The King County Medical Examiner’s Office is asking for the public’s help to find who donated three human skulls to a Bellevue thrift store.
There is no information about who donated the skulls to the Bellevue Goodwill or how they came to be in the donor’s possession.
The KCME said two of the skulls of from adults and were clearly used in a medical clinic or teaching setting.
The third skull is very old and appears to be the fragile remains of a Native American child.
According to state law, the Native American skull must be returned to its tribe of origin, but the ME needs more information to identify the correct tribe.
The office is asking that the person who donated the skulls come forward, without penalty, to provide more details about where the skull came from.
The skulls were donated in June to the Goodwill at 14515 NE 20th Street in Bellevue. Employees there realized the skulls were human remains and contacted the Medical Examiner’s Office and police.
In an emotional ceremony Monday at the Burke Museum in Seattle, the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe prepared to transport 14 ancient artifacts to the tribe’s heritage center in Port Angeles.
Arlene Wheeler, left, escorts artifacts pushed by Maurice Pitchford, 4, and the Burke’s Laura Phillips on Monday. STEVE RINGMAN / THE SEATTLE TIMES
On Monday, members of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe realized a long-held dream, bringing some of the most spectacular belongings of their ancestors back to their home territory, for display in their own heritage center in Port Angeles.
Fourteen artifacts — just a fraction of more than 80,000 recovered from the site — were handed over to the tribe after a brief, but emotional private ceremony at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture in Seattle, where the rest of the collection is still held for safekeeping.
“This is a long time coming,” said tribal Chairwoman Frances Charles, who made the trip to the Burke with her 4-year-old grandson, along with leaders of the Elwha Drum Group and prayer warrior Jonathan Arakawa to commemorate the transfer.
In a basement room with no windows, tribal members first lined up facing east, with two simple cardboard bankers’ boxes on a table before them, holding their ancestors’ possessions, dug up from their waterfront village.
Arakawa called down a blessing on the gathering, and offered thanks and prayers for a historic day, finally come.
Then Mark Charles, dressed in red and black ceremonial regalia, took deep breaths and focused his concentration for long moments, preparing to sing. He at last raised his elk-skin, hand-painted drum and began beating the stately cadence of an ancient song.
Charles’ deep, powerful voice boomed in the small room, which filled with sound as other tribal members joined in, and raised their hands to receive the song.
The objects selected by the tribe are among the most spectacular in the collection: A bone comb, carved on two sides, and found at the site virtually intact. Two blanket pins, carved in the shape of a fawn’s head, and a halibut. Seven etched stones — from more than 900 collected at the site, more than from any other village in the Northwest. The stones depict stories and teachings, and no two are alike.
Also included in the collection is a net weight, and a spindle whorl carved from a single whale vertebrae that Mark Charles found during the work at the site. At the time, he said he was guided by intuition to the location.
The village site was discovered inadvertently during construction of a state Department of Transportation project, which was ultimately shut down and relocated, after the discovery of hundreds of human remains, including many intact burials.
With the end of the project, the money that was paying for the archaeological analysis of the site was shut off, too.
So while the site was one of the biggest and oldest ever uncovered in the Northwest, with portions dating back 2,700 years, most of the collection has never been analyzed, and still awaits interpretation.
The tribe has long wanted to bring the collection home, for curation at the site, which has since been covered over and secured behind a fence. Human remains disturbed during the construction project were reburied as close to their original sites as possible.
The tribe has since built a heritage center in downtown Port Angeles, and will display the artifacts there. The exhibit, which will be on permanent exhibition at the heritage center, opens Saturday with a public ceremony.
“This is something we have talked about time and time again, it’s hard to imagine it is finally happening,” Frances Charles said. “These are priceless to us, in many ways. It’s closure for us, and all the people who were involved with this. It closes the circle.”
The hydropower dams, built without fish passage beginning in 1910, greatly diminished the river’s salmon runs, and starved the beaches at the river’s mouth for the sediment that used to be home to rich clam beds.
