As soon as we started planning the camping trip we took to Death Valley last month, I began thinking about flat breads.  There aren’t many places to buy fresh supplies in the desert and I’m pretty picky about bread.

I wanted to be able to make my own.  But I wanted to keep it simple — no rising, no rolling, no oven.

The more I looked for traditional flat bread recipes to cook in a skillet, though, the more frustrated I became.  After all, we wanted to spend our time in Death Valley marveling at the incredible landscape and perhaps spotting a few wildflowers, not waiting around for bread to rise.

Bad Water, at 282 feet below sea level, in Death Valley National Park

Inspiration finally came from an old copy of “Joy of Cooking,” where I found a recipe for the Johnnycakes that travelers carried in their rucksacks as long ago as the mid-18th century.  Also known as journey cakes and hoe cakes, these corny flat breads sounded a bit austere, though, and my eye was drawn to the corn flapjacks on the same page.

Why couldn’t I dress the flapjacks up with some chiles, sun-dried tomatoes and green onions to create an Americanized version of the  uttapam made with a lentil and rice batter?  The result was an extremely tasty cross between a Mexican tortilla and a spicy Indian street snack.

I tweaked the the flapjack recipe to use powdered buttermilk and mixed the dry ingredients together at home.  In camp, I stirred in water, olive oil, and an egg. Then I poured a spoonful of batter into a hot skillet and sprinkled each cake with jalapeños, sun-dried tomatoes and scallions while the first side cooked, before flipping it over to finish.

The batter was thin and the cornmeal quickly settled to the bottom, so it had to be stirred before dropping each spoonful onto the hot skillet. But that was the extent of the special effort.   The corn cakes were super simple to prepare and we had fresh, hot bread in no time.

The cakes were great warm with a big bowl of chili.  They were even nice a couple of hours later, after they had cooled.

And we had plenty of time left to look for those elusive desert wildflowers.

We eat green salads year-round at my house, but they become even more popular at this time of year, when the produce is gorgeous and temperatures jump into the high 80s.    Many a warm evening I abandon the stove altogether and throw together a huge salad for dinner.

Usually a simple vinaigrette is my first-choice dressing for a pile of impeccably fresh greens,  heirloom tomatoes and whatever else catches my eye at the farmers market.  Lately, though, I’ve been playing with more elaborate dressings to turn even the most basic salad into a memorable meal.   This updated Green Goddess dressing has become a favorite.

Based on a classic created at San Francisco’s Palace Hotel in the 1920s, it carries all the lovely flavors of fresh herbs without all the fat of the mayonnaise-based original.   I’ve switched the herbs around to fit what looks best at the market, added good olive oil, and substituted whole milk yogurt for the mayo.  Arugula contributes a peppery undertone and anchovies bring a depth of flavor without any overtly fishy taste.

This is a creamy dressing with a beautiful green color and bright flavors to match.  It works just as well as a dip for a platter of crudites as it does as an elegant accent for a tossed salad.  You can vary the herbs to suit your taste. Just be sure to use plenty of parsley for the color.

Summer’s magnificent produce deserves a divine dressing.

Say what you will about English cooking, the Brits know pudding.

They so love their custards, fools, trifles, and duffs that they’ve come to  refer to all desserts as pudding.  None is so magical to my mind as summer pudding.  Only alchemy could turn something as prosaic as white bread, berries and sugar into something so gorgeous, elegant and delicious.

The Oxford Companion of Food traces the first published recipe for summer pudding to a missionary in India.  But I first tasted it in a hip East Berlin restaurant not long after the wall came down.  I still remember the vivid fuchia color and the bright berry flavor that seemed to distill the essence of summer.  It was like no other dessert I knew, neither as rich as pastry or as creamy as a typical pudding.  I was smitten.

So when I was casting about last week for something different to make with a portion of the 15 pounds of olallieberries my husband and I had just picked at Coastways Ranch north of Santa Cruz, summer pudding leaped straight to mind.

Traditionally the pudding is made with red currants — like the one I ate in Berlin.  But currants aren’t nearly as common in Northern California as they are in England.  I see them rarely at farmers markets and then only in the tiniest cartons.

Still, many British chefs use a combination of blackberries and raspberries for summer pudding, which leads us right to olallieberries.  Developed at Oregon State University in 1949, the popular hybrid traces its genetics back to both blackberries and raspberries.  The berries are fat and juicy like the best blackberries but carry some of the sharp tang of raspberries.

The hardest part of making a summer pudding may well be finding a loaf of nice, firm-textured white bread.  In this era of whole grains, the only white bread my local grocery store carries is those airy balloon loaves I grew up with and they’re tucked away on a remote shelf.  Area bakeries tend to specialize in artisan and whole grain breads.  All of which is good news for nutrition but not so good for summer pudding.

