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What Are You Eating Right Now!!!

shithawk420

Well-known member
Veteran
Oh man.how did you cook the veggies moose? Tempura batter with those veggies would of been perfect.probably be a little salty though.oh I want Japanese tempura shrimp and chicken now.you always make me hungry! I know I'm not the only one lol
 

moose eater

Well-known member
Oh man.how did you cook the veggies moose? Tempura batter with those veggies would of been perfect.probably be a little salty though.oh I want Japanese tempura shrimp and chicken now.you always make me hungry! I know I'm not the only one lol
Yep, tempura beer-batter onion rings, zucchini sticks, mushrooms, and more would ALL be very good (and decadent in re. to our prescribed diet).But we just deep-fried the fish and spuds, 'hawk. The rest of the items were in the salad that accompanied it all.

At the last minute my wife vetoed my garnet-red-yams-into-French-fries plan, and we French-fried some Alaska-grown red spuds again instead.

Just finished up, and it was pretty darned tasty, though I have to say that when it comes to making tartar sauce, the somewhat unique flavor of the avocado mayonnaise when it's a primary ingredient in a sauce like that, takes some getting used to.

I forgot to add that dessert came before the dinner. 2 small squares from an 8-square bar of Lindt 78% dark cocoa chocolate bar.
 
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Green Squall

Well-known member
I took a college class and have raised bees.never used a smoker or a suit.ya really just gotta feel them out.been thinking about getting back into it.its expensive as all hell but manuka honey is literally the bees knees
You should definitely get back into it. I mean even, even if it's just a hive or two. No different than a small scale cannabis cultivation hobby, in that you'll have a personal stash of honey and some to sell.

I hate to say it, but I prefer Crystals Honey, which is based out of New York, over the local stuff I find here. Whatever they're doing, they're doing it right!

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In other news, I bit into a date today, something I eat on a daily basis, and it turned out to be the former home of a worm. Lets just say the texture was a bit off lol. Fear not, though, it has not deterred me and I'll be back at it tomorrow, although with a bit more caution.
 

shithawk420

Well-known member
Veteran
Ya know, maybe I'm stoned but you guys could do vids on YouTube or something.thats some real awesome organic cooking right there.i would watch it and subscribe.

My friend and I were just talking about red snapper.i said unless I go out an catch it I don't know we're to even find it.i assume there's a fish market in Chicago but I don't really know.

Sorry to be off topic but there's a massacre going on in chicago.like 20 dead or something on loop and Lincoln park.crazy.i love Chicago but it's getting to be too much
 

shithawk420

Well-known member
Veteran
You should definitely get back into it. I mean even, even if it's just a hive or two. No different than a small scale cannabis cultivation hobby, in that you'll have a personal stash of honey and some to sell.

I hate to say it, but I prefer Crystals Honey, which is based out of New York, over the local stuff I find here. Whatever they're doing, they're doing it right!

------------

In other news, I bit into a date today, something I eat on a daily basis, and it turned out to be the former home of a worm. Lets just say the texture was a bit off lol. Fear not, though, it has not deterred me and I'll be back at it tomorrow, although with a bit more caution.
Yeah my buddy that we gifted an apiary about 15 years ago says he wants to get back in the game.im a bit rusty but I'll do it.still got knowledge up in the ole noggin.

Actually I'll tell you guys a secret.i don't really care except I want the royal jelly.i don't know how the hell to harvest it without being stung to death
 

moose eater

Well-known member
Organic just costs more money, 'hawk. Similar practices, other than for some things, especially natural medicines, sometimes watching to make sure heat doesn't get too high.

I'd be willing to bet Chicago has some awesome fish markets, but you'll likely pay more for the stuff that comes in from far away, such as oysters, saltwater fish, etc.

When we're picking a fish, unless it's halibut, which is mostly done for flavor and texture when deep-fried, I often choose fish that mature in a shorter period of time, as the fewer years spent in the water, the less chance of picking up excess or alarming levels of heavy metals. Lake trout and halibut (fresh water and salt water) are 2 examples of fish that take a long time to reach size-large, and during that time, they're contracting heavy metals from their environment.

The other criteria in our fish choice includes price and the amount of natural oils/omega 3's in the stuff; more is better for omega 3's, and less is preferable re. pricing, obviously.