The recovery of the artifacts and the dam-removal project — the largest anywhere in the world — are part of the cultural renewal under way for the tribe.
In the past several years the tribe has built a language program to revive the Klallam language and teach it in the public schools. The tribe has published a tribal language and cultural curriculum, and its first dictionary.
And as the floodwaters behind the Elwha dam receded, the tribe recovered its sacred creation site, hidden underwater for a century.
A celebration of the completion of dam removal is scheduled for mid-September.
Meanwhile, Charles said she hopes the trickle of artifacts coming back to the tribe will eventually become a flood, as the tribe builds a curation facility at its village site to house the entire collection.
“This is just the beginning,” she said.
To make it happen, the tribe needs not only money, but to recover ownership of its artifacts through negotiations with the state. Charles said those conversations are beginning with Gov. Jay Inslee.
As the tribe’s song filled the building, Julie Stein, director of the Burke, came to the door. She watched, clearly pleased, as the boxes were carted to the loading dock, and carried by tribal members into a waiting van for the drive back to Lower Elwha.
“It always feels wonderful,” Stein said, “when artifacts go to the communities that love and use them, to teach people, and bring the ceremonies back to life.”
Lynda V. Mapes: 206-464-2736 or lmapes@seattletimes.com
Washington’s clean-water regulations to ensure the safety of eating fish from local waters are indefensibly lax, everyone agrees. That’s about to change, but without broader cleanup, water will still be polluted.
New proposed water-quality standards expected to be issued soon by the state are intended to more accurately reflect how much fish people eat. These fishermen were trying their luck for salmon running in the Duwamish River last September. MARCUS YAM / The Seattle Times, 2013
Eat only as much fish as the state assumes you do every day, and you’d starve, for sure: It’s a chunk not much bigger than a Starburst candy.
But that could be about to change, under new regulations in the works at the state Department of Ecology. Washington seems likely to follow Oregon’s lead and set a water-quality standard for daily fish consumption at 175 grams, or about 6 ounces, per day.
The level is set not to regulate how much fish people eat, but how clean water needs to be. The standard sets pollution cleanup and control limits for industry, municipal sewage plants and other dischargers to local waters.
While it sounds like a modest step forward, implementing more realistic fish-consumption standards — Washington’s current standards are based on an outdated national average — has been a battle, chewing up years of effort and the political capital of two governors.
That’s because municipal sewage plants, pulp mills and other dischargers fear the cost of tighter pollution standards. Boeing famously entered the fray last year in widely reported warnings about the potential effect of unreasonable standards on its continued business operations.
“We support a water quality standard that protects human health and the environment, while at the same time, allows for the growth of our business and the state’s economy,” Boeing spokeswoman Megan Hilfer wrote in a statement to The Seattle Times in an email July 1.
No one contests that the new levels will in some cases result in setting pollution-discharge limits too tiny even to measure with existing technology.
Gov. Jay Inslee and the state Department of Ecology are expected to announce the new proposed standard Wednesday and to work toward issuing a draft rule after that. The regulations will go through a lengthy public-comment period and be finalized only with the approval of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, probably sometime next year.
The importance of water-quality standards to human health is well known, especially to people who eat a lot of fish. Because pollutants find their way from the uplands to the water, ultimately everything, for better or worse, winds up in the tissues of fish. Pollutants such as mercury and PCBs can cause a variety of serious illnesses and impairments, from cancer, to permanent IQ reduction in children. Pregnant women, the young and the frail are most at risk.
As the state develops commercially, the abundance of healthy fish from the state’s home waters has been slipping away. Toxics are just part of the problem. Habitat, every scientific report on salmon recovery shows, is the most important thing to securing abundant runs of fish for people and wildlife.
Yet the state is losing ground, literally, in runoff caused by development of uplands and cutting of forests.
