Saturday, February 28, 2009

SEAFOOD FESTIVAL - Day 1, Food cooked
by Robin

I didn't think I'd make my deadline of getting this part done today, but thank heavens for a roaster chicken sitting in the oven for an hour. My house smells delicious!!

Anyhow, I found out the seasoning mixture that Jack was using for the calamari & scallops. Louisiana products makes an all-natural Fish Fry packet. It was good, but you can make it yourself with basic corn flour and corn meal.

Here is the Salmon Florentine fresh off the grill. This was delicious fresh and just as good 2 days later with some microwaving. Yum. Use lime on top to give it that punch all seafood deserves.
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Here are the calamari rings. Because of these jokers, my parents went home, bought themselves a fryer machine and are making them for dinner tonight. These rings were much bigger than my dc were used to, so they didn't eat them. They were very fresh though and great when dipped in marinara warmed up slightly.
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Jack cooked the scallops until they were golden. Also scrumptious plain or topped with lime and cocktail sauce. Mom likes to add extra horseradish for her "kick". (Excuse me, my mouth is watering on the keyboard.)
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Here are the snow crab legs (first batch) that Jack pulled from the pot. The kids and I had our own pot while Jack and my parents had the other one. Super fresh. They almost didn't need any melted butter, lime juice & salt to dip in. Infact, my body told me later that night, they definitely didn't need anything. (Can you say Tums?)
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These are the Royal Red jumbo shrimp that we brought home for $6/pound. They look a little gunky because they were at the bottom of the pot, but trust me, the meat is white and delicious on the inside. They are bright red when frozen but then turn pink when cooked. They rival lobster!
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Here's a pic of the kids breaking into the seafood. Nobody else wanted to be on the blog.
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Actually, come to think of it, they didn't want to make the blog either. Naughty boys.
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All seafood dinners must be topped off by great cheesecake. I think that is some sort of Italian tradition, so we followed it. Sometimes we compromise with Jack's heritage and follow-up seafood with Key Lime Pie which was a Keys tradition since he is a native Keys boy.
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The only problem was figuring out which one of these we were going to choose. Oh my. Decisions, decisions. The best option we figured was to take slivers of multiple types and that way we could all sample them. Mostly, I just needed the chocolate ones.

Cheese is not in my regular diet, but I made concessions for this occasion and paid for it too (Renee).

Stay tuned for day 2. (Oh, we also had Rock Shrimp but didn't take pics.)
Happy Fishing and good eating!
Robin

1 comment:

Andy Rayner said...

Hi Robin
Enjoyed the pictures. Our Harbour is the number of Snow Crabbers on PEI. We don’t use huge boats like on the show “Deadliest Catch” in Alaska (Ever watch that? Can you get it down south?). Boats similar to ours with A Second deck on top. Anyway, have you ever eaten scallops raw? They have to be really fresh but good. We normally cook them the same as you do in the photo on this post I am replying to. However, 3 minutes in a pan with a little stirring – Does the trick.
Nice Whale pictures you have on the more recent posts. I have never gotten a photo (I don’t take a camera nor have time to do that on the boat much. Lynn did get a photo of a blue whale when we were dating many years back. While fishing mackerel last fall, Dad and I see a 65 foot whale breaching well over a dozen times. Not just the usual little splash. This guy was coming full body out of the water over 10 feet with his tail flapping back and forth in mid air. Not often we see something like that. Must run it’s late. I fell asleep at 9pm and woke up at 11:45 and realized my son (16) was still on the phone to a girl he keeps in touch with from Ontario. Oh yes - not impressed! Anyway, he is a sensible kid, but he called her back after 10 pm (with the time change it’s earlier there) when he knew that was a no-no. I run him to bed, But after laying there wide awake for 30 minutes I just had to get up as DW has to be up at 4:45 for work tomorrow as well, and I did not want to keep her awake again.
With some species closure I am sure you are frustrated. We have gone through that up here with COD. Anyway and it looks like EEL’s might be hit soon. The Water DAMS in the Saint Lawrence river are chopping up the elvers, and they want us to stop fishing them so they can repopulate. Ok with around 2000 dams and the turbines chopping out a mortality rate of 40-50% of the eels that pass through to go and spawn. Like where is the problem here?