Pink Salmons Still Biting!

The Humpies, or Pink Salmon, are still running hard here in the Puget Sound!

I keep seeing all the salmon jumping out of the water from the ferry in Mukilteo and I finally had a chance to stop by around noon yesterday and cast a buzz bomb out from the shore.

Thirty minutes later I left with three nice pinks, gave two away to co-workers and carried one back onto the ferry to go home in a bag of ice!

Pretty good lunch break!

Pink Salmon - Catching and Eating Humpys from Whidbey Island

When my wife was convincing me to move to Whidbey, that the commute to the mainland would not be that bad, it did not take much convincing.  But what sealed the thought to me, was I looked up fishing from Whidbey on YouTube and found this video of a couple of guys catching salmon from the shore.  Growing up catching salmon from rivers, that idea was very appealing versus the usual ocean trolling for hours to hook a fish and reel one in.

The first weekend in August, with Tracy and the boys in Montana, I spent hours on the beach trying to hook a pink to no avail.  Saw a few landed, but not that many.  I used every combination of pink lures available with no luck.

So this last weekend, we made a trip out on Saturday morning - Tracy, boys, and baby girl who is only two months old.  After 20 minutes of fixing tangled lines and setting up two boys to fish, I was on about my tenth cast with a standard Buss Bomber setup when I hooked a salmon.  I couldn't believe it!  I had even only brought my light gear, reel and pole, and it was a great fight on a light pole!  After about 5 minutes, I finally managed to tighten the drag down while keeping the tip up enough to get the salmon up onto the shore and land a beautiful pink salmon!

Dylan, my 3 year old, helped me through the landing and everything else.  My first pink, or humpy, salmon.  This was a male, though it did not have the hump they get once they reach the rivers. I immediately slit the gills to bleed the salmon out as recommended for pinks, then kept him cool in the ocean water for the remaining 30 minutes while I tried to hook another.

It was great to watch the beach.  When I caught my pink, 1/2 dozen other people within sight also hooked up as a school went by and there was a lot of action.  I missed the next round of action checking on the baby and the fish, then it was time to go.  But as noone but me was likely to eat this fish, one was enough!

Cooking Pink Salmon:

With everything out there about how these fish go bad quickly, I was very concerned about getting this cooked right away.  So I did what I think of as a normal quick salmon cooking.  I prepared tinfoil, enough layed out for a double wrap of the salmon.  I had bled and gutted the salmon at the beach, so I gave it a quick wash then set it on the tinfoil.  I drizzled a couple teaspoons of olive oil over the salmon, inside and out, and added some chopped garlic (grown from my garden) into the gut cavity.  I had already started the grill and had it at a good 400 degree point, so I turned the burners to medium and put the salmon on for 20 minutes.

It came out perfect!

Carter tried some bites, as did Tracy, but for the most part I got to indulge my primal instincts and gorge myself on a 6 pound fish all to myself!  Definitely made for a great weekend!

Preserving Rhubarb

Rhubarb is such an easy thing to grow here in the Northwest.  It pops up early in the year and ours produces through September providing several months of tart vegetables used mainly in desserts.  My beautiful wife thoughtfully gave me the book Rustic Fruit Desserts: Crumbles, Buckles, Cobblers, Pandowdies, and More for Christmas.  The book goes through by season and covers a great variety of good desserts by season.  In the Spring section, I have made their Rhubarb Cream Cheese Pie with Fresh Strawberries and their Rhubarb, Oat, and Pecan Crumble and both have turned out excellent.

Well, Tracy, the boys, and our new baby girl left for Montana for a week, and our rhubarb was so massive that it was starting to crowd out other plants.

Rather than make and eat a dessert by myself, I decided that it would be good to preserve some of the rhubarb for a winter crisp or pie.  You harvest rhubarb by grabbing the stalk below the leaf, then pulling with a slight twist to pull the entire stalk out.  Pulling out the entire stock helps the next set of leaves pop right out so that you can get a steady supply.  Before bringing the rhubarb into the house, I cut off the leaves from the stalk.  The leaves can be or are toxic, so those go into the compost bin.

I found some great Rhubarb information, including the directions for freezing Rhubarb, on this site:  Rhubarb Central     I decided to freeze the rhubarb plain with no sugar added.