And even as Seattle and King County water and sewer ratepayers spend hundreds of millions of dollars to clean up Puget Sound, the city of Victoria, B.C., continues to spew untreated sewage directly into the Salish Sea — prompting a dust-up with Inslee, but still no resolution of the problem.
Inslee inherited the fish-consumption wrangle from former Gov. Chris Gregoire, who failed to implement new regulations amid scorching opposition from businesses. As the struggle to get the standards updated roils behind the scenes in Washington, regulators in Oregon, and business leaders, are carrying on with that work behind them.
The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality has issued dozens of discharge permits since updating its standards in 2011, including permits for more than a half-dozen municipalities, a meatpacking plant and other industrial users. The path forward in Oregon required implementation of flexibility in setting timelines for compliance and variances, said Jennifer Wigal, water-quality program manager at the department.
A similar approach is in the works in Washington. Kelly Susewind, director of Washington Department of Ecology’s water-quality program, charged with drafting the regulations, said he wants to take the five-year time limits off compliance schedules and variances, to give regulators and dischargers a way to work out realistic solutions under new, more exacting standards.
Dennis McLerran, regional administrator for the Region 10 office of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, whose approval is required for Ecology’s regulations, said he backs flexible implementation.
“We are interested in working with the state on a package of implementation tools that includes compliance schedules, variances, intake water credits, even how you look at some chemicals. But we want to make progress. Otherwise, why do it?”
One place he is not inclined to budge, though, McLerran said, is cancer risk, because implementing a higher risk would allow bigger inputs of some pollutants to local waters. That could put people who eat a lot of fish at higher risk — and compromise treaty-protected fishing rights.
“Some of our high fish consumers when they signed on to transfer (their) lands, signed on to continue to harvest and eat fish, and when and if they can’t, then the treaty right is a bit vacuous,” McLerran said.
“From my perspective we want a standard that is protective, and protective of all people.”
A daily consumption standard of a little over 6 ounces of fish as set forth by Oregon — the highest standard in the country — is less than a typical half-pound filet an adult would have for dinner. And it’s a snack, compared with the estimated 2.2 pounds a day that the ancestors of Washington tribes were counting on when they signed the treaties with the U.S. government ceding tribal lands for non-Indian settlement.
People shouldn’t be afraid to eat fish now, Susewind said. The increased risk of cancer from eating fish today is almost zero — compared with a background risk of cancer from all causes of about 1 in 2 for men, or 1 in 3 for women.
And many common foods, from butter to chicken to tuna, have more PCBs in them than Puget Sound coho, according to an Ecology analysis.
The ubiquity of pollution is one reason Christie True, director of King County Natural Resources and Parks, said she hopes new state regulations don’t just crank down on pollutants at tiny levels in sewage discharges and other so-called point sources, but instead go after bigger sources of trouble in Puget Sound, including stormwater.
Just making compliance schedules workable doesn’t address the problem if the regulations misdirect spending and effort, she said.
“We want to make sure whatever investments we are making make a substantial improvement in water quality,” True said. “If we just focus on the point-source discharge, we are missing huge opportunities. All of these things, arsenic, PCBs, dioxins, those are coming through our watershed through street runoff and rain runoff, these are getting washed into our water without any kind of control.”
Dianne Barton, water-quality coordinator for the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, which pushed Oregon to get started on updating its standards, and is deeply involved with other Washington tribes in setting new standards in Washington, said tribes want progress, but not at any price.
In many rural and suburban areas of the Northwest, tribes are among the largest employers, running all kinds of industries themselves, and they want cost-effective solutions that make a true difference too, Barton said.
“The tribes have always believed that this is not something we are going to achieve overnight,” Barton said. “We can get creative.
“Whether as we move forward that includes variances or resources we haven’t developed yet, we are committed to being actively engaged so we can move the (Columbia) Basin forward.”
A new study from Colorado School of Public Health shows that despite some modest improvements, poor oral health remains a major problem in the Navajo Nation and among American Indians overall.
