Becoming a true Alaskan

There are many material signs that you are a true denizen of Southeast Alaska - a pair of ExtraTufs, an Alaska Airlines Visa card on which you load every bill except your mortgage payment, a 10-year old bottle of sunscreen - but there is also a set of special skills and knowledge you should have.  If someone hands you a wriggling sea creature, you should be able to dress it and cook it.  If you've read our latest book - The Fishmonger's Apprentice; the expert's guide to selecting, preparing, and cooking a world of seafood, taught by the masters by Aliza Green - you are already in the club.
This excellent book, laden with photographs, will show you how to debone herring, fillet halibut, butterfly salmon, shuck oysters, dehead shrimp, clean geoduck, gut dungies, cut steaks from cod, and clean live sea urchin.  And as if that weren't enough, there is a handy-dandy DVD that accompanies the book, featuring 12 tutorials and 32 recipes.  The disc demonstrates basic seafood cooking techniques, such as steaming, stuffing, pickling and blackening.  Learn how to properly cook clams, calamari and scallops.  Make crabcakes and fish fumée (which is a fancy term for fish stock...I had to Google that one). 
Once you've mastered this book, you'll be ready to tackle the many fine seafood cookbooks we have on the shelf (many of which assume you know how to gut a fish).  Derby season's coming up, and what better way to impress the guys down at the harbor than to gut and fillet your massive catch yourself with a few quick flicks of the knife...