Snow at the Cabin | Winter Life in Alaska

Oh my gosh, we just arrived and literally there was so much snow. I've never had this happen. It was going up my nose and I couldn't breathe. The snow was a blockage. I don't even know what to say. Yeah, we just got here and there's probably a good over foot on the ground, but fresh stuff. Yeah. There's not an overflow right now, so I think we're going to be able to fish. This is awesome. No overflow, huh? So far. No. This is really good. Hey, is this enough of a hole for you to get started? Yeah. Okay. How far do you want these fish? Is that the ice right there? Yeah, that's the ice. How far do you want them? I don't know. There? Yeah. Okay. Like right up there? Yeah. When you go to lift the wet snow, it's like lifting concrete or something. Oh my gosh. One of these days we'll put that extension on, huh? Yeah. Better catch a fish after all this work. Oh my gosh. You need it just for the energy. We're out ice fishing today, and we're going for lake trout. We got a few different setups here. Tip up number one. It's kind of tangled, but we got a jig on there. Nice green one with a piece of bait. That's hooligan we got on there. Tip up number two. Pretty much the same, but we got a different colored jig on there, a little bit of bait. Tip up number three, treble hook with a nice piece of hooligan on there for bait. As far as poles, we picked up a couple new jigs. This is a beautiful one. This is the one Ariel's going to use. I have a good feeling about this one. She stuck a piece of bait on there. She wants to use some bait. And then I got a real big one on mine I'm going to start with. So this is just another tube jig. Little red tip on there. Let's get the ice cleared out of our holes. Let's catch some fish. How deep do you think this one is? Do you want me to grab this one? Do you want me to grab the other ones? To check the depth real quick? Heck yeah. Wish you luck. Catch us a big one. Or a little one. That's good too. How's that movement feel on that? Remember they liked... I think it'd be like... I mean I'm going to try some erratic stuff and then I'm going to try bouncing on the bottom and just leaving it, you know? Yeah. Man, this hole is so deep and dark it's insane. How deep are you? How deep do you think your hole is? It's a nice one. Wow. This thing is so flashy. I'm amused by it. Okay, I'm going to put it down. Got to maybe entice the fish with it. This is going to be it. We're hoping to catch a lake trout for eating, possibly for lunch or for dinner. We will see. Eric and I have been to this lake a few times this season and it's been pretty productive. There's bird butt and there is also lake trout and the lake trout is definitely what we're after. And lake trout are not trout, they're actually char. So char is a new fish for us. We haven't really targeted them and we haven't successfully really caught a good sizable char. So it would be exciting to catch one and taste them and see what they taste like. You got that going? Let's see if it works. I didn't feel nothing. Do you want me to be the flag runner? I just checked them so we're good for now. Oh, okay. The flag runner. We've had this little mini fish finder. It's called fish finder. It's a little battery powered fish finder and I don't know if it's working too well. It says I'm in 2.2 feet of water, which I'm like in 20 feet of water, but it does show some little stuff swimming around down there. If anything, it's a little entertainment for me while I'm out here fishing. I just dropped it all the way down. It almost felt like a bird butt. You saw it, it was just biting it, biting it, yeah, playing with it. Killing some time. Slow bite out here. I think I had a couple nibbles. That was it though. Well, my action has been okay. Arrow hasn't gotten any bites. I just had a really good bite. It's probably my third bite and it took it and pulled my pull down pretty far. It must have spit it out though and I think it went away. Felt kind of small though. I think it's a bird butt. Okay, okay. I don't know if it's off. I don't know. Okay. That's a burbot. Well, I will take that. Two hours in. You caught them on that fancy jig. I think that the... Excuse me, I have a few Cheez-Its in my hand, but this little guy, nice. I felt him tugging. He liked it. They like these tube jigs. Actually, I have a little bit of bait on as well. We're going to keep fishing because we're after lake trout, but if we don't catch a lake trout, at least we will go home not empty-handed. Nice. Nice burbot. What a cutie. Okay. Let's get that off. Yeah. He was tugging. He was... You saw it, right? Yeah. He was tugging and I just let him take it. Good job. This is a single hook one, right? Yeah. How do I get that out of his mouth? Man, they do not... They don't mess around. They have a big appetite. There we go. That's what he went for. I knew this little dancer would come handy. Yeah. He tried to eat that. This is