“The oral health among Native Americans is abysmal with more than three times the disease of the rest of the country,” said Terrence Batliner, DDS, MBA, associate director of the Center for Native Oral Health Research at the School of Public Health. “The number one problem is access to care.”
The study, published recently in the Journal of Public Health Dentistry, showed that 69.5 percent of Navajo children had untreated tooth decay. While that’s better than the 82.9 percent in 1999, it’s still unacceptably high.
“The percentage of children with untreated decay appears to have declined in the past decade, although it remains today substantially higher (three to four times) than national averages,” the study said.
Batliner and his colleagues, including Patricia Braun, MD, MPH, who directed the study on the Navajo Nation, looked at 981 children in 52 Head Start classrooms on the reservation. Of those, 89.3 percent had oral disease in the past and 69.5 percent had untreated tooth decay.
That 69.5 percent of untreated decay compares with 20.48 percent among all other race and ethnic groups.
The Navajo Nation is the largest reservation in the country, stretching over 25,000 square miles. Much of it is remote with 22 dental clinics serving 225,639 residents. The dentist-to-patient ratio is 32.3 dentists per 100,000 residents, among the lowest in the country.
The researchers found that half of all Native American children need to be treated in the operating room due to the severity of their oral disease.
To increase access to care, Batliner advocates the creation of dental therapists for the reservation.
“They learn how to do fillings and extractions along with providing preventative services,” Batliner said. “This program has proved to be a raging success among tribes in Alaska. The quality of care is good.”
The American Dental Assn. opposes dental therapists and has filed suit to block their use on tribal lands.
“The American Dental Association is fighting the idea of dental therapists,” Batliner said. “But many of us perceive dental therapists as a Native solution to a Native problem. Children and adults are suffering and this is a solution that can help.”
A new DHM Research survey of Northwest residents finds that support for coal exports through the Northwest is up from where it was last year, when the issue was the subject of public debate and news coverage. | credit: Heidi Nielsen/GoodWorks
More people in the Northwest support coal export terminals than oppose them. Those are the results of a new survey. But people who took the survey didn’t feel very strongly about why they supported coal exports.
For the third year in a row, a public opinion poll for EarthFix asked Northwest residents how they felt about transporting coal through the region. That coal would then be exported to Asia.
DHM Research surveyed 1,200 residents in Washington, Oregon and Idaho from June 25-30. The poll found 47 percent of Northwest residents say they support coal exports. That’s up a little bit from last year’s survey, which showed 41 percent or respondents supporting coal exports. 34 percent opposed Northwest coal exports, and 19 percent didn’t know.
John Horvick, DHM Research director, said many people who responded didn’t have very strong opinions about why they support coal terminals. Those reasons include supporting local economies and more property tax revenue.
“These arguments aren’t quite as persuasive as they were in the past. Maybe people are becoming a little bit more cynical, they’ve heard them before, or they’re asking some questions, or the landscape has changed on the issue,” Horvick said.
The survey also found many people aren’t paying close attention to the issue, Horvick said, another possible reason they don’t feel very strongly about why they support coal export terminals.
One survey respondent who felt strongly about opposing coal export terminals was Robert Schuman. The Pullayup, Washington, resident is a 32 year old truck driver. He said he’s not necessarily opposed to coal, but he doesn’t like it being shipped to Asia.
“I don’t like the coal going over there mainly because they don’t have any environmental controls. It’s getting pumped out in the air over there without even basic scrubbers or anything like that. It’s just pumping ash in the air,” Schuman said.
Environmental groups look at less intense support as good news to their cause. They say as people learn more about coal exports, they start to support them less.
Kerry McHugh, Washington Environmental Council spokeswoman, said exporting coal would harm communities along the railroads and where terminals are built.
“It just really starts to add up that it’s not worth it,” McHugh said.
Over the past three years surveys have shown public support for exporting coal dipped as state agencies hosted large meetings and reviews about the terminals.
Fewer meetings took place this year. Support has risen. Opposition has stayed about the same.