It was Green Squall who posted last year or so about farmed tilapia having some issues with proteins; I can't recall but think there may have been an assertion of GMO or funky protein structure.
 

shithawk420

Well-known member
Veteran
Back in the day we used to get these awesome shark steak fillets for about $3 bucks a piece from an Asian store that's probably gone.best fish I ever had beside halibut.i was actually just a minute ago talking about halibut at a restaurant my uncle and I use to go.now I'm in one of the biggest agriculture places in probably the world.theres no way that halibut is fresh.and now I'm starting to think I shouldn't get the sushi the next town over! Lol
 

moose eater

Well-known member
Back in the day we used to get these awesome shark steak fillets for about $3 bucks a piece from an Asian store that's probably gone.best fish I ever had beside halibut.i was actually just a minute ago talking about halibut at a restaurant my uncle and I use to go.now I'm in one of the biggest agriculture places in probably the world.theres no way that halibut is fresh.and now I'm starting to think I shouldn't get the sushi the next town over! Lol
They can fly fresh halibut into anywhere they wish, but at the moment, fresh, not-previously-frozen halibut, up here, where we catch the buggers, is going for about $21 to $25/lb. in the store, and previously frozen giant red king crab, which is nowhere NEAR as 'giant' as they were in the later 1970s, is going for around $40 to $45/lb.

Between IFQ's, population growth and the related demand, poor fisheries management practices, and more, they're turning many species into menu items that you don't eat much of unless you catch the buggers yourself. :)
 

Green Squall

Well-known member
@moose eater I might have been talking about the Omega 6 to Omega 3 ratio in tilapia. I'm no expert here but its always been one of the fishes that I've avoided.

Stripers are finally migrating up this way again so I hope to have my pole in the water by the end of the month. I think schoolies are already around, but I'm only looking for keepers (28 inches.)
 

shithawk420

Well-known member
Veteran
I'm sure we have seen those nasty Asian tilapia farms.the water they live in is surely toxic to humans.wich sucks cause I like making fish tacos with tilapia.
 

moose eater

Well-known member
I can get king crab frozen for about $22 a lb moose.its not fresh but it does the job.damn now I wanna California roll.im pathetic lol
Had a snack of summer rolls this afternoon with my wife; veggies and shrimp/prawn in a classic spring roll wrapper.

I used to process king crab, almost 44 years ago, though the earlier part of 1bout 1980. Not uncommon for there to be major price differences between last year's 'fresh frozen' and this year's stock, though it's a poor example, as this year's salmon won't be in the stores for a month or so.

When I planted trees the summer of 1983-sh(?) in the Roosevelt Nat'l Forest near Red Feather Lakes, a bit north of Ft. Collins, Colorado, on my way down to see family in Az., we'd sometimes find ourselves on the way to work from camp in the mornings, in the back of the flat-bed work truck, surrounded by cattle and old-school-looking cowboys driving the cattle from one area of the Federal grazing turf to another, and I was blown away by how expensive beef was in Ft. Collins' groceries, while the Federal land around there was loaded with beef.

Sometimes the closer you get to a source, the more money it costs, like buying goods straight from the producer and typically paying nothing less than msrp. Makes no sense, really, but it's the way it works sometimes.
 

moose eater

Well-known member
@moose eater I might have been talking about the Omega 6 to Omega 3 ratio in tilapia. I'm no expert here but its always been one of the fishes that I've avoided.

Stripers are finally migrating up this way again so I hope to have my pole in the water by the end of the month. I think schoolies are already around, but I'm only looking for keepers (28 inches.)
Yes, that rings a bell now. After you wrote that, I recall doing some reading, and we had an unopened bag of frozen tilapia, maybe 4-5 lbs. from Costco, and I donated it to the local food bank.
 

shithawk420

Well-known member
Veteran
Oh yeah moose? I e seen those tins go up to like $40 or so.i gotta ask.how does it get processed?love to get some won tons and make crab rangoon.oh.now I think I see it.those crabs get pulverized. But I don't know how you could efficiently remove the shell and can it so fast.knowing you I'm sure there's a great story
 

moose eater

Well-known member
Oh yeah moose? I e seen those tins go up to like $40 or so.i gotta ask.how does it get processed?love to get some won tons and make crab rangoon.oh.now I think I see it.those crabs get pulverized. But I don't know how you could efficiently remove the shell and can it so fast.knowing you I'm sure there's a great story
Different crabs are processed differently, though there's some similarity between the snow crab/tanner crab and the king crabs. The snow crabs/tanner crab are smaller, so they don't require the large butchering stand that king crabs often used when I did that work.

The tank crews crawl into live tanks that look like really crude concrete swimming pools (We had six tanks in our plant if I recall correctly). The crew drains the water and gets into the tank with 3-4 ft. deep in crabs, x whatever area the tank takes up.

There are troughs overhead, just below head height or at head height, and the crew begins tossing the crabs up into the troughs that have H2O running through them on a slight down-slope angle, so the water takes the crabs down the trough into the next room.

Dungeness (shallow water bay crabs, similar to the blue bay crabs on the East Coast or Gulf of Mexico) are MUCH faster above water than king crabs, as they come from a pressure zone more similar to our atmosphere. King crabs move like someone slipped them several Quaaludes, as they come from WAY deep, and our atmospheric pressure is way heavy for them.