him. We've got this really, really cool skin and they are delicious as well. Small little guy. There's a storm a-brewing. It wasn't supposed to snow, but we are just like in the clouds now, so I think we're going to call it quits. Ariel was definitely the hero today with that nice little burbot. We're going to go home and I think we're going to make some fish sandwiches. Let's do it. Well, we have our work cut out for us today. It is snowing outside and it's been snowing for over a week. We have been putting off snow removal and we've got to get it done, so we're heading out. Well, we've got our work cut out for us. Like Ariel said, we haven't snow plowed in about a week, but this snow is wet and it's packed down. It's probably only about a foot right now, but it's probably about two feet in total of how much snow we've actually got. One thing we have going for us is the plow wings that we put on the snow plow. We put these on, I don't know, a couple of weeks ago and these things on this machine and for our property, the type of snow removal we're doing have been just like a game changer for me. Pretty sure I can get our snow plowing done in about half the time as I was doing it before. So I'm going to be running the plow on the pliers and Ariel, she's going to be taking care of our snow blowing for us and we're going to get started. We've got a lot of work to do. How much are you paying him? Biscuit an hour. So that's about half of our little section done. It's the both sides of our house, the back of our house and the front of our house and over by the shelter object. We still have our big area to do and the driveway, but the reason I like the plow wings on the plow so much is you can go really far distances with your snow. It kind of keeps your snow in the plow and turns it into a snow pusher. So I can go really far, push the snow and have minimal amounts of snow coming off the side. But we're getting there. We're getting close. We got to jockey some stuff around when we do snow plowing here. So I got to hook up the tundra to the trailer. We got to get that pulled over here and then we'll start working on our other section. That was a lot of snow on our shelter object. I've got to head over to our high tunnel. I know there's a lot of snow on that too. We're getting there. This is the sawmill covered in snow. Fortunately, we don't have any sort of cover for it or anything like that yet. So in the wintertime, it just has to sit here. And we put this thing in an area where last winter I used to push a lot of snow. And now obviously I can't push the snow here because we've got the sawmill sitting here. So we have to come through here and use the snow blower, kind of blow it over. It kind of sucks. We lost some space here. We also lost a lot of space over by our conics when we built the two lean-to's off of it. We lost a ton of space for snow plowing. So it's only about halfway through winter and we're already running out of room. We'll see what happens. I finished the high tunnel. It took me many passes with our shovel and the snow blower. There's quite a bit of snow. We actually haven't had that much snow this year. It hasn't been a very strong snow year, but we are getting quite a bit now in this month, February. And I suspect we will get some more into March as well. Eric and I are super proactive with snow. I know we kind of like fight it, but we really like to, we like to remove it and it will collapse your structures if you don't get it off. That's why we choose to remove the snow off the high tunnel and the shelter logic. Just kind of want to be cautious. If we were going to get a lot of snow, it would definitely probably cause some damage. Broke a new part on the snow blower today. And this is the piece that holds the back axle in place. So it kind of broke and the back axle was kind of trying to come forward and the track was falling off. So hopefully I have a bolt that will fit. If not, we're going to have to just not use a snow blower for today. Well unfortunately that bolt that broke is not just a bolt, it's connected to the whole rear axle. So it's one big piece, but I was able to put a little bolt on the broken section and a bolt on the other piece of the broken section, put them together and weld them up. So this thing's solid now. See how she does. What do you want to clear? This whole front area kind of? Get it ready? No, just the bees. Okay. Let's get the snow again. I usually knock it back down, but it just took a little too long. Alright, bees are still alive and we are done for the day. So we're heading inside. If I can get out. We're having another blustery and snowy day outside, which means it is perfect for staying inside and cooking. We're going to be making a lovely spaghetti squash and coconut pie. I also have some chicken stock going in the background. We ran out of chicken stock a little while ago and we had three chicken carcasses, so it worked out perfectly. We've