Tuesday will be the first day that Washington stores can legally sell recreational marijuana. Even though the state has been preparing for this day for nearly two years since it passed Initiative 502, it still could be unclear to some people exactly what the rules surrounding pot are.
Here are some answers to the biggest questions that will arise when pot officially goes on sale this week:
Who can buy marijuana and how much can they possess?
Adults who can legally buy marijuana can purchase up to 1 ounce of plant material or 72 ounces of marijuana-infused liquid, such as oils. It’s also legal to buy as much as 16 ounces of edible pot products, such as cookies or brownies, but officials at the state Liquor Control Board say no vendors in the state have yet obtained all of the licenses necessary to sell edibles — so, they won’t be in stores initially.
Of the nearly 200 stores in Seattle that applied for a license, only one — Cannabis City — received approval Monday morning. State officials say that’s because many stores there simply failed to meet licensing requirements in time. Customers near Puget Sound will also have options available in Bellevue and Tacoma. Elsewhere in the state, stores could open as soon as Tuesday in Bellingham, Kelso and Spokane. The full list of retailers who received the state’s first licenses is available online.
This is an area where it’d be easy for marijuana users to run afoul of the law. I-502 makes it illegal to consume pot in public view. That means no visits to nearby parks, no smoking in your vehicle, and definitely no sampling product inside a marijuana retailer. The Seattle Police Department gives a good rule of thumb and describes it like open alcohol container laws. Basically, don’t use pot anywhere you’re not specifically allowed to do so. You may not get arrested just for public consumption, but you can receive a fine.
And while we’re on the topic of consumption, Oregonians and other out-of-staters should be aware that crossing state lines with Washington pot isn’t legal. I-502 does allow residents of other states to buy cannabis, but it has to be consumed in the state. If you try to take pot out of Washington, expect to face the penalties for drug possession in whatever state you enter.
Will legal marijuana be cheaper than stuff on the black market?
No, at least not initially. Supply is still pretty limited in the state, which means that demand — aka prices at the register — are probably going to be steep.
So, what kind of prices can users expect in the early days? That’s likely to vary from store to store. Ramsey Hamide, manager of Main Street Marijuana in Vancouver, told the Columbian he expects initial prices on their shelves to be “maybe $90 to $100 for a 4-gram bag and $45 to $50 for a 2-gram bag.”
But Hamide also said he expects those prices to go down to near street costs in the weeks and months after the first sales as growers throughout the state begin to meet demand.
Does I-502 change state DUI laws?
It’s still illegal to drive while under the influence of marijuana or any other intoxicant. If you get pulled over by an officer, they can conduct a field sobriety test on you to see if you’re intoxicated. Because there aren’t yet any fancy tools — such as a Breathalyzer for alcohol — to figure out if you’re high, the officers can take you back to the station and seek your permission for a blood test if they think you’re driving high. That goes for medical marijuana too. And if a driver gets in an accident while driving high, those blood tests are mandatory.
The first legal marijuana stores in Washington are scheduled to open Tuesday. The Liquor Control Board issued the first 24 retail licenses early Monday.
Rick Stevens stopped by 420 Carpenter, a marijuana retail location in Lacey, Washington, to see if it was open yet. The retired TSA worker is looking forward to making some homemade edibles and listening to Pink Floyd.
Credit Austin Jenkins / Northwest News Network
But state officials warn of high prices and short supply in the beginning. Even so that’s not keeping away some would-be customers.
420 Carpenter is a recreational marijuana retail location that has received its license – one of the first in the state. There’s a surveillance camera out front. The deadbolt is locked. And nobody is answering knocks at the door.
The location seems out of the way in the back of an office park.
Bobby Johnson, who was scouting this location on behalf of some local users of the social networking site Reddit, said, “It’s very nondescript, but I’m sure everyone will know where it’s at very soon.”
The store’s owner said he plans to open on Friday. Johnson said he’d like to be one of the first customers.