I made a loaf of brioche in my bread machine for the recipe but later found some good organic white bread at Whole Foods and some old-fashioned white loaves at Safeway.  They would work just fine with the bonus that you don’t have to worry about cutting slices to a uniform thickness.

The outline of this recipe is drawn from a collection of cookbooks by British culinary icon Elizabeth David, who specifies fresh red currants. To add a little depth to the olallieberries, I stirred in a couple of tablespoons of French creme de cassis that I keep around for making kirs. If you don’t have any of the liqueur, try adding lemon zest to pump up the flavors. I like that approach, too.

Although this recipe is incredibly easy, unmolding the pudding can be problematic.  My first effort fell to pieces when I turned it out onto the plate. Yet the pudding still tasted so good when I spooned it into bowls, no one noticed.

A little creme fraiche or Greek yogurt covers a multitude of sins.

Before we left on our recent trip to Alaska, I compiled a collection of recipes that I thought might work for car camping.  They had to be simple — based on ingredients we could find at most any grocery store —and require a minimum of pots and pans.  One skillet would be ideal.

At the same time, I wanted fresh flavors and appealing textures.  Canned goods and pantry items soon lose their charm when you’re traveling for six weeks.

Our favorite quick and easy meal turned out to be an updated version of Joe’s Special, the venerable San Francisco dish made with spinach, eggs, onions and ground meat.  Think of it as a deconstructed fritatta.  It takes a bit of chopping but it comes together fairly quickly and tastes terrific.

I’ve substituted ground turkey for the original hamburger and thrown in sliced mushrooms for meaty flavor.  What makes this dish so easy and fresh tasting is the baby spinach now available washed and bagged at all but the smallest supermarkets.  Bagged spinach holds up nicely in an ice chest for several days.

Throw in some good Parmesan, chopped pimentos and dried oregano and you have a very tasty one-dish meal.  Just be sure not to cook the spinach and eggs too long.  The dish should be moist and each ingredient identifiable when it’s served.

We liked this dish so much, it’s going into our emergency dinner repertoire for those nights when we’re just too bushed to attempt anything more ambitious.  A food processor would cut the work to almost nothing.

I first came across a recipe for Nanaimo bars in an old issue of Sunset Magazine. It was over the top with butter and sugar, but I couldn’t resist trying it out. And from the first bite, I was a fan of this indulgent combo of chocolate and buttercream with its irresistible balance of cake-like base, creamy filling and brittle chocolate topping.

Since then, I’ve made the recipe a couple of times a year, whenever I feel like spoiling myself or my friends. The only other person I know who makes the bars is Susan Steade, now food editor of the Mercury News.  Her recipe is very similar and the bars are always a cause for celebration in the newsroom.

The glorified brownies get their name from the town of Nanaimo on the eastern shore of Vancouver Island, but they have been been adopted throughout British Columba as a provincial specialty. So I made a note to myself before starting this trek to Alaska and Canada to taste the first BC-made Nanaimo bar I came across on my travels.

In the tiny town of Stewart on the western shore of BC, I finally spotted a platter of the distinctive brown and white bars in a bakery case. My mouth was set for pure delight as I made my purchase

That first bite, though, was more than disappointing. — it was disgusting. How could anyone turn chocolate and butter into something so horrible that its rightful place was in the trash?

I suspect the bakery’s recipe includes instant pudding. Goodness knows, there are plenty of recipes on the Internet that call for a box of vanilla custard powder. That’s the only plausible explanation for the sickeningly sweet chemical flavor.

Rather than risk such culinary trauma again, I think I’ll stick with the old Sunset recipe. Sweet butter and the best quality cocoa and chocolate are the keys. I like to use Sharffen Berger cocoa and bittersweet Valrhona chocolate.

Try this version when you’re looking for a memorable dessert to take to a potluck. The bars are so rich, you’ll feel less guilty if you enlist a bunch of people to share the calories.

One of the striking ironies of Alaska is how difficult it is to find fresh fish in the ports serving North America’s biggest fishery.

Frozen fish is everywhere, neatly packaged in vacuum-sealed pouches.  That’s because all but a small portion of the huge harvest of salmon and halibut is destined for markets elsewhere.  The fish are filleted and frozen within hours after they’re pulled from Alaska’s icy oceans.

Homer, where we spent a couple of days earlier this week, is the hub of halibut fishing.  The legendary Spit is lined with signs advertising halibut charters.  Hundreds of commercial fishing boats fill the harbor.  Several processing plants do nothing but pack and freeze fish to ship around the world.

It seemed like the perfect place to find a nice chunk of fish for the seafood chowder recipe I had brought with me from California.  Yet finding fish that wasn’t frozen as hard as a chunk of marble proved daunting.

The supermarkets didn’t have any fresh local fish.  When I went to the market on the spit recommended by the manager of the campground where I was staying, it didn’t have any fresh halibut either.  The case was filled with frozen fillets.

