At this spacious log cabin on Swift Creek Reservoir, there’s no cell phone service or landline, no Internet, not even electricity. "Buying this cabin was the best thing we ever did," says Janie Hibler, author of several cookbooks about Northwest-style food. Time here in Washington’s Cascades, she says, is spent together: hiking, watching ospreys and bald eagles, cannonballing off the dock, and sitting down to meals that start right outside their door.
This weekend, as they’ve done for years, the Hiblers and their kids and grandkids fish for trout and pluck huckleberries on nearby Mt. Adams. With a few imaginative touches, Janie transforms these into dinner: salmon-stuffed trout cooked on the wood-burning stove, potato salad, and an arugula-nectarine salad. Dessert is the huckleberries, skillet-baked into a rustic cobbler. It’s a menu with the summery flavors of the landscape itself.