Fumigator!

One of the great things about Ucluelet...no, the greatest thing, is the fish. Though it is hard to see initially, Ukee is about fish the same way Tofino is about surfing. One way or another, the fish in the sea (and the lake, river, and creek) drive this town. Even if you aren't excited about eating fish (such as my friend Dean), there is a lot of fun to be had looking at fish...the mini-aquarium, the fish plants, the boats, or even just staring off the dock or bridge.
Me, I love fish. I love eating fish, I love looking at fish. I love catching fish. I even love communing with fish...I can hang out all day staring at fish in an aquarium or during a dive. And my job involves fish...counting, identifying, sampling...fish!
When we moved here, we went looking for a fish store. That is what one does in every other place I have lived. We couldn't find a fish store in Ucluelet (there is one, but it is only open seasonally, and it isn't really all that great.) and we went more than a month trying to figure out how one goes about getting a halibut or salmon or rockfish without going out and catching one yourself. Lacking, as we did, any fishing gear or a boat, catching our own was a bit of a stretch.
But, as we got to know people around here, fish started to flow our way. The most glorious, fresh, lovely fish ever. And since we cannot eat fish as fast as it flowed, our freezer started to fill. Halibut, Sockeye, Spring salmon (what they call King salmon in Alaska), Yelloweye, Quillback, Sablefish, Albacore Tuna...it goes on. That's what is in my freezer now, along with some spot prawns. And now freezer space is becoming an issue, even with two freezers! And it is compounding, now that I have got back to trout fishing in my spare time...

And that got me thinking. About smoking. Smoking fish. When my father lived in Ottawa, we used to go to this fish place in the Byward Market. They sold this amazing smoked trout...rainbow, brown, cutthroat, and Golden trout (looks like a trout-shaped goldfish). They also had arctic char, but I never got to try that. But I remember loving it. Big treat. Not to mention that lox is impossible to find around here...though salmon candy and heavily smoked salmon is pretty prevalent. As I was doing all this thinking and dreaming, there was a defunct hot water heater in the driveway, waiting to be taken to the (tiny, on the border of a national park) landfill. The more I looked at it, the more it looked like a smoker. Until one day I knocked the cover and all the insulative foam off of it (big job! took all day!). Then it really really looked like a smoker.

Another couple of weeks went by until I mustered up the courage to take a recip saw to it...a la van (long story)...and clean it out. The next thing was smoke.

Going online, I found that making smoke comes in two main flavours (ha ha)...the one that appealed to me was using an electric element to make heat, and burning chips. The lovely assistant offered up her old electric steam cooker, and I pulled it apart to find the perfect little cast element in the middle. A quick test fire on the hearth confirmed it got hot enough to make smoke, so I rigged up a tomato juice can and an old stainless travel mug as a smoke injector. After attaching it, I filled 'er with maple chips, and fired it up! Yay! smoke! Only the unit started to look a little weird. As I was moving in for a closer look, the aluminum casting around the element sagged and splashed onto the pavement. Wow! I took a photo as it burst into flame, and I decided that I was happy it wasn't making steamed broccoli anymore.
Unfortunately, even after cleaning the remaining aluminum off the unit, I wasn't able to make it work. So I went to internet plan B, which involved spending money (damn.)

I went to a Pet Smart and bought a nineteen dollar aquarium aerator. After looking at photos and videos of products such as the Smoke Daddy and the Smoke Bullet, I fashioned my tomato juice travel mug smoke injector using a small bucket, a lid, a cheap pizza tray, and some plastic tubing...and liberal amounts of silicone RTV gasket maker.

Today I am using the smoker (which we have dubbed either the Fumarole or the Fumigator, I'm not sure which...I might paint it green with teeth) for the very first time....there is salmon, ling cod, and sable fish in there. It is a cold smoker, and the temp probe hasn't gone above 17* C since I started the operation 4 hours ago. I can use it as a hot smoker simply by putting a heat source (which I would rig up with a Johnson 419 temperature controller) in the tank, and still using aquarium injected tomato mug fume injector 2010! Next post...smoked fish taste tests!