First, I cut the ends off the rhubarb.

Then wash the rhubarb to remove dirt, dust, etc.

I dried the rhubarb on a towel for 20 minutes.

Then I dice the rhubarb - cut into approximately 1 inch lengths.

I put the diced rhubarb in ziplock freezer bags an removed as much air as possible.  A vacuum sealer would be nice, but spending money is not nice.

After that, I wrapped the Rhubarb in freezer paper to prevent any freezer burn.  That should keep them nice until we are ready for some late season crisp!

Salmon Berries - Sweet and Sour

Salmon Berries are such a conundrum.  You see them all over the place, large juicy looking berries that you keep convincing your self must be delicious!  Eating them can be a different story.  Some can have a really great taste with a mild aftertaste.  Others are straight up sour, and the color, ripeness, and size seem to have no bearing on the taste.

One of my sons loves eating them though- munches down buckets of them in the early spring.

I eat some to be supportive, and like about the first dozen.  The fact that they come out before all the other berries makes them easier to like.  Sitting next to blackberries or raspberries, I would pass on the off flavor of the Salmon Berries, but in the late spring, before the blackberries are even blooming, they are worth a snack while wandering around in the forest.

Does anyone have any good recipes for salmon berries?  Though they are gone for the year in my neck of the woods, I keep thinking I should do something with the large quantities next year!

Black Caps - Wild Raspberries

As a kid, I searched out every Black Cap bush within a several mile radius of my parents house.  The wild cousin of the domestic Red Raspberry, western Black Raspberries or Black Caps (link to genus definition) as I grew up calling them.  The taste is different, maybe more wild?  I am not sure how to describe what makes them different than red raspberries, but I know that I love the flavor and seek them out as soon as they come into season.  An added benefit, is that the season for these berries is fairly long, with each berry cluster generally ripening one at a time over a period of 4-8 weeks.  A good bush though can have dozens of canes with dozens of clusters on each cane, making for a very good forest treat!

Here in Western Washington, the berries are ripe now and should be producing through August.

The berries produce off of the previous years canes, so when picking be careful of the shoots coming up around the base of the plant as this is the next years crop.

Recipes?  I think a syrup would be delicious, but have never made it back to the house with enough to do anything substantial with.  Last year, I made a mixed berry cobbler with black caps, red huckleberries, and dew berries that came out excellent though!

Nettle Pesto and Eggs

Living here in the Northwest, stinging nettles are very abundant around my property, as I have found on many occasions when picking other berries and getting stung while reaching too far into a bush.  They especially like to hide in the middle of the blackberry patch at the end of my driveway!

After finding some nettles, hopefully without getting stung too many times, look for the young shoots.  Even this time of year, you can find young shoots coming up.  Pinch off the tops of the plants (wearing gloves and preferably long sleeves just in case) and throw into a bag or a pot.

Nettle Pesto Recipe from Fat of the Land   Langdon Cook does a much better job at describing how to make nettle pesto.

My instructions:  Mix ingredients in blender.


2 cups stinging nettles, blanched and chopped (figure 6 cups raw)
1/2 cup Parmesan
1/2 cup pine nuts, roasted
4-5 large garlic cloves, peeled
1/2 cup olive oil
1 tbsp lemon juice

Puree for about 10 minutes until everything is well chopped, blended, and smooth.

I take my pesto, place extra in mason jars with caps and freeze to preserve for a bit.  Not sure if that is recommended, but it seems to work.  I use within a few months.

New Chicks 2013

We received our new baby chicks over the weekend - eight new baby birds are making their home inside our house right now - in our office.  The garage seemed too cold, and we are probably checking on them too much, but they are cute!

We have two Barred Rock older birds, and we ordered these chicks through the local farm store.  We did not want to order straight from the hatchery and have to deal with chicks in the mail, maybe because I never thought the post office would care enough to make sure they were handled correctly.

Sure enough, the nursery called last week - the chicks were "lost" for 48 hours in transit!  Luckily, most survived, but how do you lose a box of cheeping birds?  Seems like something you would notice.

All of our birds made it - we got:

2 Ameraucana
2 Black Astrolorps
2 Brown Leghorns
2 Wellsummer

The chicks in their bin:

Looking up information on chicks, I came across this poster from 1918.  I thought it was very fitting!  Why though, in our current recession / war, are we only being encouraged to spend at malls instead of doing work at home to help out?

