Walking the Walk: Liz & Elma's go-to seafood recipes
Your Bellingham SeaFeast organizers, Liz Purdy and Elma Burnham, are (surprise, surprise) seafood lovers. While we sit (or pace) in our quasi home offices, we wanted to provide an honest look into what seafood means to each of us—the two people who spend all year thinking about our festival weekend at Bellingham SeaFeast. We’ve both been eating a lot of seafood during the Stay-at-Home period, and we hope our story can empower you to do the same. We’re definitely not professional chefs, and though we both grew up with the salt water very nearby, we had to learn what we liked, which recipes are best, and (in some cases) how to catch it!
We first met on the commercial fishing grounds in Bristol Bay, Alaska! We kept in touch and were thrilled when our paths crossed again to collaborate on Bellingham SeaFeast when Liz joined the planning team in 2018. That summer, we visited the Lummi Island reefnet fishermen with festival founders, Deb & Pete Granger.
Elma grew up on the east coast, in Long Island Sound along the Connecticut coast, where fishermen set traps for lobster or hung nets to grow oysters. She has spent the last decade fishing commercially for salmon in Bristol Bay, Alaska maintaining a connection her parents made with coastal Alaska in the 1980s.
Liz is a native of Seattle and earned her first dollars as a host at Chinook’s at Fishermen’s Terminal, an Anthony’s Restaurant. After college, her interest in environmental policy brought her to Alaska where she stayed to fish for a summer or two.
Elma visiting family friends in Cook Inlet in 1995.
Liz’s first King in Sitka in 2011.
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