Foraging from the wild

We have had much success (and much failure) foraging from land and sea this summer. I thought I'd share a little bit of each.

Plants and Seaweed

Clockwise starting at the top right these are: seabeans (aka sea asparagus), fucus stems (aka bladderwrack), sea lettuce and focus pods.

CB and I had a ball foraging for these (while Tawn and Jason sat on the boat rolling their eyes). Using a book called Pacific Feast (thank you Bella Star), we cooked all of these up!

The seabeans got added to a quinoa salad (after blanching to get rid of some of the saltiness) - delicious!


The fucus stems got made into tea - not bad


The sea lettuce got dried and eaten - tasty!

And the fucus fronds got baked and cheese dusted, magically turning them into cheesy puffs! Surprisingly, not so tasty, though they kinda grew on us after trying them a few times (well, some of us).


So the lesson here is, if we were stranded on a NW island, we could definitely survive (assuming we had an oven and possibly some powdered cheese) - but we'd probably get pretty skinny.

Shellfish

We've had more luck with the shellfish, though it's been spotty (like the prawn - ha!). We've caught just enough crab to keep us dropping the traps. Same with prawns - although pulling up 300 feet of line by hand in the dinghy is beginning to wear on me when we get a catch like this


Especially when a dude in the SAME PRAWNING SPOT picks up 300/day (fortunately, he was very sweet and shared - I think his wife was getting sick of prawn).


We've also been collecting lots of oysters, mussels and clams as there hasn't been any red tide where we are.

Fried oysters...


Oysters on the half shell...


Clams were delicious, though we didn't end up cooking the geoducks - they just looked too disgusting


We figured those clams were negative calories as they were so small and it took digging about 13 holes before we'd get one.

Fish

We've been lucky enough to have someone that knows what the heck he's doing when it comes to fish - Kevin caught a ton of rock fish, ling cod, red snapper and halibut. Not to mention salmon - oh, he got so much salmon. I caught a whopping 2 - these were my contribution:


We've had fish every way you can possibly think of it. On the bbq, in the oven, with feta, on a stick, smoked - you name it (though not as sushi since apparently you have to freeze salmon to -37F to kill the tapeworms. I'll take my salmon sushi in a restaurant thankyouverymuch).

Some of the smoked salmon we made - not only does Kevin know how to catch fish, he comes with a powerboat, and a smoker. Yum.


Can we live off the land and the sea? Well, sort of, but Jason's VERY glad to be back in port so he can have a hamburger.