“It feels to me that we have three distinct seasons of food: Mist, Evergreen, and Bounty. Within each, there are waves of seasonal foods; there are fewer in the long gray months of Mist and we treasure them dearly. Evergreen comes on slowly, the forests and farms waking up from a long wet winter to unfurl their leaves and hope for some sun. Then for a brief window in the late summer and early fall, we struggle to keep up with the season of Bounty — the choices are overwhelming, and in the kitchen we try to stay out of the way and let each ingredient sing.”

John Sundstrom, “Lark: Cooking Wild in the Northwest”

In 2019, my friend Andrea and I met up with our two Alaskan friends, Jess and Andy, in Seattle. We actually met in a community urban garden in Seattle, where anyone is welcome to stop and pick some of the fruits, vegetables, or herbs. After a fancy meal at Canlis, we headed to an Airbnb that would be our homebase as we ferried out to the San Juan Islands each day. If you haven’t been to the San Juan Islands, or even heard of them, I hope you’ll put them on your list. At high tide there are over 400 of them, though the ferry only services four of the main islands. A word of warning: the ferries book up far in advance and you have to be in line on time (thank god for Jess and Andy who knew the system). After a 2-hour ferry ride where you can have a beer and do a community puzzle, you arrive at one of the islands, each of which has its own little personality. While San Juan Island is the most developed — we had a great meal, including a sea bean martini, at Duck Soup — our favorite was Orcas Island. On Orcas we spent hours kayaking in a bay that we had completely to ourselves, stopped for oysters at an oyster farm, and had pizza at the famous Hogstone’s Wood Oven. If you are nearby, also take a shorter ferry to Lummi Island, where you can have lunch or dinner at the Willows Inn, which has been on every “Best Of” list you can imagine (we had lunch, which included a fried seed bread I still think about). After a drive out to Deception Pass State Park, we finally traveled back to Seattle for a surprise boat picnic with Andy’s family, with baked goods from Sea Wolf Bakery, fresh tomatoes and cherries, and seaplanes landing all around us.