Carter thought the chicks needed a roost, so he build one with his magnet squares!

They started roosting on it after a few minutes of scrambling and wondering what we put in there with them!

Lastly, I went out last night to feed the older birds, and sitting in a tree over the coop was our resident Great Horned Owl.  The picture is a bit fuzzy, as it was dark and I was getting as close as I could before he flew.  Good thing I have overhead protection on my chicken run!

Oysters on the Beach

A nice little family vacation over to the Olympic peninsula yielded a lot of foraging potential!

But the nice highlight of the trip was a stop by a small park on the way home up the Hood Canal.  Oyster shells covered the beach, individual shells and large clumps where multiple oysters had spurred off of previous shells.  It was a moderately low tide, but you could see out in the water a couple feet lower large piles of oysters ready for harvest!  At the elevation we were at, there were still quite a few good ones on the beach. 

This was definitely an example of bad preparation.  I had lost my knife early in the trip, and did not have any type of container to carry oysters home.  Luckily, Carter found me a sharp rock, which I used to pry open a couple of shells and slurp down right there on the shore.  Perfect!

Easy Pumpkin Seeds

Each year at Halloween, we set out with the goal of finding the perfect pumpkin for each of the family members.  After the toils of selection, (see ShermanFarms U-Pick) the fun begins with the pumpkin carving!  

With a little help with sharp knives for the little ones, we carve a pumpkin for each family member. 

And of course, we save the seeds!  Pumpkin seeds are a nice fall treat after the rigors of tromping around getting candy from neighbor’s houses.  To me, and to my kids, the homemade ones have a taste reminiscent of popcorn, but much more filling.

It is pretty simple really, save the seeds after carving your Halloween pumpkins, or save the seeds after cutting up your Hubbard Squash or pumpkins for pie or any other winter squash. 

·         Clean off all the slime, stringers, and goopers. 

·         Place in a bowl and add two tablespoons of olive oil. Stir them around and make sure all are oiled, add more oil if needed.

·         Spread on a cookie sheet evenly

·         Sprinkle with salt to your liking – we salt liberally

·         Bake in oven for approximately 45 minutes at 250 degrees

·         Eat right away, save for later, enjoy!

I store my roasted pumpkin seeds in ziplock bags on the pantry shelf.  The keep well for several months, at least, that is the longest I have kept any around.

Vermicompost: Making the worms do the hard work

Maybe I need to rethink my tagline statement.  Waste is needed, as long as it can be directed towards food for my worms!  I am simply amazed at the amount of things that the little squigglers eat up.

So it seems like a pretty simple system - build a box, put food scraps in, cover with something that is not attractive to flys, add worms, get awesome plant food!  I definitely like the rich dark look and feel of the worm castings that I have produced with my worm bin, and I think the garden beds that I am using them are doing better, though I did not do any side-by-side comparison or definitive tests.  But worm castings as a beneficial by-product aside, I get to take food scraps out of the garbage and make something out of them!

Of course it is not all a bed of roses, in fact it smells nothing like roses.  I have had all the classic problems that you can get from a worm bin:  too wet, too dry, too smelly(anaerobic), fly invasions, beetle invasions, slug invasions, centipede invasions, too much food, the wrong foods.  But it has been a fun experiment, and I see a definite, and free (minus my labor of course) benefit to the plants around the house!

I started my bins by collecting worms from around my property.  The hard part is finding red wigglers versus regular earthworms.  Luckily, I had several ages piles of leaves from a previous spring cleanup, and that provides a good supply of worms.  They tended to be on the small side, less than an inch in length, but have grown much larger in my bins.

I have two worm systems.  A larger system that I keep outside.  This is a 2 foot wide, 4 foot long, and 20 inch deep wooden box, made from scraps of plywood and 2x4s.  I have a divider board in the center to divide the box into two equal sections.  I fill up one half at a time with a mix of household scraps and dry leaves to cover the scraps.

My second garage system is a 5 gallon bucket.  This system is fed with shredded cardboard and coffee grounds only.  Over time, this system has produced an abundance of additional worms for my larger outdoor box.  The worms really thrive in the coffee grounds and cardboard!  I get the shredded cardboard from work and the coffee grounds from a local coffee shop that sets out bags of grounds for home gardeners.  I consider this my worm factory to produce more worms for my outdoor main processor.