An old post, reposted

I used to blog on MySpace. Interestingly, I wrote about the beach that I now live near. Below is an excerpt from that blog that still rings true to me...

Beach revel-a-thon Current mood:  awake If you read my post below, you know I went north to the beachiest beach in bc. Normally when I go to long beach (it should really be called log beach) ....(section removed for brevity)... This time I was there on BC Day Weekend, when not only are the tourists out in force, but so are the locals. It was actually hard to find parking at the beach. That was distressing, since I usually get an entire lot to myself...but I worried less about break ins. It's not like there is anything valuable in my van, but around about 1990 CHEK TV ran a news article on my kind of van (there are tons of them here) thatshowed you how to break into them!!  Well, since then owners of Yoda Vans get smartasses breaking our doorlocks just for kicks. I swear I'm gonna retrofit the damn thing with Mercedes locks one of these days...I digress. I have never seen that many people at that beach. You have to understand that long beach has a very slight gradient to it, so when the tide is out, the beach is massive. Like a plain of sand. And on this oversized soccer pitch there were clusters of people. Most obvious were the globs of surfers with their rental wetsuits and soft top longboards. Two kinds, there...gaggles of girls on a surf school adventure, sometimes with a few lanky emo boys in tow. They decorate their cars and play hopscotch or volleyball on the beach. The other kind is groups of redneck hockey boys who have, for a brief moment, forayed into the world of waves and home grown spirituality. The only part of it they get is the home-grown, and they sit in circles smoking in their wetsuits. None of them really surf. There are also locals and real surfers surfing, but they are in the water, not on the beach. They look at the posers and head straight for the water. Thus they become part of the water culture and the parking lot culture, but really regard the beach as an obstacle between themselves and the waves. On a busy day at Pacific Rim National Park Reserve, thousands of tourists that are NOT surfing or bodyboarding show up. Most of them in bathing suits even though they do not enter the water past their ankles. Knees if they are brave, though they laugh and point at kooks like me swimming without a wetsuit. But there was something that I realized when I was there. Beaches are for kids. Adults who are adults and have embraced being an adult do not belong on the beach. Watching kids on the beach is like seeing your pets with a box. Somehow, they can eke every fun part out naturally...running full tilt with a stick dragging it in the sand. Sitting in the shallow waves and ducking each one. Sand constructions and drip castles. Forts. Even skimboarding. Kids absolutely belong on the beach, and it speaks to the most elemental part of them. Unless an adult has a specific activity that requires the beach, they really have no idea how to enjoy themselves. What I saw on the beach really divided the beach-going adults into three types. (Yeah, I love classification...I should have gone into taxonomy or cladistics) The local adults we can lump and dismiss...they see the beach everyday, and to them it is a resource. Generally they are on their daily walk, or bike, or using the beach as a way to get home/work. They are cruising, and barely have time to favour you with a smile. Generally recognizable by deep tans, dogs, and a well-used look to their clothes (but not scruffy!) The next group is tourists who have travelled a really long way to be here...Germans, Japanese, Italians, Koreans, Chinese, or Mexican tourists. They feel the need to exploit the beach, and are DOING something...trying to fly a kite, making human pyramids (truly funny to watch), beachcombing, taking panoramic mosaic shots of the beach, videotaping, whatever. They are generally in family groups or tour groups, and they are happy and behaving like....well, like kids. They are there to be on the beach....they chose to go to the beach instead of the botanical garden or the golf course. The last group are the ones that kill me. They are the short-haul tourists. They drove here from their home. The vast majority are from Vancouver and Victoria or even from Alberta and Washington State. They have driven hours and hours with this destination in mind. They said "let's go to Long Beach," and packed their minivan or SUV or BMW with stuff, and made the long highway trip to the beach. THIS beach. And when they arrive, with their hotel booked and their park pass paid, they seem to expect something. They march out onto the beach, and survey the land...usually they will remark on how beautiful it is, followed by a complaint about the number of people. If it is deserted..."there are no people! Where is everybody??!?" If it has anyone on it, there are too many. They take a picture that they will later delete off their camera when they discover how boring a picture it is. Then they are at a total loss. They simply cannot let that kid part loose to enjoy the new environment. Not wanting to abandon their comfortable car (it is subconcious, they would bristle if you were to suggest it) they stray very little down the miles-long-beach. They walk in circles and kick the sand. Then they sit for ten minutes before they realize the sand is bothering them by blowing in their eyes and it really isn't as warm as they thought it would be. And then they leave. I have to admit I often arrive at the beach as an adult. It sometimes takes me a good half hour to relax and begin to see the possibilities. I think the parents who sit on the beach have the luxury of living vicariously through their children, as they build towers out of crab shells or make collapsing water channels. I suppose many of the adults who have little connection with the silly in themselves populate the resorts, where adult-oriented activities of fine dining, drinking, and cultivated appreciation of natural pulchritude are force-fed into their systems so that they can relax enough to have sex. Is that the cynicism in me speaking? Or am I jealous? Personally, I like the dusty grimy gritty camping expedition where the bulk of your cash goes to gas, and the natural pulchritude is free. Adventure manufactures itself for the adventurous. The food is dusty and requires little preparation. The drinking involves throwing odd things in the fire. And if there is sex to be had it is spontaneous and filled with discomfort like mosquitos and sharp rocks. Or cold. Hey, sorry. Did I say I was an adult back there? Yeah, I am prejudiced...and these fucking mosquito bites itch like hell.

