Cape Native

Smelt on a Full Hunger Moon

The full moon rose out of the ocean fat and bright. Its light touched the top of a low cloud, transforming it into a bed of sparkling fresh snow in the the silent sky. February's full moon is traditionally known as the Hunger Moon, when winter stashes have withered, but we were feeling quite flush. 

Our stores of shiitake mushrooms, squash, garlic, herbs and hops are holding strong, though the onions went for an early sprout last month. Our frozen veggies, fruits, chickens, ducks, venison, fish and cheese are still plentiful, the garden continues to produce carrots and the chickens lay some eggs when they're in the  mood. We're pretty lucky to center our diet around homegrown food. Last night we enjoyed the next best thing to do-it-yourself sustenance.

A friend returned from his Maine camp with smelt "caught yesterday." A sampling confirmed their freshness. As most old Cape Codders know, there is a huge difference between "caught this week" and "caught today." Fishermen get to eat the best fish, as nothing compares to fish eaten shortly after being caught, and they always taste better when you catch them yourself. Smelt, however, are hardly available for sportfishing on the Cape. So a friend or good fish market is your next-best-bet. 

I wrote about smelt back here, but I had to bring them up again, because they were just so fresh and delicious. Tony tossed them in flour, dipped them in egg, dusted them with flour again and then deep fried them. Served with some homemade cocktail and tartar sauces, they flew off the plates. They're also tasty pan-seared in olive oil with capers, parsley and lemon, the way we cook snapper blues.

While there were once good numbers of smelt in local estuaries, the winter past-time of hanging lanterns off a skiff and dip-netting smelt is but a faded memory. There are a small number of ponds that were stocked with these silvery fish years ago, and I've potted slender smelt in minnow traps in one of those ponds. (No, I'm not naming names.)

A late-winter run of fish is fun, but smelt in Massachusetts have seen better days. Storm-water inputs, creeks dammed up and cut off, and declining water quality in spawning grounds have all-but-eradicated smelt runs on the Cape. Once-strong runs in places like Quincy and Hingham Bays have dwindled.

I'm tempted to entice my sporty sister in Maine to secure a smelt shack for one wintry weekend, as fisheries management seems to think the runs up north can handle us dipping a meal or two out of the stream. As if we can leave the menagerie. In the meanwhile, we'll be looking forward to our own runs of tinker mackerel and silversides; tailor blues and spawning squid; and, of course, spring stripers. Which reminds me, did you hear about all the over-wintered keepers around this year? There is that fisherman's adage, "Early to bed, early to rise, fish like hell and make up lies." Then again, you never know...

Orleans - Medical Waste an Unwelcome Holiday Surprise

At approximately 1:30 pm on Monday, a pedestrian traveling west on West Road near Old Colony Way and the Cape Cod Rail Trail discovered 9 bottles of Colo-Screen Developer. The containers were labeled "For in vitro diagnostic use" and carried warnings about dangerous fumes and skin irritation. As a dutiful collector of litter, the walker put the capped bottles in her pocket and brought them home for disposal.

While this may sound like the opener to a Robin Cook medical thriller, like Outbreak or Contagion, it was only the beginning of my irritating mission to track down the source - one that is still bothering me as I write this now. My friend, the pedestrian, showed me her find, and I mentioned it might have come from the C-Lab at the end of Old Colony Road closest to West Road. I suggested she bring it over and ask. She had to run to work, so I volunteered to stop into the lab.She put the bottles in a plastic bag upon my request.

I held up the bag to the woman working the desk at the lab and asked, "Is this something you use here?" She didn't know and got up to find a phlebotomist. Two women in white coats came down the hall looking curious and shook their heads "no" when they looked at the bag. "Do you think this is a biohazard?" I asked. "They are leaking very slightly in this bag." One of them remarked that they could be if swabs had been dipped in them. I asked if they could dispose of it with their biohazardous stuff and they said they couldn't "just dispose of anything" and that the fire department wouldn't want them throwing away flammable material. Good point, but now what was I going to do with them? The receptionist suggested I take them to the fire department. Someone presented me with a nice, big biohazard bag with a zip-top and suggested I ask at the doctor's office upstairs.

