Ann's Blog
Falmouth Harbour, Antigua:
April 9, 2011
Catches of the day: From the
sublime to the ridiculous
It had been almost a two-month drought: We hadn’t caught a fish – or even got a bite –since the barracuda our friend Skip had reeled in when he and Tricia spent a week onboard with us in February. But we finally heard the line whirring off one of our two reels earlier this week, on our sail from Les Iles des Saintes to Deshaies, Guadeloupe. When Steve had the fish reeled in almost to our transom, we could see it was some sort of tuna, and I began running the checklist.…
Sushi rice, in the locker under the forepeak berth; seaweed sheets (nori), sushi vinegar, and wasabi, in the galley dry locker; pickled ginger, in the cupboard over the stove; bamboo rolling mat, in the drawer above the fridge. We were ready for business.
Once it was safely on the gaff and in the cockpit (making quite the mess on our transom in the process), we could check it against our fish ID book: It was a blackfin tuna, “an excellent food fish….Commonly hooked by offshore anglers in…the West Indies.” (For those who are interested in such things, the book is Gar Goodson’s Fishes of the Atlantic Coast, first published by Stanford University Press in 1976, and we use it for ID when we catch a fish because it includes info on edibility.) Get the rice cooking.
It became eminently clear that night why a Japanese sushi chef undergoes 10 years of training. But our ragged tekkamaki rolls and imperfect nigiri still tasted great.
The next evening, Steve dredged fat pieces of the fish in my cocoa-and-chile spice rub (the recipe is in The Spice Necklace), and seared it rare – and it tasted even better than the sushi. Yeah, it’s a cliché, but the silken fish melted in our mouths like butter.
That tuna was the “sublime” in the title of this post. The “ridiculous” came when I was defrosting my fridge, a once-every-three weeks (or so) chore. At the same time as I was carefully prying/chipping/melting the ice off the cold plate and mopping up the water from the bottom of the freezer compartment, Steve was cleaning the two fridge filters, which catch sand, bits of seaweed and grasses, and other sediment drawn in with the seawater that circulates through the system.
This time, however, there was a thumbnail-sized crab swimming inside the fine filter. Best guess is that he came through the coarser filter (whose holes are still only a couple of millimeters) as a just-hatched young’un in his larval stage, and set up housekeeping in the finer one. He had been happily growing in Filterville since the last cleaning. We tipped him into the sea and invited him to come back when he was a big boy ready for dinner. Ours.
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Hi Ann and Steve!
I absolutely LOVED The Spice Necklace and am thoroughly enjoying An Embarrassment of Mangoes right now. I mentioned it on my blog here:
http://guerillachefhq.blogspot.com/
I love to cook and love exploring new foods. Thank you for your writing. It’s almost like being there. I hope to see these places you write about one day.
Best wishes!
Kevan
Hi Ann and Steve,
Congratulations on a magnificent fish. Your sushi looks fabulous!
Hi,
Just finished “The Spice Necklace”- we’ve been to most of those places so it was a fabulous trip back in time. Good to see we visited some of the same interesting sights. We will be heading back to the Grenadines in Nov. Looking forward to An Embarassment of Mangoes.