Poaching

When I travel, I tend to do it on the cheap. As a result I am pretty familiar with the street foods and grocery chain foods of many countries. Now that I've "settled" all those fancy continental equipment intensive dishes mock me with their luscious simplicity (did I contradict myself there?) from the satin pages of my (many) cookbooks.

The other day I walked to the local Co-Op to buy milk and some cookies for Stacey. As I passed through the veggie section a display of Bosc pears caught my eye. I vowed then and there to master the intimidating Poached Pear.

First I googled poached pears. Hundreds of wonderful pictures assailed me, so I stopped for an hour to admire them all. Well, the first few hundred. I looked at some recipes as well, and it seemed pretty simple. All the recipes made it seem as if making this show stopper of a dish (to me) would only take 18.345 minutes.

Because I liked the color of the really red poached pears, I decided to use red wine.

Here is where I started...a bottle of screw-top Malbec/Shiraz blend that a guest brought us and four firm Australian Bosc pears.

Then I went to our prodigious spice shelf to look for additional flavourings. Perusing the spices and making a blend in my head is my favourite part of cooking. I grabbed a bunch of likely looking things with a sort of a purple theme. 

I really like cooking with flowers because most people regard them as an ornament rather than a foodstuff. One of the flowers we have in abundance in our home is lavender. I even have a huge jug of disastrous lavender wine in the fridge. I decided that Lavender Poached Pears had a nice ring to it and grabbed the jar of purple even though warning bells were ringing in my head. I also got some orange peel and star anise. I looked for my vanilla bean but it has gone missing.

Armed with my flavours, I scratched out a recipe. Here it is as first penned:

4 Bosc Pears
3 cups red wine
1 tsp lavender flowers
1 tsp granulated orange peel
1 star crumbled star anise
1.5 cups sugar
add water to cover pears

I chose the pan/pot with the lowest volume but highest sides so that the pears would fit but the liquid would cover the pears. I put the pot on med-low (4) and added the wine, sugar, and spices. As it heated up I started to peel pears. I used a tupperware potato peeler (my wife came with a complete tupperware accessory set) but if the pears had been any softer than they were I would have had to use something sharper. It went pretty well, and I tried to collect any dripping juice into the pot. The wine mixture was getting warm so I lowered the pears into the pot with a slotted spoon...unusually prudent for me. I'm a pretty messy cook.