I held up the clear biohazard bag with the little plastic bag of bottles inside to the receptionists at the family practice upstairs. "Is this something you use?" The three women behind the counter nodded and agreed, "Yes, all the time." Bingo! "Someone found these right down the street on West Road," I added. The first woman looked blank, and the woman behind her shook her head and said, "Those wouldn't be ours, we order ours from a company that delivers medical supplies." I stopped myself from inquiring if she thought these particular bottles of colo-screen developer fell from the sky. "Well, they were found right at the end of this road, so it seems likely they had something to do with this office, unless a delivery person was maybe going to lunch at Skaket Beach and lost them...," I offered, benevolently. The woman in the back shook her head again. "No, those aren't ours, ours don't come in those bags." Good gracious. I told her the bag was from C-Lab downstairs, someone asked me again where they were from and if I had been on a walk. I was still holding the bag up and starting to feel like the straight guy in a who's-on-first kind of skit. Then the lady in the back insisted, "Ours don't come in those little bags." Ah, the sandwich baggy. "No, ma'am, they were loose on the ground. I transported them here in this sandwich bag. I just want to know if you can dispose of this or do I need to take it to the fire station or something." They took the bag and off I went, not exactly breathing a sigh of relief.

I drove up West Road, didn't see any garbage and went home. I thought about it, sort of irritated that no one seemed to be very concerned about biohazardous medical waste littering the road along the bike path. Wouldn't you want to know where along the stream of deliveries and pick-ups this spill occured? If it was lost on the way in you'd have a missing box. If it was lost on the way out you'd have to wonder what other kinds of waste were tossed on the roadside. Maybe someone was diverting biohazard bags thinking they could score some sharps, aka needles. The whole thing sort of bothered me. I wondered if there were numbers on the bottles that would allow one to track it to the medical facility it came from. Then again, it's a developer, not a Vacutainer of blood.

I called the fire department, mostly because I didn't have time to walk the road and look for more waste, even if I had wanted to. The person on the business line asked some questions about what exactly was found, where it was found, and what I did with it. I explained that I had some concern there might be more stuff on the roadside. I didn't mention any of my other concerns. She told me she'd pass the information along to the EMT coordinator (or some such title) and maybe he could go look around and see if there was anything else on the road. I thanked her and said goodbye, then washed my hands a few more times and decided to stop wondering about it. It's a disgusting tale, to be sure, but we don't make this stuff up.

A striped bass gut check

   photo by Tony Stetzko

Life takes guts. When things are running smoothly we're busy all day, but when something goes wonky, it's all we can do to keep heads above water. Things were wonky all summer. My number one farmhand and partner, surf-fishing legend Tony Stetzko, broke his left wrist in May, just as the striper fishing was starting to turn on. It might have been a more entertaining story if a giant striper tried to pull his hand off, but he wiped out while playing mini-basketball with his toddler on our slick deck.

I found him sitting outside, holding his wrist to a frozen bag of peas. I'm not sure if his clear face was a sign of stoicism or shock, but when I saw the arm I felt my stomach flip. "I think I broke it," he said. "That's the wrong shape," I replied. Several hours, x-rays, a large needle and a "Chinese finger trap" later, he was home sporting a solid cast from his knuckles to halfway up his humerus. This was no laughing matter; he was sentenced to at least eight weeks off from fishing and the likelihood of a lifetime of arthritis. I, in turn, inherited all the farm and household chores, the heavy lifting, and cutting and splitting six cords of wood for our winter's heat. You can bet I got out of that last one. The pace and weight of all the other stuff took a quick 10-pounds off me, replaced with more muscles and cheerfulness. Tony spent the summer testing his limits and feeling the pain.

Tony's hospital x-rays revealed a number of healed fractures previously unknown to him - a testament to his toughness and a reminder that when he casually suggests he might have broken something he probably has. This is particularly useful information for me, given that I am raising a little one with a similar disposition. They are also hard to keep still. After a few painful weeks, Tony was either markedly improved or just used to the pain, and he began fishing, selecting a seven-foot St. Croix that he could cast with one hand. He reeled by cranking the rod instead of the handle. "So, what's going to happen when you hook a really big fish?" I inquired when I found out what he was doing. "I'll keep the drag tight and walk back up the beach and pull it in," he said. Tony knows how to work a fish in with the surf, and it was a good plan for landing bass in a pinch. He wasn't able to fish as often or as aggressively as he usually does, but his usual is out-of-the-box intense. He fished a lot by normal standards and hooked plenty of beautiful stripers. The jury's still out on the impact of this plan on his cranking arm.

