minutes per side.

Meanwhile, make the spicy dipping sauce by mixing together the mayonnaise and Tiger Sauce in a small bowl. Serve with the salmon cakes.

(c)2020 by Emma Teal Laukitis and Claire Neaton. Excerpted from Salmon Sisters: Feasting, Fishing, and Living in Alaska by permission of Sasquatch Books.��

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John Plant might be the most popular YouTuber��who has never spoken a word on camera. In the four years since the 36-year-old Australian started his channel, , he’s attracted 9.8 million subscribers and racked up over 775 million views on his 48 videos. What does he do��to capture such a large audience? In each video, he goes out into the bush near his home in far north Queensland, with nothing but his now signature pair of blue shorts, and silently creates handmade��shelters and tools using only what’s available to him in nature. That’s it. “Primitive technology is a hobby, where you go into the wild bare-handed and make things from scratch without using any modern tools or materials,” Plant says. “That includes making the tools you need to make things. You can, in theory, with enough time, make anything that exists in modern times.”

In the channel’s , Plant builds a primitive wattle-and-daub hut, complete with a bed, fireplace, and chimney. But before viewers��see��the final structure, they watch Plant craft a stone hand ax��to chop wood, burn the wood to create a fire, gather material to fire clay pots, use the pots to carry water from a nearby stream, pour the water into dirt to make mud, and finally use the mud to insulate and support the walls of the��shelter. In other videos, he shows his audience��how to , how to , and how to��master .

Plant graduated from James Cook University in Cairns, Australia, and then worked stints in soil testing, at a pottery shop, and at a powder-coating factory before leaving the nine-to-five��world to mow lawns and spend more of his time in the bush. In 2015, he launched his YouTube channel and soon gained a large enough following that he could focus on building primitive dwellings full-time.

He was more surprised than anyone that so many people wanted to watch him painstakingly construct��things in nature. But his videos give viewers a pause from modern life. Amid all the noise of social media, there’s a shirtless man in rural Australia spending his days scouring the forest for the perfect clay deposit or a proper tree for a thatched roof. And it’s refreshing to watch someone work��in silence, without��nudging viewers��to subscribe to his channel or sneaking in mentions of corporate sponsors.��His quiet demeanor��is a source of regular quips in the comments. “I just realized the reason he doesn’t speak is because he hasn’t invented language yet,” wrote one viewer��on a recent video titled simply��“.”

After getting constant questions from viewers who wanted to��build from-scratch shelters in their own backyards, Plant decided to put all of his Stone Age knowledge into a guide. ($20, Clarkson Potter), out October 29, aims to be a wilderness resource for experienced craftsmen and newcomers��alike. It comprises��step-by-step instructions on a variety of ancient practices, from starter projects��like��digging sticks and hand axes��to complex structures��like updraft kilns and pyramidal huts. Ahead of the book’s release, we spoke with Plant about how he came to have��this hobby, his wildly popular YouTube channel, and his next project in the woods.

On How He Got Started: “I first got into primitive technology when I was 11. It wasn’t strict bushcrafting��but rather what kids do naturally. Back then��it was building paths, bases, hideouts, and traps with other kids my own age. What got me into this hobby is a lack of computer games and material possessions. My parents could afford expensive toys for me but didn’t want to spoil me—better for children to be active anyway.”

“I used modern tools like machetes and ropes to make things. Then I suddenly decided that that was cheating and made a self-imposed rule of not using any modern tools or materials to make things in the bush. I can vaguely remember my first project,��at age 11,��was a simple hut with a low rock wall and a dome roof made of sticks, covered with sheets of bark and leaves. It’s not still around—it was below the water level of the creek in the wet season. But it was fun to build this first hut. It was a small home away from home.”

On Why He Started Sharing His Work Online: “I made videos to show friends and family, and they started saying I should put it on YouTube. The first video (“”) shows the progression of a hut over nine months, with many components to it. I just kept editing new things into it to show people I met. Before that I only took photos of my projects for my own interest.”

On His Reading List: “When taking on a project, you must research it thoroughly—how much material was used, dimensions, weights, etc. Then you try to create the thing, see how it goes, and then try something else if it doesn’t work. Trial and error plays a big part after the research phase is done. I’ve read��the , by John Wiseman,��for shelters and bow making and ,��by J.E. Rehder, for furnaces and pyrotechnology. But mainly internet research.”

On the Most Difficult Skills to Learn: “Fire making and metallurgy. In learning fire making with the hand drill—spinning a stick in the socket of another stick—many blisters were had. I was 18 by the time I got my first fire. It would have been earlier if I had a teacher to learn from or today’s internet��at least. With smelting iron, I had to learn many different skills and made up some by myself.”

On Staying the Night in One of His Shelters: “I’ve stayed in��. It had underfloor heating, which I tested at night in winter. I put palm fronds on the sleeping platform, and it stayed warm all night. It rained a bit, but the roof kept the rain off, and I had a fire and bed made from wood and moss, quite comfortable. I ate yams and sweet potatoes from the garden in front of the hut. It lasted three years before termites ate the wooden roof and the tiles came down. The walls dissolved in the rain after that.”

On How Popular His Channel Became: “I was surprised when my videos started to pick up in popularity, to be honest. There was already a well-established bushcrafting community on YouTube, and I didn’t think I’d be anywhere near as popular as the outdoor and camping channels that used modern tools and materials. I thought that, at best, there would be a niche audience who was interested in making things completely from scratch in the wild. I think��there’s a lesson here for people reading this: if you have an unusual hobby that you’re interested in, but think others may not be, then put it out there for a larger audience to see. Chances are, if you’re interested in it, there will be at least a few thousand people in the world who are also.”

On Being Silent in His Videos: “That was originally by laziness rather than by design. I showed my first video to two different friends initially, and both said the video needed narration or no one would watch it. I had edited the video already and couldn’t be bothered to narrate it. Though some people complained about the lack of narration, most preferred it to other channels that talked excessively. To compromise, I added subtitles that people could turn on in their YouTube settings for more in-depth, real-time explanation.”

On How Engrossing the Work Is: “When I’m immersed in a task, I don’t think about anything else outside of it. That’s a good way to be. Sometimes I wonder what ancient people did, and how my work would compare to theirs, and what they’d think if they saw the way I do things. Most things they’d think I did��worse for sure, but some things better also.”

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