The Dungeness crabs are stacked whole and alive on their backs, packed inside heavy steel cooking cages (about 2-1/2 to 3 ft. tall and maybe 16 to 20 inches square) that are matched to double hooks on a chain to balance it out (by having 2 of the cages matched on a t-hanger on the chain), and they are dragged on a timed route though a cooking tank, then flash frozen in a brine tank where we would add sufficient salt to keep the H2O from freezing at -10 f.

Dungies (as we referred to them), being quite fast, relatively speaking, and still fairly strong for their size, were the most bizarre crabs to crawl into a full tank with while on LSD. Did that a couple times. YIKES!!

King crabs are sent down the trough in the stream of water, and the butcher on the other side of the wall has a metal stand at waist height and wears a Kevlar-like apron. The metal stand has a platform for the butcher to stand on, which also provides some counter-ballast, as the stand has an upright post, and a large, fairly dull blade on the top of the post, pointed toward where the butcher stands, looking similar to a large image of the arrowhead on the side of the Kansas City Chiefs' helmets.

The butcher spreads the legs (all 8 of them, crabs essentially being underwater spiders to some degree) with the back of the shell resting against the butcher's apron, and the belly of the crab against the 'blade' at the top of the post.

Using their abdomen, they press the apron and crab into the blade, the leg sections come off in either hand, and the shell is trapped between the blade and the apron, then tossed to the grinder bin to be processed as biodegradable waste and sent out to the bay via a long (grand-fathered) effluent.

The leg sections of either tanner/snow crab or king crab are then sent down a conveyor to the next team; typically, a couple under-paid hippies running gilling machines, where they grind all the gill from the pretty white structure at the top of the legs. The gilling machine operators pass the sections onto the folks packing cooking crates down the line, and they invert the legs sections and carefully pack the crates.

No dead crabs are permitted to be processed. If someone was in doubt, the standard procedure was to hold a crab about an inch or 2 off the concrete floor and drop the thing on its back. If it moved a mandible or leg, it was alive, if it didn't, it was dead, and tossed to the grinder.

King crabs can have what is called a tail, which is a squarish flap under their belly near their ass. Inside that shell of a flap is a crab tail, and on a decent size king crab, it's large enough to fill out a sandwich between a couple slices of the old classic Oro-Wheat Honey Wheat Berry bread. We used to be permitted to keep all the crab tails for ourselves, and we'd cook them in the crates at the end of the night. Once got SO f'ing tired of eating king crab that I was amazed a person could even get to such a point.

I can assure you, however, it's been many years since I was burned out on crab.

Some time I'll tell you about the party that neighbors had in Homer, Alaska in 1978 or 1979, after they returned from the Bering Sea and crabbing; they put on a crab feast that included crab fondue made with Dungeness crabs. HOLY SHIT, that stuff was OUT OF THIS WORLD!!
 
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shithawk420

Well-known member
Veteran
Ha ha! I knew you had a good story! On lsd? I'd freak out cause crabs remind me of spiders.im definitely gonna read that again.thats some rough work.even for me.ive seen Japanese people eat those spindly crabs or spider lobsters or whatever they are called alive and break their legs off.i guess it don't get fresher than that
 

armedoldhippy

Well-known member
Veteran
Back in the day we used to get these awesome shark steak fillets for about $3 bucks a piece from an Asian store that's probably gone.best fish I ever had beside halibut.
we used to go to Hatteras to fish. back then, it was difficult to fish from the piers without catching 3 to 4 ft long sharks. we had never eaten shark, but an old boy we gave one to opened our eyes. he cut it up into steaks there on the pier & gave us a couple of them. "grill 'em just like pork" the man said. WOW!
 

armedoldhippy

Well-known member
Veteran
farmers market re-opened for the season this morning. got some peaches & cream corn on the cob, a basket of tiny red taters, a cantaloupe that smells wonderful, and a huge green tomato. sliced the 'mater up & fried it, had eggs over easy, a fist full of bacon, and some really thick-cut multi-grain bread toasted & slathered with good butter. these strawberries are plumb ugly, but lots more flavor than the "pretty" ones we normally get stuck with. gonna have the corn, a pan of corn bread, and probably some fried red taters (mmmm, starches i aint supposed to eat :yummy:) and onions at supper. gotta remember to pick up some heavy cream to whip for the strawberries. cantaloupe will prob get the knife at breakfast in the morning...:headbange
 

moose eater

Well-known member
we used to go to Hatteras to fish. back then, it was difficult to fish from the piers without catching 3 to 4 ft long sharks. we had never eaten shark, but an old boy we gave one to opened our eyes. he cut it up into steaks there on the pier & gave us a couple of them. "grill 'em just like pork" the man said. WOW!
Shark meat should almost always e skinned immediately, or as close to immediately as possible. Soak the fillets or steaks in milk afterward, and then we've smoked, grilled, or fried them.

Salmon shark is fairly common up here, or used to be, can get fairly HUGE, and there used to be a charter or 3 out of Seward and Valdez that would target shark.
 

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