Fishing for striped bass in the surf requires a degree of intestinal fortitude. The action close to shore is often best at night, so while most folks are settling into bed, we are pulling on waders, airing-down tires and setting off for long stretches of uninhabited beach. This kind of angling is usually solitary. We rely on knowledge of the shoreline and tides, the smell of bait, the feel of the lure in the current as it navigates the contours of underwater structure, and a healthy amount of gut-feeling. Fishing back in the estuaries and creeks provides the rain-like sound of fleeing bait fish and the great splashes and intermittent sucking sounds of feeding bass, as well as pot-holes filled with thigh-deep mud and steep drop-offs into silent water.

On the ocean shore, bars appear at low-water that afford the angler a chance to venture out to cast into deeper pockets and bowls, but darkness and a single-minded obsession with hits and follows allows the tide to sneak behind and around the surf-caster, bringing swift currents and making retreat to high-ground treacherous.  Coyotes, foxes, deer and even humans come by, but when you're out a ways on a moonless night the only calling card you're left is footprints in the sand where there weren't any before.

A most unwelcome visitor is a heavy fog that obliterates all sense of direction and distance. Even the most practiced surf-fishermen can find themselves second-guessing the route to the buggy or the way off the beach. In deep fog you can follow the shoreline, the surf reminding you of which way is wet, and walk right past your ride. Ten feet feels like fifty, even as a couple hundred feels like ten. Once in your vehicle you have to keep the dunes, or the poles, to your right or left depending on which way you came in and hope you don't go over a cliff into the surf.

For every mildly gut-wrenching moment, there are handfuls of peaceful, starry, solitary nights when I feel as though I am standing in the footsteps of thousands of years of Cape Cod anglers. Bridging the gap between a solid footing on ancestral fishing spots and the undulating mystery of the sea is a subtle matter of feel. The more tuned in you are, the better the fishing gets.

As we rest our rods and heal whatever's broken for another season of striper fishing, I thought you might enjoy a little gallery of guts. We take a very small percentage of stripers landed for food - the rest are quickly released to go and get bigger. Those taken are swiftly dispatched by priest (the whacker used to deliver a blow to the head that relieves the fish from gasping for water and suffocating on the beach. A baseball bat will suffice. Learn to use it.) Once home I put the fish on ice overnight and fillet it the next day. I always check the guts, and I can't imagine not slicing open the stomach to get an inside look at what the fish was feeding on. Postmortem analysis tends to shed light on why the fish hit the dropper instead of the plug or why it wanted the Mambo minnow or the Stetzko needlefish. At the same time, it is important to remember that fish will hit something totally different from what they are dialed in to. A nice big, black eel swimming through a silvery sand-eel bait ball might be just what the menu was lacking for a big savvy bass. With that in mind, a gut check is not to be missed. We've found sand dollars, rocks, whole mackerel, crabs, piles of fresh sand eels, and sometimes absolutely nothing. Here are a few photos of this past season's guts.

   crabs, softshell at this point; this fish hit a green medium Stetzko Mr. Wiggly

   some blueback herring; this fish hit a chartreuse Clouser minnow dropper

   quite digested tinker mackerel; this fish hit an olive Mambo minnow plug

   big meal of small sand eels; caught on a white Lefty's Deceiver dropper

   sand eels, silversides, and one small needlefish; this fish was caught on a black and purple Bomber

Venison dans la rue

A friend witnessed an accident and called me just after nine on Friday night. Within 15 minutes I was on the side of the road looking into the buck's glassy eye and wondering if he was really dead. His only injury seemed to be a four-inch scrape on the top of his right hindquarter. A nudge failed to yield a muscle tremor or eyelid blink so into the vehicle he went. As I drove home, the thought returned that he might come roaring to life in the back of the Suburban and cause a second accident. My grip tightened when he shifted in the tarp on a turn. When I got home he was still dead, and I sharpened the knives.