got that going. We've got two smaller spaghetti squash. I'm going to get these cut in half and we're going to get them cooking. So the truth is that we are not very big fans of spaghetti squash, but it grows quite well here, and we really like to make it with dessert. Eric actually discovered this pie probably a few years back. He made a spaghetti squash pie and it was so delicious. And last week I tried combining it with coconut and it turned out wonderful. I've got a little bit of water in here. I'm going to put the lid on and we're going to put this on our wood stove. We're moving right on to our dough, but I wanted to first point something out. When I cut this squash open, you can see these little seeds are actually sprouting or have already sprouted and we're growing inside the squash, which I think is pretty unique. This is like a five, probably a five month old squash. And the dough is really simple. I'm going to be using a cup and a half of flour. We're going to be adding lard to this recipe and it's nice and cold. You can definitely use butter too. I don't have an exact measurement, but I'm going to use a few nice size spoonfuls. I'm just going to kind of get that mashed in just a little bit, just until I get the flour and the fat kind of crumbly. This is the consistency that I'm looking for. I'm just going to add a little bit of some salt and a little bit of sugar too. I'm just going to give that a quick stir and then we're going to add our water in. I have ice cold water. You just use a little bit of water, probably just a few little tablespoons until the dough comes together. I'm going to set this outside to chill for about an hour and then we are going to get started on our filling. Our spaghetti squash only took about 30 minutes to cook and I'm just scraping out all those seeds. I'm going to be giving that to the chickens and we are going after the flesh. Chickens love all the extras from this and it's probably best to wait until these are not very hot, but I'm impatient. I want pie. So this squash has a lot of moisture right now. When you steam it or cook it in the manner that we did, it will pick up a lot of water and spaghetti squash can be kind of watery in the first place. If we're eating it for dinner, we like to bake it, but because this is for dessert, I'm going to be straining it just a little bit. It's way too much moisture for us. It's much better. We've got about two cups of this spaghetti squash going into a mixing bowl. We're going to be adding half a cup of half and half. And here's the best part, we're adding one full can of very thick, beautiful coconut milk. Next, I'm going to immersion blend this to get it to be a really nice, smooth consistency. Alright, this looks good. It's time to get our dough rolled out. For the remainder of our filling, we're going to be using half a cup of sugar and a third of a cup of cornstarch. And then I'm just going to be using a little bit of salt. We're going to crack four eggs in here, and then I'm going to get this mixed up. It's time to combine these two mixtures for the pie filling. I'm just going to pour them into this pot I have heating up. This is that coconut milk, the squash, and the half and half. This is the mixture we just made up. We're going to let this heat up for about two minutes until it thickens. We're going to add it to our pie filling and get it in the oven. We are cooking this pie. It's going to be more like a coconut custard pie. I had wanted to try coconut cream pie, which is where you don't cook it and you let it chill. But because I added that squash, I just don't feel comfortable yet doing that. This is how I made it last time and it worked really well. It's almost starting to boil. I'm going to add the last few ingredients. Just a hair of vanilla, some cinnamon, and a little chunk of butter. Into the oven she goes. Our chicken stock has been simmering for a few hours in the back. It's all ready. I'm going to pull out the big chunks, which are probably going to fall apart on me. That's where all that flavor comes from. These carcasses. Okay, we're going to give this a go. It's pretty heavy. Oh gosh, look at that color. Liquid gold right there. Gorgeous. Our pie is done. Unfortunately, we have to let it cool for quite some time until we can finish it off. We topped our pie with some whipped cream that Eric made and caramel and some toasted coconut flakes. Looks awesome and I know we're going to definitely enjoy this tonight for sure. We were lucky enough to finish up our chicken stock and we've got quite a few quarts over there. That batch is almost done and that's it. That's a wrap for today. I've got to interrupt this video for a very important thing. Shall we? Okay, let me think of a wish. I'm ready. I didn't wish for anything. This season, and it's been pretty productive, there's burbot and... Is it burbot or burbot? It's a defective snow angel. It's not very good looking. Thank you for watching.