Sushi feed raises thousands for cancer treatment

A home-harvested fundraiser raised just over $3,800 for a child's medical expenses on Sunday, which follows another effort in October that had raised $1,800.

The funds are for Taryn Lee, a five-year-old diagnosed with spitzoid melanoma earlier this summer. According to St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, melanoma is the most serious form of skin cancer due to its tendency to spread quickly. While rare among the general population for skin cancers, it is even more rare among pediatric cases, particularly for the very young.

Taryn is the daughter of Colton and Camilla Lee, a Wasilla couple with Wrangell roots. After learning of the young girl's diagnosis, local residents rallied to help out, first with an enchilada feed in October and most recently with a dinner held Sunday.

Annya Ritchie and Jillian Privett did much of the event's organizing. Ritchie is a family friend, and Privett knows two of Taryn's grandfathers from their time working at Wrangell Public Schools.

"Just community members helping out old community members," Privett explained.

The fundraiser ended up taking on a distinctive flavor as the two brainstormed ideas for a dinner. They approached Jared Gross, a fisherman with a talent for making sushi.

"It's always something we always talked about doing," he said, but the opportunity hadn't come up yet.

Gross has been eating and making sushi with regularity since 2012. "When I was squid fishing in Ventura, California, is when I really started eating sushi. I'd go to the same place every day, and this guy down there taught me how he did it. That's pretty much when I learned," he recalled.

Since then the Japanese delicacy has become his preferred way to eat fish.

"That's like the only way I eat fish now. I never cook it anymore. I think it's been like four years since I've actually cooked a piece of salmon," he said. "I just really like the flavor, and it's actually pretty healthy for you."

Gross was game for the idea, and the group began collecting ingredients for a meal. Privett explained they collected salmon and crab donated from various residents, while her brother Reme provided a venue at his bar, Rayme's.

In all they had enough materials for 150 different roll orders, as well as a special salmon poke Gross concocted. Poke – pronounced po-kay – is a dish of Hawaiian extraction featuring marinated, raw fish. For this meal he explained they used a king salmon fillet donated by Tony Guggenbickler.

"You've got to take your fillet and trim it up like you would anything else, take the bones out and everything. You take the skin off, then basically you cut it into little cubes," Gross said.

Still raw, these then get soaked for a few hours in a marinade that includes onions, spicy mayonnaise, soy sauce, sesame oil, green onions, peppers, avocado and edamame. The dish is flavorful and easy to make, using ingredients that can be commonly found at the local stores. "You've just got to go out and catch the salmon."

While poke is among his favorite ways to eat salmon, Gross devised a few hand rolls – makizushi, or "rolled sushi" – that would appeal to different tastes. Raw salmon was still on the menu, but so were cooked crab and combination rolls.

These sushi rolls start as a sheet of nori, or dried seaweed, layered with cooked rice.

"The most important step is getting your rice seasoned right," Gross explained. "You're supposed to rinse your rice, to get that cloudiness out." After boiling, the rice is spread out to cool consistently, with a mixture of mirin, sugar and salt applied as it does. What results is a flavorful, sticky rice that's ready to roll.

The other important element to good sushi is a sharp knife, Gross added.

For the fundraiser, the group got together Saturday evening to prepare ingredients, making the rice the next morning. At Rayme's a half-dozen volunteers manned stations at the side counter area and began to fill orders. It turned out to be a bit more than they anticipated.

"It really backed up for a while. I looked at all these orders and thought where would I even start?" said Gross.

Ritchie took down orders while Privett helped prepare rolls, and other volunteers took shifts prepping and cooling rice. Resident Aaron Angerman was soon called down because he had some experience making rolls, and they soon caught up.

"I'll make it at home a couple, three times a year," he said during a brief break. "I'm learning from Jared. It's pretty cool."

"If they didn't do that, there's no way I'd have been able to do it myself," Gross said afterward. "The most I've made is maybe like 20 rolls. That's just for friends coming over and eating."

They ended up filling just under 140 orders, collecting $3,800 in the process.

"All the funds, everything donated today, all that money is going to go into the Taryn Lee account at Wells Fargo," Privett explained. They opted to start up an account with a bank because other platforms, such as GoFundMe.com, take a percentage. "It's going straight to them for medical fees. It's really early stages of everything going on with her right now, but we're just trying to make sure that when the time comes, that whether she needs a college account for later in life, that money can go towards this, or it can go to her medical expenses right now. Just so they know they're okay."

"Whenever there is someone hurting, struggling, or going through something like this, it's natural to want to try to help in any way possible," Ritchie commented afterward. "However, we can't take the pain away or solve any real problems, but what we can do is pray for the best and host events like this. Wrangellites continue to pull together and provide blessing for people who need it."

"There's always ways to help out. That's one of the good things about Wrangell," Angerman agreed.

At the last news of Taryn's progress, the Lee family was advised to seek specialized treatment in Oregon. They were to see a specialist in Texas, and were still hoping to hear back from St. Jude's before deciding on a course of treatment.