Rock Fishing on the Honga River....

This past May, my pals Luther and John and I went down to the next county south to rock fish. It's not that there weren't rockfish up by us, we just wanted a change of scenery.

We put in at a public ramp and the water was so shallow I think we had, something like, 3 inches between the hull and the bottom. After some delicate navigating by Luther, below, we were able to open up and head out into the river...... And when I say river, I don't mean that in the literal sense. It's really just an inlet off the Chesapeake Bay.



Fishing companions....Luther and John.



The day started out sort of chilly but warmed a bit by the afternoon. Luther is impervious to the cold.


We were trolling, pulling lures behind the boat. Spent a lot of time staring at this.....



Finally the rod dips and John being the closest, grabbed the pole and away we go.....







At the end of the day, three happy fisherman.

Oysters a la maison.....

Brought back the oysters from the island last week and proceeded to make our signature oysters casino. Oysters and clams casino usually involves a sort of marinara, cheese, plus green peppers and onions and bacon. I omit the the sauce and cheese and keep it simple, clean, and, most of all, oystery.



Time to do some shucking.......



Bacon? Check.



Green pepper and onion cooking in the rendered fat.



Under the broiler they go......



All done.


Wait!


Now we're done.

Small Craft Advisory. Time to Roast Oysters!

You won't hear me going on about how summery the autumn is around here today. I'm typing this from the attic of the cottage on the island. I've done a lot of work at this desk. Wrote an entire screenplay up here. Studied for a semester of organic chemistry up here as well.




The trip out today was a bit hairy. A small craft advisory is in effect. This happens quite frequently in the non-summer months. The advisory is issued by the National Weather Service when consistent winds of 22 mph, but not greater than 39 mph, occur. Anything stronger and you have a gale. This advisory is generally considered to apply to boats under 33 feet in length. That'd be us.






Tying up the boat was an acrobatic feat. I've done enough times in heavy seas so that I've got the system down.


These are Chinese windmill palms. They grow on the slopes of the Himalayas and are very cold tolerant. I bought these down in North Carolina about 8 years ago. The first few winters I wrapped them in burlap. Last year they roughed it on their own. Fully naturalized at this point. I don't know of anyone successfully growing them outdoors and unprotected any further north. Gives a very coastal Carolina feel to the place.




First oysters of the year! $30 for a half-bushel. That's about 100 oysters.

(I'm actually blogging from the island. I'll have the oyster roast photos up tomorrow. Time to sit on the front porch in the 20 mph wind under a Buffalo blanket and watch the sailboaters scramble for sanctuary in the harbor, known as the "pot".)

Oyster roast at the north beach. Since the winds are out of the south today, we're in the lee and things are quite peaceful. The wind has pushed the tide up so there's less beach this afternoon. The structure in the water is from an old seawall.




Toyed with the idea of using driftwood but opted for charcoal. Good thing. All the drift wood was damp.



Now we play the waiting game. After about 5 minutes you'll be alerted to their readiness by a slight hiss as they pop open and the fluid, called "liquor", spills onto the hot coals.




While we're waiting for the oysters to roast, let's have a few on the half-shell shall we. We left the cocktail sauce back at the wharf and since a run back in last night just for cocktail sauce wasn't worth it we made due with ketchup and worcestershire (sp?) sauce. Not bad.


Roasted oyster. Didn't bring any butter but they were still delicious plain.



Race against time. The sun was setting promptly at 5 this afternoon so almost as soon as it had begun, the roast was over. Here's a picture of the sun as it rocketed out of the heavens and below the horizon in a matter of moments. Western cultures romanticize sunsets. The Japanese find them sad and, naturally, consider sunrises to be romantic.


Not fully sated. The old stand-by.



Oops.




Okay, let's see. Dead calm? Check. Cloudless sky? Check. 70 degress? Check. I thought so. It's Sunday, time to leave. Happens every time......



Time for a quick breakfast on the sun drenched porch.


I'm off to drain the water tank as it's now the season for hard freezes. Burst pipes are a constant threat. Until next time................

Weird Japanese Snack #6

This one has been fairly long in coming. I got this one on my usual Monday morning (thanks Terry). Again, not Japanese but Korean. They're no slouches when it comes to challenging snack foods themselves. I really had to wait for the mood for octopus flavored potato crisps to come along. It came along yesterday afternoon and stayed for about 17 seconds.




Immediately upon opening the bag you get a whiff of the ocean. A whiff of the ocean on a breezeless, hot summer day. With lots of seaweed on the beach......



This is gonna be harder than I thought. They shaped the potato based crisps into crude semblances of an octopus, I think. Actually, it looks more like a Pepperidge Farm Goldfish, the snack that smiles back, rather than a Korean ocotopus flavored snack chip, the chip that takes you aback....

So I actually ate one. Just one. That was all I needed. While not overpowering it was not good. I have to tell you, I have tasted this taste before. I frequently use raw squid as bait when I fish. Sometimes I eat things while I'm fishing. Sometimes that thing is potato chips. Sometimes, in the spirit of "Hey, you got chocolate in my peanut butter!", the two collide when I don't clean my hands. It's not good.....not good......

To close this out, I have to tell you quickly about a phenomenon in Japan. It's called the "Korean Wave." It's starting to fade now, but a few years ago a Korean soap opera called Winter Sonata became a smash hit in Japan, mostly with middle-aged women. The show's star, Kim Bae Jong, plays the kind of decent, dutiful, Confucian ideal man that Japanese women can't seem to find in Japan anymore. At any rate, he's a huge star in Japan now and recently he and his co-star in Winter Sonata, it's a love story of course, appeared at the Tokyo Dome and sort of role played their on-screen characters to a live audience. You can see the demographic in the video. It's pretty hilarious. I kept it together until the part with, well, I won't spoil it. You can watch it here.