On the first cut there was a "woosh" and an eye-watering scent escaped. It was a smell I will never forget: dark, fermented, and overpowering. Opening the abdominal cavity revealed leaves, grass, and cranberries - the contents of the rumen. I've slaughtered enough to know this matter should be contained in one membrane or another. I was heartened to discover that the translucent bladder was intact. We removed it without rupture, unsure of how much difference it would make given the damage encountered.  We sorted out the gutting as best we could and carefully washed the interior.

After drying the cavity we dragged the deer to a locust tree where I threw a hammer with a tied-on length of rope over a large branch. Tony hoisted the deer, his healing wrist protesting, while I hung on the free end of the rope, and we lifted it incrementally. With its head and front legs off the ground it refused to go any higher. We pulled the end of the rope together, but our combined 330-pounds did not provide an inch of lift, so we looped the rope around my trailer hitch and I drove the deer into the air. I worried that the coyotes could jump up and grab a hind leg, so I gave it an extra pull, engaged the parking brake and let it hang high in the cool air overnight.

With daytime high temperatures forecast in the 50s, I decided to skin and quarter the deer and let the meat age in the climate controlled environment of one of our extra refrigerators. I'm glad I addressed it sooner rather than later. As a stiff wind turned the deer in circles, I cut the hide around the neck and down to the chest to meet the incision we made during field dressing. A hacksaw made quick work of sawing off the back legs above the tarsal gland, where the buck sported black patches. I took the front legs off at the knee joint with a sharp knife. Then I cut the hide up the insides of the legs, just like skinning a coyote or an otter. I returned to the neck and quickly sliced the coat away from the meat.

When I had pulled the heavy hide down to the vicinity of the prized backstraps, I saw evidence of hemorrhaging, which made sense.  What made less sense were the giant holes in the carcass that I ran into as I got down into prime backstrap territory and the coating of rumen contents that wrapped around the back of the deer and covered the tops of both hind-quarters. There were chewed up holly leaves, cedar sprigs and twigs stuffed down into the rumps like a chef had gone wild. Bones were broken and the meat was split as if with a heavy cleaver. The scent of the rumen and its green contents came back for an encore.

I carefully and completely excluded meat that was even in the same county as the blasted stomach stuff. I took the two undamaged front legs for ground or stew meat, about three-quarters (14-inches) of one backstrap and a four-inch piece of the other, stew meat from the neck and also from the one lower hindquarter portion that was unaffected by the crash. I was going to make a little antler mount, as opposed to the more laborious European skull mount, but the vehicular impact broke part of the skull, loosening one antler. I rested the head in the fork of a maple tree and will address it before it gets rank. The hide is folded in a secure tub, awaiting future tanning, and the carcass went deep in the ground in a remote location.

 The accident wasted a great deal of meat from a deer I knew something about, but we salvaged what we could and look forward to some excellent eating. This blessing was timed perfectly. Just an hour before I received the call I was debating pulling our last vacuum-sealed package of venison stew meat from the freezer to augment our Thanksgiving feast of  local turkey and home-butchered chicken and ducks. More importantly, everyone we know seems to be suffering from an unseasonable onslaught of deer tick bites. With one of our household's potential deer hunters on doxycycline for a couple of nasty tick bites and the other recovering from the same, neither of us are particularly keen on getting into a ground blind in these Cape Cod woods anytime soon. The buck I unwrapped was so infested with deer ticks I wondered how it had enough blood left to run across a road, and it served as a reminder of a whole host of tick-born maladies that are statistically rare but have afflicted a significant number of people we know. We're holding out for a cold shotgun deer season or, if Jack Frost refuses to cooperate soon, some icy muzzle-loader hunting.  For now, our gift of a seven-point buck is received with deepest gratitude and respect. I wish the same for whatever you grace your table with this Thanksgiving.

Our secret crop

I have a secret crop in my garden. Let's keep this between you and me and not mention anything to those black helicopters. It's starting to become lush - and fragrant - and it's slowly getting bigger. I devoted most of a manure- and worm-casting-fertilized raised bed to it, but I threw in a couple of beefsteak tomatoes to disguise it. I'm starting to get excited about a harvest I didn't think was in the cards, and I'm already planning how I can dry it and vacuum seal it and make a nice stash for the coming year.