“Don’t you have any fresh fish,” I asked?

“It’s fresh frozen,” the young clerk replied.

Now I know that flash frozen fish is pretty good.  It’s certainly better than fish that has been sitting around in a cold case for a couple of days.  But it still doesn’t compare with the firm texture and sweet flavor of fish that’s just been pulled from the sea.  So I kept looking.

Down the street, there was another processor that touted its fresh halibut.  But the shop was locked and a sign on the door suggested calling for assistance.  When I dialed the number, the man who answered said he did have fresh fish but he wouldn’t be back to his business until the next day.

I would be gone by then, headed north to Tok, and I began to despair of cooking the chowder I had been anticipating for weeks.

Luckily for me, Joe of Kachemack Bay Seafood was walking by and overheard my cell phone conversation.

“I can get you some fresh halibut,” he offered.

I followed him to his little shop, hidden near the docks, where he pulled a glistening halibut out of an ice chest and expertly cut off a fillet just the size I wanted.

“Most people are surprised how hard it is to find fresh fish down here,” he said.  “The frozen is good alright, but it’s just not the same.”

I thanked him profusely and took my beautiful piece of fish back to the camper, where I made this elegantly simple chowder on the two-burner propane stove.  Light and fresh, it was the perfect showcase for this impeccably fresh fish.

Resist the urge to add too much seasoning or take measures to thicken the broth.  You want the sweet, slightly briny flavor of the fish to sing out in this dish.

Halibut, firm and mildly flavored, is my choice for the chowder but any firm, white-fleshed fish would be good.  Just be sure not to overcook it.

Of course, fresh fish is best.

Alaskans call themselves “sourdoughs” in tribute to the prospectors who settled much of America’s last frontier in the late 19th century.

Among the miners’ most treasured staples in those days before powdered yeast became commonplace was a crock of sourdough starter to leaven their bread, biscuits and pancakes. The starter — a mixture of flour and water allowed to ferment with wild yeast in the air — was so central to their diets that they called anyone who survived a hard winter in the gold fields a “sourdough.”

So it seemed only fitting that I should bring a jar of starter with me on my camping tour of Alaska. What better way to start the day in the shadow of the rugged Alaskan Range than with a stack of sourdough pancakes swimming in maple syrup?

Even though we’re staying in a developed campground in Denali National Park, there’s no doubt that we’re on the fringe of a wilderness that has changed little since prospectors and trappers arrived in the heart of Alaska.

A moose, all ungainly legs and protuberant nose, grazed on the fresh green tips of spruce trees not far from our campsite the other day. Red signs posted on all the trails warn that female moose are calving in the area, increasing the presence of hungry bears. At a campfire program, the ranger told of a moose tearing through the woods just as another program had ended a few days earlier. A grizzly was on its heels.

From our shuttle bus en route to Toklat, 53 miles into the center of the park, we spotted a pair of grizzlies, a couple of moose and more than a dozen Dall sheep — the animals whose threatened population inspired the creation of the park in 1917 as a game refuge. A fox, snowshoe hares, golden eagles and ptarmigan appeared, too.

What we didn’t see was Denali, the Athabaskan name for the mountain identified as Mt. McKinley on official maps. At 20,320 feet, it’s the highest mountain in North America, but it’s notoriously shy. Even when the sky is clear elsewhere, Denali wraps itself in mist and clouds. Rangers tell visitors that they only have a 20 percent chance of seeing the mountain.

To sustain us for a day of watching for the mountain to peek from behind its veils, I made pancakes with the starter I brought from home. I was worried about whether it would work since all sourdough lore emphasizes the importance of keeping your starter warm so it will be active enough to raise batter. But the pancakes came through even if Denali didn’t. (If you want to see the mysterious mountain on one of its good days, click here.)

Although temperatures dropped to 40 degrees overnight and our little camper is unheated, the starter bubbled away after it had been fed with more flour and water. Just before cooking, I stirred in milk, oil, an egg, a little sugar, and salt. The pancakes were picture perfect, light, tender and a little crisp around the edges.

The starter came from a friend, who had been nurturing it for some time. That’s one of the nice things about starters. Once you get them going, they need to be fed regularly and there’s always plenty to share. Take a cup of starter out for a loaf of bread or a batch of biscuits and stir in ½ cup of flour and ½ cup of water and it will replenish itself. I’ve even used my starter to make terrific sourdough cornbread straight out of an old “Joy of Cooking.”

A starter can be kept going indefinitely as long as you feed it, the flavor getting deeper and more tangy as the benign bacteria grow. I store mine in the refrigerator between baking bouts and have let it languish as long as three weeks between feedings. It hasn’t failed me yet.

