We Be Cookin' Up Dem Crabs!

Here's another 100% from scratch endeavor, and the results were literally knee-wobblingly good!  I awoke Ira today around 6am so we could catch the tide on its way out.  We headed to the public boat launch at the Intracoastal Waterway on the upper end of James Island.  We tried the good, old-fashioned chicken-neck-on-a-string method for a while, but aside from seeing some nice wildlife we were disappointed.  We felt several bites, but couldn't bring any to shore, mainly due to the rocky bottom there causing our lines to get stuck.  So, after a little rest we decided to head over to the fishing dock at the county park to catch the low tide turnaround.

We had to fight for a spot at the fishing dock.

It was a beautiful day!  Clear skies (enough to burn me pretty well), and high somewhere in the 80s.  The dock was crowded and became more crowded as the day went on, but we managed to stake out enough space to set out a couple of basket "traps".

View from the lower dock down the tidal creek.

The only sad thing was how SLOW it was in crab activity.  Even the more experienced people weren't bringing in many.  Before we had enough to fool with I had to take Ira home for lunch and he decided he didn't want to come back.  So, I continued on alone, determined to bring home enough to make a meal.  Finally, with some good catches of my own and the generosity of some people who had more than they needed I had about 20 decent sized crabs, as well as one random white shrimp.

Of course, the crabs were a huge hit with the kids.  They were fascinated with the entire process, which is a big part of my motivation for these adventures!

They look small, but they pinch hard, and they taste good!

We opted for steaming rather than boiling.

According to Adrienne, these crabs are "hot and mad".  They are only slightly redder than my neck after sitting in the sun waiting for them to accept my invitation to  dinner.

Then I quenched them in a spicy broth.

Lots of goodness in that icewater.

The butchering probably took me longer than the actual catching - at least that's what it felt like.  But in the end we had enough meat for quite a feast.

I pulled all the lump meat and most of the claw meat, but I left a few claws for the kids to crack open by themselves.

Now,  you know this wouldn't be blogworthy if that's all we were doing.  With so much crab meat, what can we do to really enjoy it to the fullest?  One of my earliest thoughts was to make crab cakes.  Crab cakes are relatively simple to make, but it's often frustrating to order them in a restaurant.  All too often you get a dry, bready cake that lacks in good crab flavor.  I knew I could do better.  As usual, my bread crumbs came from my own hands - I baked a nice loaf of bread while waiting for the tides to change in the mid morning.

Sage and thyme whole wheat bread, sliced and toasted, then pulsed in the food processor to make the crumbs.

All you really need to hold it together is some egg.  Mine came in the form of homemade mayonaise (really aioli): eggs, oil, salt, lemon juice, garlic, and in this case rosemary.

Bring out the Kennedy, and bring out the best!

While this simple combination provides plenty of flavor in natural harmony, I took it to the next level with a nice sherry-cream sauce.

Cooked down to a rich sauce this stuff is phenomenal.

Thanks to Jodi we had a nice salad to go along with everything.  It took me literally all day, but it was worth every second.  I spent some quality time with my oldest, delighted all three kids with live crabs in our tiny little apartment kitchen, and thrilled my wife with a meal that probably would have cost $20 a plate or more in a restaurant downtown.  I don't mean to boast (well, OK, maybe a little), but I think I could swing it as a chef if this physics thing doesn't work out!

Seriously good.  This is what weekends are like at our house (sometimes)!

Sometimes a zest for life leaves you with more zest but less life...

I've always been an adventurous person. Growing up I had very few fears, and in fact I used to seek out the fastest, highest, and otherwise most dangerous experiences as I'm sure many teen boys do. One aspect of that adventurousness that never really manifest until a bit later is in the realm of eating. I always thought it peculiar that my dad liked to taste things in the wild. He was never afraid to put unknown berries and leaves in his mouth, often remarking on the various qualities of each.  I didn't share his enthusiasm when I was younger.  In fact, when it came to food I was pretty much a steak and potatoes kind of guy...and I didn't even like the two to touch on my plate!

That all started to change when cooking became a hobby of mine a few years ago.  As you can tell from other posts, I'm all about adventurous cooking and eating now.  My kids think it's great when I eat ants or grasshoppers we find, and if it weren't for my eagerness to try seeds of unknown plants I may have never sampled bread from wild wheat.  However, this past weekend I had an experience that may have put a damper on my enthusiasm for wild and unknown foodstuffs.

Don't eat this mushroom!

A large, round, white mushroom grows in grassy areas all over South Carolina.  Now, mind you, I grew up with the folk wisdom that one should not eat strange fungi for fear of nasty repercussions.  However, I have sampled smaller mushrooms in the wild with no adverse effects.  While few mushrooms are both edible and delectable, only two genuses common to North America are genuinely harmful (I discovered this after the fact, and only after copious internet research in an effort to decide if I needed to go to the emergency room).  Well, it turns out that the particular mushroom I ate last friday probably belongs to the amanita genus, a family of fungi that all contain a particularly dangerous toxin that shuts cells down by inhibiting their ability to express certain genes, including those necessary for protein production and cellular metabolic processes.  In case you are wondering, the telltale feature is the closeness and whiteness of the gills (not really visible in this picture).

