Pictures of food

Often I think "This would be a good story for the blog" and then I forget to take pictures.

So instead of the stuff I've been doing lets take a look at what I've been eating. We're making an effort to eat less meat, really chicken, pork or beef. This has mostly taken the form of burritos.

The magic here is that they're super easy and can be made from just about anything. For purely vegetarian we'll grill some peppers and then warm up a can of beans with some taco seasoning. Start with a layer of rice. I usually use white rice, Angie tends to use a rice pilaf like from Goya. Then some beans, and the peppers. You might like onions with your peppers but they upset Angie's stomach.

A couple weeks ago the grocery store had tuna steaks on sale. I've ruined quite a few unsuspecting tuna steaks. The thing I've learned is to not overcook them. This one is done, you might not think its done but you're wrong. Cook it any more and its ruined.

Really good, big wraps are hard to find, if you've got a hispanic grocery near by they're your best bet. Fortunately our local grocery has good ones. Here I've added some Caesar salad which gives a nice flavor. I forgot to add salsa before I took the picture and had to go back later.

This is haddock with "Magic Fish" coating. Again pan fried but haddock wants to be cooked all the way through.

At home we steam the wraps before we assemble, this makes them slightly sticky which helps keep them rolled. At the great northern estate I grill them a little in a cast iron pan which seals them shut. I like the little amount of crunch they get when I do that.

I should note that this is also a good way to eat cheap, I bet we're only looking at maybe $2 per portion.

Fish day

We've got a farm pond. Its about an acre which means its maybe 100 yards long and about 30 yards wide, maybe half the size of a football field. My great uncles built the pond in the '60s by scooping out a bunch of dirt around a natural brook and piling that dirt up to make a dam. The dam has a pipe running through it that lets out excess water. The pipe is an L shape with the foot of the L through the bottom of the dam and the top of the L a few feet below the top of the dam. The pipe is the magic that makes this kind of a farm pond work, if you just let the water run over a spillway it will gradually eat away the spillway and the dam will fail. The other clever trick is that inside the dam wall there is (or at least was) a rubber barrier around the horizontal part of the pipe. This barrier kept water from leaking out around the pipe when the dam was new. Considering its been standing for 50+ years I'd consider it a good design.

Most farm ponds have fish in them, its a handy way to keep down the bugs and entertain the kids. The pond was last stocked in '95 or so after a copper sulfate spill upstream killed everything in the pond. We took over the farm in 2002 and sometime around 2005 somebody stole all our fish. I don't have a problem with somebody coming down and catching a fish occasionally but these people left baited hooks specifically to steal our fish.

Anyway dad and I figured enough time has passed that its time to stock again. To do that you need to get a permit from the state which dad finally got, then you take a ride to Frenchville.

The guy's operation is great, he's got several of these tanks half submerged in his yard. Up the hill there are some ponds too but we didn't go up to see them. The guy is one of those people thats always moving and busy so we didn't want to take up too much of his time.

We bought 50 6-8" brook trout which ran about $2 apiece. The process is pretty simple, he dips a net in the tank and counts 25 fish into a bucket of water, then comes the clever bit.

He dumps the bucket into a plastic bag, squeezes out the air and inflates the bag with pure oxygen. This hyper-oxygenates the water ensuring the fish survive the journey. Its about an hour ride from Caribou to Frenchville. The fish guy said the fish would be okay for up to 3 hours so I didn't hurry too much on our ride back but neither did I dawdle.

In retrospect I'd have brought a box to put the bags in but this bag didn't move an inch. The other bag rolled around the back of the truck some but the fish didn't seem to mind.

I ripped the bag open and submerged it in the pond. The fish didn't seem all that interested in coming out so I had to pour them out of the bag.

I put them in kind of a shaded spot under a cedar tree with another cedar laying in the pond. I'd talked about cutting the dead tree last year but now I'm glad I didn't. They congregated around for a minute and then went crazy eating the bugs on the surface of the water. Within about ten minutes they'd dispersed and over the next day we only occasionally saw them come to the surface to feed.

At first I'd thought that 50 fish seemed like a really big number but when you disperse them into a pond it seems like nothing. Dad says by the time we go back in October the fish will be 10 inches long or so. We won't pull any out this year, the winters are hard and we don't want to stress them so they'll have the best chance of spawning in the spring.

More challenges

I was all excited to post about week 9 of the 52 week Coleman challenge, then I realized I hadn't posted week 8, whoops.

Anyway, seems like a lot of people didn't like my green beans challenge so we got pork for week 8's challenge. Thats fine, a good excuse to pull out the Coleman oven again:



Then this week our challenge was fish. I was actually a little surprised how slow the entries were to come in. We got good variety on this one though. I tried to emulate one of my favorite fish dishes:



I think I posted about the Prepo on here when I brought it home. It didn't work then, its got a little bronze filter sock thing inside which was clogged, a quick soak in carb cleaner got it flowing again. It works okay now and actually runs better the more its used. The problem of course is that the fuel is no longer manufactured. I've got a half dozen cans and I've done some experiments with refilling them. It can be done but its not cheap. Fortunately I think this stove can be modified to use larger cans that other butane stoves use.