If you don’t have a friend with starter to spare, or if you’ve let yours expire from neglect, don’t despair. It’s easy to make a new one. Even if it’s not quite as tangy as a mature starter, it will raise your baked goods just as well. In the past, I’ve used the recipe below with great results.

You don’t have to be an Alaskan to appreciate good sourdough.

The sapphire waters of the Inland Passage are the lifeblood of Southeast Alaska.  Winding through a magnificent landscape of dense forests, deep fjords and glacier-carved peaks mantled in snow, the icy seas teem with marine life that has sustained the native Tlingit people and fed the bears, bald eagles and migrating whales for millennia.

Today, the maze of inlets, channels and sounds serves as a watery highway to the outside world for fishing camps and towns hugging its shores for the more than 200 miles from Ketchikan to Juneau. The waters support a vast commercial fishing industry.  They’re a primary draw, too, for throngs of tourists, who sail in aboard cruise ships and ferries throughout the summer, hoping for a glimpse of wild life that lives off the ocean’s bounty.

Lucky me, I’ve arrived during the King salmon season, when it seems every fishing crew is racing to get its share of the lucrative catch. Fishermen sell whole fish off boats in the harbors and local papers publish notices of salmon fishing derbies.

King salmon, with its luxuriously moist red flesh and rich flavor, is my favorite fish.  Since we’re camping, I’m not equipped to handle a whole one, so I’ve been buying fillets and steaks from the markets. Although I haven’t found any bargains ($16.99 a pound appears to be the going price), the salmon has been incredibly fresh and satisfying.

This is fish without guilt.  Wild salmon are plentiful here and the fishery is managed to ensure that enough mature salmon are left to swim back upstream and spawn at the end of their life cycle.  Forage for the eagle and bear populations is factored into the equation.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch program ranks wild Alaskan salmon as a best fish choice for diners.

“For us, it’s one of the poster children for a sustainable fishery,” says Geoff Shester, senior science manager for the aquarium’s sustainable seafood initiative.

When salmon is wild and straight out of the sea, it needs little embellishment.  I’ve been cooking it very simply.  Fillets were excellent pan-fried quickly in butter then finished with a tablespoon of capers and a splash of red wine vinegar a la Nigel Slater.  But a thick steak, cooked in a foil packet over hot coals in a campfire ring, was sublime.

All I added to the steak were a few cherry tomatoes, thinly sliced scallions and a generous pinch of dried thyme.  This recipe, adapted from Mark Bittman’s “Quick and Easy Recipes,” should work just as well in a hot oven or on a grill.  Fresh sprigs of thyme would be a nice addition.

For camping, cooking in foil can’t be beat. The fish stays moist and is hard to overcook. It definitely produced the best salmon we’ve tasted in Alaska.

Still, the pan-fried salmon comes in a close second.  So I’m including that recipe here, too.

If you can’t find perfectly fresh salmon, try some of the flash-frozen fish sold in better markets for these dishes.  When the fish is thawed slowly in the refrigerator before cooking, the texture and flavor remain quite good.

Before I left for Alaska two weeks ago, I wrapped up a piece on glorious spring rhubarb that was published today in the San Jose Mercury News.

The dish that pleased me most was this homey rhubarb clafoutis. A riff on the simple French cake frequently made with cherries, it’s at once tart, sweet and creamy.  The bright, tangy flavor of rhubarb plays deliciously against the custard-like cake.  The secret to its luscious texture is to not bake it too long.  The finished cake should still be a little soft in the center when you take it out of the oven.

In the meantime, I’ve been sailing the Inside Passage on my way through Southeast Alaska.  The ferries have proved a marvelous way to get a close look at this magical landscape of snow-capped mountains and dense green forests sweeping down to the sea.  Eagles soar overhead and Pacific White-sided dolphins leap out of the water.

I’ve yet to see much of whales aside from random spouts in the distance, but we haven’t reached Haines.  There’s still plenty of time to encounter a pod of humpbacks.

One of the things I’ve been looking forward to most is the taste of fresh salmon straight out of Alaskan waters.  Since the salmon season was cut short in Northern California, I haven’t had any of my favorite fish for months.  Even if I weren’t opposed to farmed salmon on principle, I wouldn’t consider it an acceptable alternative.  Its flavor just can’t compete with that of its wild cousins.

I was so eager for the real thing that I took a risk and ordered it in the ferry’s dining room.

I should have known better, considering all my years as a restaurant critic.  Although the fish looked promising, it was overcooked, excessively seasoned and utterly disappointing.

At least the view was fabulous.

My mission now is to buy some fresh salmon — off the docks if possible — and cook it myself.  I’m thinking about steaming fillets en papillote, or, more likely, in a foil packet.  I’ll let you know how it turns out.

Addendum on June 14, 2011:

Since the link to the story and recipes has expired, I’ve added the clafoutis recipe.