I managed to fit all four pears into the pot. I guess in my irrational mind I expected them to stand up, but they all fell on their sides. I poured water from the kettle to cover them, but they just floated. In my earlier poached pear research session I had seen a way to keep the pears covered in liquid using parchment paper (great stuff, I always keep some around). I cut a pan-sized donut of parchment and it kept the pears basted beautifully.
I waited until the pears were simmering lightly, and sat down to read a manga. I meant only to read a few pages, but I got really sucked into this incredibly formulaic story about a kid who can shape metal with his bare hands. Not a great read but it still ate time. Thankfully, those pears take a lot longer than just 18.xxx minutes to cook and when I finally finished reading Metallica Metalluca they were tender enough to push a small knife through but still firm enough to hold their shape. Way to go me!
I was a little disappointed with the colour...I was hoping for the deepest darkest red like the photos on the web. These were a delicate orange-purple. But a nice shade for something with lavender in the name!

























I left them on the plate to cool while I strained the liquid and started to reduce it to a nice syrup. I bumped it up to a soft boil and tasted it. Something was missing...fruitiness maybe. I looked around and saw a decrepit old grapefruit. I juiced it and added the juice to the mixture along with a splash of vanilla extract.

Then I stirred and stirred and stirred. Then I got bored and went back to the computer. I started reading about the capital of Mayotte, which is called Mamoudzou when I heard a hissing sound. I ran back to the stove to find syrupy mess boiling all over the unit and a burning sugary smoke cloud curling toward the skylight.

At least sugary messes clean up easily with boiling water.

I transferred to the other unit as the messy side was cooling. Then, drawing on my practice from making marmalades in the winter, I stirred the mixture while watching the temp on a candy thermometer. When it was approaching 250* F I whisked it off the stove and left it to cool.
Unfortunately, with such a vigorous boil a lot of the aromatics were vapourized. I grabbed a lemon and squeezed half of it into the syrup. Then I zested half of it for some decoration.  After cooling the syrup I coated one of the pears and spooned a bit onto a plate. Setting the pear on the syrup, I then added some lemon zest and the green leaf is a bit of Italian parsley for decoration.

Then I called my lovely wife to the table for a taste test. We snapped some more pictures of it before digging in.

The taste was better than I had hoped. At first it seemed as if the lavender would overwhelm all the other tastes, but after that boil the flowery resin was knocked back to a hint of floral zest. The harshness of the reduced wine worked well with the grapefruit, anise, and the lemon and zest worked well too.

It must have been good because we polished it off in about 90 seconds!

I regard this as a bit of a success, and I want to try poaching the pears in stout next. I also have a huge stock of apple ciders, quince wine, and plum wine. I'm gonna need more pears!

Or how about root beer or cola poached pears? I'd need to water it down...

The other three pears are now in the fridge living in the syrup. I'm going to see how they chill, and I may consider putting up (canning) some pears in this fashion so that I can enjoy them in the depths of winter. What shall I attempt next?

Low Tide Part 2

Another fun example of the low tide. This trawler was moored at the hake plant. Usually the hull or at least the deck can be seen, but in this pic all you can see is the flybridge.

By the time I got downtown (a whole two blocks from where this started!) my flip flops had dried out enough for my feet to stay on them. Onward to Big Beach! It was only just past seven in the morning, and although the sun was shining hot and bright, no-one was around but me. By the time I'd walked to Cynamocka I was stripped down to just tshirt and shorts. 

This is my first summer living in Ucluelet, but the salmon berries seem late. These were the first ones I'd noticed. Maybe the birds are getting to them before me. 

The pic below is how it looked at Big Beach upon arrival. It's hard to see, but quite a bit more shore was exposed...those two rocks in the center of the picture have been pretty much obscured by waves on other visits.

Correction; other visit. This is actually only the second time at Big Beach. For me. The last time I was here with Stacey after the opening of Ucluelet's new community hall. This was the first real visit where I could explore to my brain's content. I started scanning the beach as soon as I got there...the tide was starting to come in...o no.