The really nefarious aspect of this mushroom is that it actually tastes very much like the common white mushrooms sold in the grocery store (by the way, don't invite me for dinner any time soon if you're including those mushrooms in your meal).  So, I can see how families in rural settings who are used to gathering their own food could get themselves into trouble.  The "death cap" mushroom, which is one member of this family, accounts for 50% of all mushroom poisoning deaths worldwide (according to wikipedia).  I believe the one I ate to be the "destroying angel" or something very close to it, and it did live up to its name.

Now, many of you reading this are thinking, "What kind of idiot is this guy?"  And, frankly, I had the same question about 6 hours later.  I woke up around midnight with the kind of rumbling in my stomach that almost prompted me to call the closest seismic monitoring post instead of the doctor.  I then spent the next two and a half hours with my new best friend, the toilet.  Though, I'm sure the toilet was confused as to the nature of our relationship since I repeatedly and quickly changed which of my ends was doing the talking.  The next day, that is today, was spent in general malaise with sporadic hot flashes and general light-headedness.  However, after consulting with the state's poison control hotline (who informed me that I was the THIRD such report this WEEK) I decided that unless I am yellow tomorrow morning from jaundice due to a liver failure I should be fine in the long run.  I ate less than two grams, which is less than one fifth of the average lethal dose for an adult male, and I'm in pretty good shape overall, so I think my body is going to handle it.

There are lots of life lessons to be drawn from this experience, but mostly I'm trying to laugh about it for now.  If you don't see another post to this blog within a month or so, you'll know what happened to me.

Baking bread from wild wheat growing in a vacant lot near our house

Last year I noticed that some of the grasses growing on the hills behind my in-laws' house were some sort of grain.  During our frequent walks along the trails we would stop and sample a few of them.  When the seeds were still green they were sweet and grassy, but as they dried some of them started looking more and more like wheat.  Soon I convinced myself that they were, in fact, some sort of wheat, and I decided to do some experimenting.

I don't know if this was once farmed, but I sincerely doubt it given the hilly terrain.  Apparently these grains thrive in this environment all by themselves.  Despite the for sale sign visible here, this lot has been vacant for at least twenty years, and probably since before anyone inhabited the Salt Lake valley.

The wheat closest to the sidewalk was the fullest, perhaps because it catches more of the rain runoff there.

We are moving from Utah soon, so this summer was my last chance.  Fortunately for me, the grain ripened fairly early and has been golden for at least a week now.  So, the kids and I went to work.  First, I harvested an armful of stalks from a vacant lot just up the street where the heads of grain were full and dry.  As it turned out, that was the easiest part of the process, even though my only tool was a pair of small gardening sheers.  

My harvest and harvesting tools.

Next, the kids and I set out to try to thresh the grain from the straw.  I have seen several different techniques on YouTube, but I wanted to do it without making too much of a mess in the yard, and I didn't have the proper tools to do it quickly, so we tried a few techniques.  The kids and I tried separating the grains by hand, but that was way too inefficient.  Next we separated the grain heads from the stalks and tried beating them with random objects inside a drum.  That worked, but again did not yield much for the effort.  Finally, I resorted to loading them a few handfuls at a time in the food processor, which yielded approximately 70-80% of the grains.

We tried a few different manual methods to extract the seeds, but ultimately it was too inefficient to continue.  It was, however, very satisfying to pop the little grains out of their husks!  The kids stayed entertained for a good 15 minutes....

I loaded a bunch of heavy, irregularly shaped objects in the barrel to try to thresh.

The beating was then accomplished by rolling the assembly down the hill.  The results, however, were poor.  Only about 10% or fewer of the grains were released by this method.

So, following a similar idea I found online I loaded the heads into the food processor with the plastic blade.  The results of that process are shown as they accumulate batch by batch in the bowl on the left.

Winnowing is the fun part, in my opinion.  We poured the grains and debris through the air stream produced by a box fan to blow off the chaff leaving only the grain (and a few sticks) behind.  The result was a lovely combination of sizes and colors, and smelled like grass and wheat at the same time.

If you don't have wind, make some.  Pouring the grain back and forth separated the wheat and chaff fairly well after only 5 or 6 passes.

The overall size is about the same, though the wild wheat is a bit thinner.  The color variation is amazing, though!  The final yield for the batch was just over one cup of grains.

We ground the wheat in our normal Mill-N-Mix grinder, and the resulting flour was doubled in volume from the wheat we started out with.  It was a grayer/whiter hue than the whole wheat flour we buy commercially or grind from commercial wheat, and it had a slightly tangy taste to it.  I blended the wild wheat flour with a little bit of store bought white flour to make sure it would rise, and I made my usual honey-wheat bread from flour, water, honey, and a bit of salt (using commercial, freeze-dried yeast).  It was awesome!

The 1 1/8 cup of grains produced over 2 cups of flour.  That's a higher volume increase than the commercial wheat, presumably because the original grain packing ratio is higher due to the smaller diameter grains.

Not only did it turn out as pretty as any other bread I make, but the taste and texture were phenomenal!