Cup Noodles with Tofu Pad!

This has been in my cabinet at work for a while now. Time to eat! It's fairly autumnal outside today and this will hit the spot. Didn't bring any lunch today as I could not get to the grocery store yesterday. Here in Montgomery County, Maryland, the archaic computer system that governs the timing of the street lights failed. Apparently, the system is so old they're having trouble finding parts (?) to repair it. Eventually it took them two whole days to fix. In the meantime, commutes that normally took 20 minutes (mine) took over an hour. And that was taking back roads, etc. It was gridlock as far as the eye could see. I couldn't bare to look at people in the cars beside me. They all had that same anxious, frustrated look that I knew was on my face as well. Anyway, back to the soup.

First, time to boil some water. Four minutes in the microwave and we're all set. The first time I boiled water in a ceramic mug I, rather stupidly, assumed that the handle would still be cool. It was, in reality, hotter than a thousand suns and almost fused to my hand the instant I touched it.




Below you can see the raw noodles and the tofu pad. I mentioned in a previous post that these noodles are fried before they're dried and packaged. That's where they get a lot of their flavor AND a lot of their calories. Almost 500 for this bowl......

Here it is with the flavor packet added. I have no idea what the hell those little Corn Puff-looking thingies are supposed to be. They're spongy once they cook and have no flavor. Japanese whimsy?

Now we set the timer on the explosives and wait..... In the background, my trusty Dell Mini is loading up an episode of Naruto for some lunch time diversion.




Ta da! The tofu pad is kind of savory with a hint of sweetness and a very pleasant chewy texture. The broth was great. If I had been thinking, I should have brought some left over pork loin that I had, along with some green onions and Sriracha. That would've have really taken this to another level. The Naruto episode is where they're in the Forest of Death during the Chunin exams. The fights were brutal. I was so hoping Neji was gonna beat up the three bad ninja from the Sound Village when Sasuke woke up from his curse mark coma, irradiating blue chakra mist, and pulled their arms off. I know that meant nothing to you.

Home Made Samosas (you read that right!)

Last Saturday, waking up rather late (9:30ish) after having spent the previous night drinking mineral water and nibbling on water biscuits while watching the Bolshoi on the educational channel, I turned on Tyler Florence's Ultimate cooking show. His stuff is usually a bit too-many-ingredienty for me. That day he was making the rather unimaginatively named "Tyler's Ultimate Indian Dinner." He made lamb curry and some other stuff but the samosas looked easy and had the intriguing element of making your own dough. It couldn't have been easier, in the food processor you just add 2 cups of flour, a half teaspoon of salt, and six tablespoons of oil. Turn on the pastry blade and slowly add six tablespoons of warm water until the dough balls up. Easy. Put it in the fridge for half an hour and then you're good to go. I made it early in the after noon and assumed it would keep until that night. When I returned from the ballet at around 10, I rather ambitiously got out the dough and found that it had sort of hardened and dried out and was unusable. I wasn't too bummed. It was easy enough to make and I started again the next day. Getting the dough to roll out thinly enough was a bit of a challenge. I don't know about you, but I don't have a whole lot of rolling pin work under my belt. Anway, you roll it out and make semi-circles of the dough, run the seam with some water so it sticks, and pack them with the filling. Oh yeah, the filling. Most of the spices I already had but when I went to the store for the ground chicken it called for I had to grab some cinnamon. I'm not gonna go into all the details of the filling. You can get it here. I did sort of scorch the spices in the oil rather than cook them. I thought I was sunk but I guess I got them off the heat in time. At any rate, you end up with the classic stuffed triangle shape. Fried them in oil at 350 F after returning from Myerhoff that evening. Why no picture of the process? I totally spaced and didn't even THINK to document until I got to work with ........




To the right you can see the red Indian Relish I got from Trader Joe's. Love that store. It's owned by a German company and they know how to bring the variety and quality of a high-street supermarket to the masses at fantastic prices. No offense Harris Teeter, I'm just sayin..... The weird looking white stuff to the right is the dipping sauce that I also whipped together. What's it called again? Lomash? Limon? Limahl? Uh, no, that was that goof from Kajagoogoo...... Wait, not even close, it's called Raita.

There's that weird cockney rhyming slang thing they do in London where they refer to something not by a word that sounds like it, but rather, to a word that is connected to a word that sounds like it. To wit: in an Indian restaurant in White Chapel, a local might ask for a serving of "Paperback." Now, this is the silly part. Since "raita" sounds an awful lot like "writer", especially when spoken with the soft-on-the-r-sound accent of the English, the person in question has made the association with the famous Beatles song, "Paperback Writer." So instead of being all dull and simply asking for what he wants, he's made the sound association between the two words and is now asking for "Paperback raita." Get it? Another example. When someone lies, like, say, they claimed to have spent the evening at the opera when instead, and you know this for a fact, they spent it at the local pool hall talking nonsense. A cockney rhyming slanger might accuse them of "Tellin' porkies." The association here? Lies-pies-pork pies- porkies......

Since I took three photos of my samosas, I'm posting three photos of my samosas. They were fantastic. Literally as good as the ones from the "Indian Garden" down the street. You know the one, appropriately set above the aptly named "Thrive" yoga studio.