First I found this:

Actually, I am ashamed to say I have no idea what it is. I believe it to be animal, not vegetable. But it could be a coralline algae for all my knowledge. Hopefully someone will pipe up in the comments and direct me to the appropriate web article.  And there was a LOT of seaweeds to look at. Phycology is not my strong point, but   I know the common names for some of them. The funky nubbly bit of red and white is Turkish towel seaweed. This piece is a bit...dead. The red stuff (rotophyll?) is being bleached out. My mother always got excited when we found this stuff on Pender, and that excitement lingers even though it's as common as nails around here.

The one on the right is hard to identify as well. It doesn't look like any of the Laminaria species I know. My guess is some type of Alaria  but those usually have a prominent centre stalk. I'm sure it's pretty common around this area...it gets wrapped around salmon and stuffed with lemons. Then the whole package is wrapped in foil and steamed. Yummm! This specimen looks a little discoloured for that kind of treatment. Most of the seaweeds or algaes around here are edible. It is surprising that nobody is collecting and promoting this abundant and free source of food. Maybe it will have to be me......?



Believe it or not, the wacky patterns on the rock are seaweed as well. Apparently these growths (as well as the tar spot looking things on the rocks) are part of the life cycle of the leafy seaweeds. It wasn't until DNA analysis was done on seaweed that anyone discovered this. Evidently the life cycle of these plants is crazy complex. The company that Stacey works for retains an army of people that know about this stuff, and they use surveys of marine algae to determine the relative environmental health of habitats. I tend to associate biodiversity with biohealth...which makes this area very healthy!


On Hornby Island much of the rock is sandstone, and the wind and waves have hollowed out little holes and pockmarks. The rock around here seems to be largely volcanic (igneous, is that right?) but also has lots of little holes and pocks. Some of the holes are really deep (longer than my fingers) and spaced pretty far apart. I wonder if these have been worn in the rock as well, or are they part and parcel of how the rock was formed? Escaping gas bubbles? A combination of the two?
The cool thing is that the rocks themselves are almost like colony animals...

These pockmarks are almost too perfect. I have no idea how they were formed. I'm sticking to my bubble/foamy rock theory...

The limpets and barnacles sure love these rocks. I assume there must be microscopic algae all over the rock for them to eat...the limpets, anyway. Barnacles are filter-feeders....they wave their back legs in the water to gather floating bits of detritus. Which is a fancy way of saying they eat floating garbage. Mmmm. I've no idea what the feathery algae on the top of the rock is, but there is some Ulva  near the bottom. I even see a little red shore crab peeking out from the bottom. It seems to me one could spend a lifetime studying just one rock like this!










The seaweed on the left is common around here. It's called Dead Man's Finger (Halosaccion).  Limpets and snails eat the stuff, and kids love to squeeze it to make it squirt. After all that talk about salmon and seaweed, one has to wonder if stuffing these babies with crab meat or halibut might be nice....? I shouldn't blog on an empty stomach. Everything looks like food.

The stuff on the right that looks like deformed dead man's finger is actually called Sea Cauliflower. There are two seaweeds that are very similar both known as Sea Cauliflower. I think this one is Colpomenia peregrina. The other one (Leathisia sp. ) is slimier and softer.


This stuff on the left is some kind of Sargassum, which I think is a recent arrival to our shores. A lecture in 1996 pointed this out as an invasive species, but it's pretty ubiquitous now. It grows into massive clumps which break loose in storms. When cut loose it grows pretty fast and those clumps can become sargassum islands! Almost.

There was tons of eelgrass like green spaghetti. There are no eels in eelgrass, it just looks long. Maybe they call it surfgrass here, even though there are no surfers in it. It sure looked pretty, though.