“I might drive by and see if there’s an insane line,” he said. “If there’s not then, yeah, I probably will.”
Another would-be customer, retiree Rick Stevens, said he has used marijuana medically for a bad back. Now he’s ready to become a recreational user.
“It makes food taste better and music seems to sound better and all of those things,” he said.
But Johnson said, “I’m a little more excited about the edibles — once that becomes available. I’m not really a big smoker.”
Eventually, legal pot shops will sell edibles. But that part of Washington’s nascent legal, recreational marijuana marketplace isn’t ready yet. For that matter, much of the legal pot crop isn’t either.
Randy Simmons, deputy director of Washington Liquor Control Board, called it “a real issue,” and he expects some grumbling.
“I would just say give it time,” he said. “This is day one of this infant starting to walk.”
Simmons also said the state will be running stings to make sure stores don’t sell to underage customers.
WASHINGTON – The U.S. government turned its back on the descendants of freed slaves of Native Americans, swindling them out of lucrative land royalties allotted to them as children, a class action claims in federal court.
Leatrice Tanner-Brown and the Harvest Institute Freedman Federation sued Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewel and Assistant Secretary of Indian Affairs Kevin Washburn, seeking an accounting of revenue from leases on land promised to children of Freedmen, who were liberated by citizens of the so-called “Five Civilized Indian Tribes” or Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw and Seminole nations.
According to the complaint: “The Five Civilized Tribes allied themselves with the Confederacy during the Civil War and attempted to maintain slaves following the War. As a result of the Tribes’ disloyalty to the United States during the Civil War all territory owned by the Tribes was forfeited. The status of the Tribes was reestablished under treaties entered in 1866.”
Some of the forfeited land was allotted to the freed slaves and their descendants.
The Department of Interior in 1908 agreed to keep track of revenue from leases on land granted to Freedmen minors or their descendants.
“Notwithstanding demand from plaintiffs for an accounting of revenue from leases on restricted lands during the period that these lands were held by Freedmen minors and not subject to alienation, defendants have failed to provide the requested accounting,” the complaint states.
“Under the Act of May 27, 1908, restrictions against alienation of Freedmen allotments … were not removed. Accordingly, any royalties derived from leases on [Freedmen] allotments should have been accounted for by the Department of Interior under the terms of the Sections 2 and 6 of the 1908 Act,” according to the complaint. “These failures were not innocent. They were the result of a deliberate strategy to swindle land and money from Freedmen.”
The claims says many of these allotments were for oil-rich land, and the government allowed grafters and speculators “anxious to obtain oil-rich lands for little or no payment to allottees” to exploit the often unsophisticated and uneducated Freedmen.
According to the complaint, there were 23,405 Freedmen in 1914.
“Defendants breached their duty to avoid conflicts of interests and to monitor Freedmen allotments in favor of alienation of European settlers, Oklahoma statehood, and corporate interests,” the class claims.
They want an accounting of money collected from the allotted lands and declaration of the government’s fiduciary duties.
They are represented by Paul Robinson Jr. of Memphis, Tenn.
Tar-sands extraction isn’t just turning swaths of Canadian land into postapocalyptic film sets. New research shows it’s also contaminating the wild animals that members of the Mikisew Cree and Athabasca Chipewyan First Nations have traditionally relied on for food.
We already knew that the tar-sands operations have been dousing northern Alberta with mercury and other forms of pollution. Now university scientists have collaborated with the First Nations to test the pollution levels in hunted animals found downstream from the tar-sands sites. Here are some lowlights from their findings, which were included in a report published on Monday:
Arsenic levels were high enough in in muskrat and moose muscle; duck, moose, and muskrat livers; and moose and duck kidneys to be of concern for young children. Cadmium levels were again elevated in moose kidney and liver samples but also those of beaver and ducks … Mercury levels were also high for duck muscle, kidneys, and livers as well as moose and muskrat kidneys, especially for children. …
Total levels of PAHs [polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons] and levels of carcinogenic and alkylated PAHs were very high relative to other food studies conducted around the world.
