Sunday, October 3, 2010

Dangerous dinner and a fuller freezer



Today was setting the clock-back day... I like it being light at 7.30 but it has been a long one with the power of this morning, with repairs on the electricity system. We had a quieter weather day yesterday to get some much needed restocking of the freezer in.

We've now got 22 2-people feeds of fish in freezer - including 3 high-risk ones - Gurnard Perch, related to stone-fish. --

They're the ones with the big eyes. No deaths recorded from Tassie - you just might wish you were. The flesh is apparently good though. Need to figure how to best fillet them - might just cut the spines.

We also minced enought big wrasse for 34 days of kitty food. And we have some days of chopped roo for the hounds in the freezer too. A good day can set you forward nicely, but the processing is qute a lot of work. Tired now. More tomorrow - the island wedding etc.

3 comments:

  1. Looks like quite a load. Fishing will be less harrowing, I'm sure, as the weather warms. What's with Big Eyes? Spines a problem?

    We went a less adventuresome gathering expedition today. Picnic lunch and Pecan picking. They've just burst the husks and are still in the tree, so we picked low hanging fruit (a definition depending on which of us was picking!). After pulling off the husks we had 6.6 pounds of nuts. Not bad for a few hours.

    Next week they'll start falling. Then you have rake them on a tarp and sort through the litter. Oof.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Spines a huge problem - and it's dorsal, anal and according to the book 'ventral' Exceptionally painful - to the point of possibly lethal. I'm always happier with lots of food stored.

    I ENVY your Pecans. one of my top 3 nuts, and the best for cooking IMO.

    ReplyDelete
  3. My aunt and uncle in Houston had a yard full of pecan trees. They had a nifty tool for gathering - a large steel spring curved into a semi-stretched C shape at the bottom end of a three-foot handle. Walk around the yard, see a pecan, push the spring-basket down against it. The nut pushes two adjacent spring-wires apart and slips into the basket. After you have a dozen or so in the holder you raise it up and empty them out into a bag, and keep going. No leaf mold, no sore back.

    But planting pecans is a pretty long-term yield project. Fortunately they are a native tree here, and one can forage on street corners.

    ReplyDelete