The pink glop in the next pic was in a narrow crack in the rock. I think the camera flash did a good job here. I'm pretty sure this is some kind of tunicate colony. The other encrusting animal around here is Bryozoans, and they don't have siphons (the part that looks like little volcanos). Tunicates are sort of cool because they are a link between animals without backbones (invertebrates) and brave animals with backbones (us.) Tunicates have a notochord (pre-backbone) when they are developing, but they absorb it as they mature. I have noticed this same trait in aging men :-)

Below is a tiny teeny leather star (Dermisterias imbricata). It looks like a magic wand above my finger. They eat sea anemones and sea cucumbers.

This green shore crab made a nice shot with the reflecting water. He could see me taking the picture even 6 feet away.

As I got closer to the water, there was less to see. From diving in similar areas I knew that there would be tons of cool little animals living underneath the masses of seaweed. But the sun was hot, and digging in the seaweed to expose them didn't seem like a great idea. Besides which, balancing on the EXTREMELY slippery rocks in my flip flops was starting to make my feet hurt. And while I was lucky to get a day with almost no surf to speak of....the tide was beginning to come in rather quickly.

The whole place looked like a clear-cut forest. Only instead of being hauled away to become toilet paper and sundecks, it was just lying down for a rest. Until the surf came back to animate everything. I guess this would qualify as an eclipse for all the little sculpins, crabs, lumpsuckers, and anemones. I hope it also protected them from my weighty steps.

The wide shots are from my iPhone and stitched together with a great little app called Autostitch. In default mode it can get a little blurred, but panoramas in the future should look better.

I had so much fun poking about in the shallows. And best of all, this was just the first of three days of low tides.

I really wanted to show the fallen forest to Stacey (asleep in bed) the next day.

The panorama below shows 180* with the Black Rock Resort in the right hand third. I will go back and take a panorama at high tide so that you can see what a difference 10 or 12 feet can make.

Low Tide

A few days ago were the lowest tides of the year! Well, I'm not sure of that, but they were the lowest tides for this summer.
I love low tide. As a kid living in the Gulf Islands my mother used to let me skip school to explore the low tides together. We'd go down to Boat Nook or Thieves Bay and crawl on the exposed rocks. It was always a big event if we found a gumboot chiton or even exposed purple starfish.
This year's tides were pretty early in the morning, but they fell on a Saturday, Sunday, and Monday.
On Saturday morning my wife was too sleepy to come with me, so I scooted on my flip-flops and grabbed the camera. We live just a block from Ucluelet Harbour and I wanted to get a chance to walk under the abandoned fish plant at the end of the road. The tide was super low! All sorts of hidden underwater hazards were exposed, making the usually smooth water of the harbour seem positively dangerous. It was possible to walk within about 4 feet of the floating dock where it's dredged for extra depth. The term "walk" is euphemistic here, as what I really did was pick my way down on the incredibly soft (yet sharp) hash of rocks, shells, mud, and glass whilst trying to keep my feet from sliding off my wet el cheapo flip-flops. This footwear was giving me serious doubts. Buried clams were squirting water in the air as my weight disturbed them.

The other unused fish plant looked like the daddy of all long legs on those stilts. The pilings have to be really long so that the big hake boats can offload, but seeing them high and dry is sort of scary.
This bad boy (actually, I think they might be hermaphroditic) with the mohawk is a mossy chiton (Mopalia muscosa) looking a little bedraggled. It is another species you don't usually get to see unless you strap a big aluminum cylinder to your back. There were also tons of all sorts of starfish...sunstars in a big gloopy mess, bat-stars peeling off the pilings, one blood star in the water, and of course lots of purple sea stars. This one is a special ninja throwing shuriken sea star.

Also present was a Pink sea star (Pisaster brevispinus, bottom image) that was almost like zombie flesh.

There isn't a whole lot of stuff in a habitat like this. It was time to get a look at some other tidal areas.

The banner photo at the beginning of this blog is a panorama shot taken from in front of the Ucluelet Aquarium about 10 minutes after the lowest point of the tide. My low tide adventure was just beginning, though...there will be part 2 in the next post.