Off Beet

Some beautiful fresh beets from Aprilla farms via the Cape Ann Farmer's Market. Can't abide beets... just kidding.

Readers may recall my basic formula for vegan dumpling fillings is a green, a mushroom, a root, and an allium. In this case, baby bok choy (also from Aprilla farms, reconstituted dried abalone mushrooms, shredded beets, and scallions.

The filling is parcooked just enough to wilt so it folds easy. Here's a bunch of dumplings, mine and my sister-in-law protege... can you tell which is which? Most folded as gyotze, with a couple of demo shumai there in the foreground.

Here they are cooked, crisp on the bottom and chewy on the top, with a soy/sugar/vinegar/garlic/ginger/scallion/sesame dipping sauce. they looked awesome, with the beets marbelizing the translucent wrappers. And when you bit them, they looked a little like meat. But they weren't, so you could eat a million of them, steaming hot and dripping sauce over your plate. Pass me another couple.

PYO Lobster and A Modest Proposal.

My first and as of this writing only lobster taken on snorkel. I caught this in about 12 feet of water, at low tide in Rockport. Totally worth buying the permit to have this memory. Here's the lobster, next to the guage -- you can check it yourself with photoshop, if you've a mind.

The lobster dished up proper with black bean sauce, since I had some baby bok choy from Aprilla farms, at the Farmer's Market. I didn't (ie, never) work from a recipe, but I've seen this dish and experimented a million times (up to and including cutting up the lobster before you cook it. Don't. The meat adheres to the shell, and it's a mess to eat). It's a pretty direct process for me now. And I used black beans from scratch -- not a prepared sauce.

Were you inclined to do it yourself: Steam whole lobster. Cool, clean, and crack all joints on all appendages. Set aside, keep such contents of the shell as you'd enjoy adding to the sauce later. Saute crushed garlic and ginger with soaked fermented black beans. Add broth, greens, whole lobster, a little broth with corn starch, tune sweet and salt with palm sugar syrup and soy sauce. Look at that baby... I think a shout out to Dennis Liu is due here, who took me to my first asian grocery in C-town back in the day.

Finding lobsters is not hard; find legally sized lobsters is very difficult because they are under so much pressure, between pots and divers, that they get taken the moment they molt and become big enough to gauge. Of they few lobsters I've taken on SCUBA (less than a dozen since I was certified in '88) most of them were barely legal, and soft (ie, recently molted, and I got to them first).

As much fun as catching lobsters on SCUBA can be, I don't think the environment can sustain it. Plus, divers can dig and move rocks -- you'll do anything in the heat of the moment to bring up a trophy -- in a way more disruptive than traps. To say nothing of recreational poachers, that lowest of life forms, who should be used as bait. Live bait. In chunks. I grew up friendly with a lobstering family in Hull, summers back in the 70's, and it was common knowledge that anyone fiddling with traps could expect -- and soundly deserved -- a peppering with birdshot.

I propose diving for bugs be banned and replaced with the following compromise: Divers may take lobsters only on snorkel, and in return, there will be shallow water diver sanctuaries with no lobster pots, so the take will be better in the free diver's limited range. Or maybe no sanctuaries, but give the free divers a slightly shorter limit, like 3" instead of 3 1/4" and only males, something to give them an edge. Because it's hard to hold your breath that long.

Halfshells On The Halfshell, or Neck With Me

I made sushi for my sister in law, and, well, thank goodness Intershell is open until six.

Anyway, the topnecks -- or countnecks -- whatever necks, they looked beautiful, and called to me from the ice, like the oysters in Alice. Opened cleanly, not a tough one in the batch, and I caught every drop of liquor in the scallop shell. Served cold with my world famous chili/lime/palm sugar/fish sauce and a dab of seaweed salad.

I hadn't had these in ages and they were just ... perfect. It consummates the relationship with the seashore like swimming. You go in the sea, you put some of the sea in you. I never got the hang of oysters, but these were fresh, crisp, salty, icy cold... I see another stop at Inteshell in my future.

Banana PBJ: Hit Me!

Chicken wings aren't the only thing that make me hear funky baselines. This sandwich was specifically constructed to be high calorie -- and yummy -- for a day I skipped breakfast and had a lot to do. Thick sandwich bread, chunky peanut-only peanut butter, a thick schmear of brand name strawberry jam, and sliced bananas, baby, wrapped tightly in saran for at least a half hour to get some integrity. But where I love PBJ's that have sat around all night, that's not so friendly with bananas, and this sandwich has a shelf life of only a couple hours.

Nice Cleavage!

Man, I was waiting to use that line...

I built a 'croc walk' for my kids' summer camp, using discarded lobstering rope and a couple of four by fours. I needed multiple easy, clean cuts and the cleaver is just the way to go. And more fun, too.

Line up your cut and whack! through the bottom strands. You have to think your cut what supports the object, and end with a crack to get every strand. Perfect cuts: clean, neat, doesn't disturb the lay of adjacent rope. The rest of the rope doesn't even know it happened.

That there cleaver is Onibocho. Well, one of the two knives I call Onibocho. When I finally get that big-ass gyoto from Shinichi Watanabe, that will be the new Onibocho.

Polly's Law (or Whitefish Spread)

Quick breakfast for guests when I wanted to balance getting out the door with having something nice. Quick run to Market Basket produced a chunk of Acme whitefish, flaked into a bowl, and thrown on an unset table with two ciabattas (freshest loaf at MB at the moment), a tub of cream cheese, a pickle plate (two kinds of olives, dill pickles, pepperonci) and a bagel fixin's plate (sliced purple onion, tomato, chopped dill pickles (poor man's capers; essential), carrots for border and color, and fresh minced scallions mixed into room temperature cream cheese. Get your own plate and silver and enjoy.

And you know, looking this over in contrast to the phrase 'getting out the door quick' and I'm thinking, this is what you do when you want to get out the door quick? Give me a break. Admittedly, for guests, but still...

I carpooled with Polly for a year, and we're still friends, and she'll read this. Polly was late more than once because of a breakfast that got out of hand on my part, and I'm sure saw similar behavior in preparing snacks and god knows what else. Thus Polly's law, and I quote her: 'Never let Michael near food.'

Vindaloo Dipping Sauce

Easy. Take a spoonful of vindaloo curry from a jar, mix well with an equal amount of olive oil, and serve with a good crusty bread. In this case, it's a whole wheat, paper thin pita from a bakery in worcester, also at the Indian market. But frankly, my preferred tipple for dipping will always be a crusty baguette.