Traditional Polar Bear Plunge

My grandfather was never the most talkative about things native american, but then I only knew him really in high school.  But on one occasion the group of us (us being whatever collection of grandkids happened to be around that day) got him talking about how our people lived before contact and in particular the sweat lodges and the morning rituals.

How I remember the story from when I was about 14:  All the men and older boys would sleep separately in a sweat lodge.  Each morning, the youngest make members of the family would build the fire and heat the stones, then drop them into the water basket to make the sweat lodge hot and steamy.  You began the day by sweating and clearing away everything from the previous day and night.  After a good sweat, they would go and walk or run into the river adjacent to the village.  In winter, if there was ice, they would keep an area broken free so that they could wade into the water and wash away the sweat.

I do not have a sweat lodge, and sleep on cotton sheets, but I have always liked the thought of the plunging into cold water to start the day fresh.  Instead, I end up doing that once a year on New Year's Day at a Polar Bear Plunge.

Every year at 12 noon on New Years Day, there is a polar bear plunge at Double Bluff park in Freeland, WA. You donate $15 to the local 4-H, get a free t-shirt, and get to jump into the cold ocean!

A great tradition, and one that I will continue to enjoy, maybe next year one of my boys will join me!

Crab For New Years

It is great to live in the Northwest!  There is always something to do outside that I can enjoy with my boys.

On New Years Eve, we decided to take advantage of the last day of crabbing season and throw a pot in from one of the local docks.  It was a very nice day, which made this an even better idea!  I walked out on the dock and threw the pot into the water while Tracy and the boys played on the beach.  We had a great time watching a crew take their crabbing boat out of the water for the winter - a six man operation that took them over an hour to accomplish and involved the realization that their truck was too small.

We checked the pot - a couple starfish and a female dungeness that we threw back.  We went to an early lunch at the local pizza joint and checked again - more starfish!  REALLY big sunburst starfish, all purple and yellow and slimy with thousands of tentacles trying to get my chicken out of the pot! Carter and Dylan thought this was the greatest catch in the world, letting the little suction tentacles wrap around their fingers before we threw the starfish back into the water.

One last soak while we went home and worked on the garden for a bit, then Carter and I went back out to pull the crab pot.  At the end of the dock, Carter got into a conversation with an older gentleman who was also pulling his pots, using his loud four-year-old voice, I could distinctly hear his 1/2 of the conversation as I pulled up a pot of starfish with a last female dungeness.
"We probably only have starfish in our pot, did you catch anything?"
"No, we aren't that good at crabbing, but we like catching starfish."
"Well, my brother is at home sleeping, so he will probably be sad to miss the starfish, but I think he will be OK"
After Carter helped me throw back our unfortunate catch, the older guy came over with a bucket and asked if we wanted his red rock crabs - he had caught four plus some dungeness and "thought Carter needed to bring something home to his brother"

Crab identification Link:   Washington Crab Identification

So after a day of poking around with a crab pot, we came home with four red rock crabs, the other other crab of puget sound!

We got home and boiled all four in a nice large pot, then Carter and I sat and ate one together.  Dylan even tried a bite, pretty brave for a two-year-old!

After the kids went to bed, I processed the rest of the crabs getting out all the meat.  The legs don't have much meat on the red rock crabs, but I am stubborn and still got all everything out.  Crab shells and guts went to the compost bin.  More food for the worms?  Will they eat crab shells?  To be determined...

With company coming over the next day, I looked up a crab salad recipe - this definitely worked and was a hit with everybody!
Crab Green Salad with Avacado
Ingredients:

·         2 cups cooked cooled crab meat, flaked

·         1 cup diced celery

·         1/4 cup chopped green or red bell pepper

·         1 teaspoon salt, or to taste

·         1/4 teaspoon pepper

·         1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice

·         3 tablespoons mayonnaise

·         mixed salad greens

·         6 avocado wedges, optional

Preparation:

Mix crab meat with diced celery, chopped bell pepper, salt, pepper, lemon juice, and mayonnaise. Serve over mixed greens with a slice of avocado, if desired.

Till next crab season!

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