The First Nations members aren’t shocked to hear this. Some have already started avoiding their traditional foods because of worries about contamination, they told researchers. More from the report:
Participants were concerned about declines in the quality of [traditional] foods, in the greatest part because of environmental pollutants originating from the Oil Sands. It was notable how many participants no longer consumed locally caught fish, because of government-issued consumption advisories and associated human health concerns. Muskrat consumption had also declined precipitously, along with muskrat populations, a decline that was attributed to changes in hydrology and contaminant levels associated with the WAC Bennett Dam and the Oil Sands. The only effective alternatives to traditional foods are store-bought foods. …
All participants were worried about ongoing declines in the health and wellbeing of their community. They generally viewed themselves as less healthy than their parents, who rarely got sick. Neurological illnesses (e.g. sleeping disorders, migraines, and stress) were most common followed, in descending order of frequency, by respiratory illnesses (e.g. allergies, asthma) as well as circulatory (e.g. hypertension, coronary) and gastrointestinal (e.g. gallbladder, ulcers) illnesses. Yet, everyone was most concerned about the current and escalating cancer crisis.
A documentary about the research — One River, Many Relations — will be released in October. Here’s a trailer:
There is nothing more seasonal in Alaska in July than a wild salmon caught directly from our local shores.
One evening last summer, after 13 hours on the water, a friend of ours came home with a marvelous salmon. Although it was late, it was still light out, and he and my husband made quick work of filleting while I pulled up a recipe. It wasn’t long before the fish was sizzling in a hot pan, filling the house with the aroma of spices and saltwater mingling together. There is truly nothing better.
That night, I coated the salmon with a homemade spice rub, based on a recipe I found on my talented friend Heidi Drygas’ local food blog, Chena Girl Cooks. Together, we ooh’ed and ahh’ed over the smokiness of the paprika and the cumin, the kick of the chili powder and dry mustard, the nice sweetness from the sugar and a surprising pinch of cinnamon. And can we just talk about that beautiful charred crust for a moment? You get a stunning caramelization when a hot pan swirled with oil meets a perfectly fresh fillet of salmon, patted dry (this is key) and rubbed generously. “I have to write about this,” I said aloud between bites, squeezing a wedge of lime over my fillet before diving back in. “We have to make this again.”
Two nights later, we indeed made it all over again, and this time I made a bright, summery avocado-peach salsa to go with it. When I don’t have peaches on hand, I’ve used mangoes in the salsa with equally terrific results. Since last summer, we have looked forward to eating this dish again, as soon as the first fresh salmon comes through the door and into my kitchen.
Sugar-crusted salmon with avocado-peach salsa
For the salsa:
2 sweet but firm peaches, pitted and finely chopped (or mangoes)
2 ripe avocados, finely chopped
1 small red or orange bell pepper, finely chopped
1/2 cup red onion, diced
1-2 jalapenos (to taste), seeds removed and minced
In a bowl, gently stir together the peaches, avocados, bell peppers, onion, jalapeno, cilantro and lime. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Cover and refrigerate until ready to serve.
In a smaller bowl, stir together the sugar, chili powder, paprika, cumin, mustard, cinnamon, pepper and salt.
Heat the olive oil in a skillet over medium-high heat. Pat the salmon fillets dry and liberally season the top of each fillet with the rub, patting it so it will adhere. Place the fillets, seasoned side down, into the hot pan. Cook about two minutes, until rub is fragrant and caramelized but not burnt. Flip each fillet and continue to cook on the other side 2-6 minutes more, being careful not to overcook (cooking time will depend on the thickness of your fillets and your preferred doneness. I like my wild salmon fillets medium in the center, so mine were ready after four minutes). Plate the salmon and top with the avocado peach salsa. Spice rub adapted from Chena Girl Cooks, originally adapted from Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute.