This growing experiment started last summer, when I happened upon a plant by sheer luck. But my interest in the herb was piqued some ten years ago when I hung around in Boston's Chinatown. Okay, I wasn't really hanging around. I was shopping for groceries. After bringing my then-toddler daughter to the Museum of Science for classes, I would pop into Chinatown to pick up yard-long beans, big bags of rice, rice paper wrappers, dried shrimp and mushrooms, peanut oil, every kind of sauce we could think of and maybe a big nasty durian fruit for chuckles. We came home loaded with Asian foodstuffs, cutlery and steamer baskets. And, so, the Asian cookbook collection grew in response to our unbridled shopping.

I ran into a clever recipe in Anita Loh-Yien Lau's excellent little book Asian Greens. It was an Asian pesto featuring peanuts instead of pine nuts and a cilantro- and mint-flavored herb called "rau ram" in place of basil. Helping us on our search were the descriptions in the index of Asian vegetables. It was a narrow green leaf, "ribbed with a purple hue."  I put it on my list and hit a Super 88 on the outskirts of Chinatown. I found one purple and green herb in the back of the store where the vegetables were kept, but the placard was in an Asian script and the leaf was decidedly heart-shaped rather than narrow. The closest Super 88 workers were seated on some empty crates nearby and I tried to ask them about rau ram, holding out the bunches of purple-green herb. One woman laughed when I inquired and launched into relating what seemed to be an incredibly funny story to her co-worker. After a hearty guffaw was had by both, the joke-teller waved her hand at me and retreated to the employees-only warehouse. Her co-worker looked at the herb, furrowed her brow and nodded, "Mhmm, rau ram."

By this time my daughter was halfway through a bag of dried cuttlefish, and we gathered our wares and checked out. The pesto turned out delicious, but I soon discovered the rau ram we bought was no such thing. I compared our purchase with internet photos of the real deal and realized we were way off. Our leaves were green on top with purple undersides and had serrated edges. They tasted more like licorice than cilantro-mint. Rau ram leaves were small, tapered and shiny green. I have a batch of Vietnamese cilantro, or rau ram, growing in an herb bed now, and it boasts a strong, musky flavor that I can only describe as what Yves Saint Laurent's Opium perfume would taste like if you sprayed it in your mouth.

What we bought was perilla, or Korean sesame plant, or ggaennip.  The minty licorice flavor was unforgettable, and though I ceased shopping in Chinatown as my daughter grew out of those long car trips, I periodically thought about that great, accidental pesto. Flash forward a decade to last summer and taking my toddler son on a little stroll around the community garden at Orleans' Sea Call Farm. What to my wondering eyes did appear, but a perilla plant in full leafy glory! It was not in a private plot, but nestled amongst rosemary and lavender in a little herb garden. I tasted a leaf and he tasted one too, and I wondered who planted it, why and how.

Late last fall we returned to the community garden, looking for fallen apples and pears. The plots were barren, but that little perilla was still there, dry and stiff with its little seed-loaded flowers hardened and crisp. I glanced around guiltily and snapped off a couple of stalks. Even dead as a doornail it still smelled delicious. I tucked the dried flowers in a paper bag and forgot about them for the winter. Then, in late spring, I discovered the bag and enlisted my 3-year-old son to help me plant the tiny, round seeds in flats. We rattled the bag and shook the seeds from their berths, then tried very hard to only plant a couple per cell. We watered them and put them in a sunny place, rotating the tray and putting them outside on nice days to prevent legginess, a difficult task without firing up the grow-lights on the seed-starting table.

I was thrilled when they sprouted and tickled when they stayed squat. When one pair, then another, of true leaves appeared, I was truly hopeful, and I continued to baby them until I could safely plant them in the garden. Now they are lovely, though their growth is very slow. I hope they will develop enough by fall to provide us with seeds for another batch next summer. I'm also patiently waiting for the plants to get big enough to allow for harvesting the leaves so I can put together a batch of pesto and maybe gather some leaves to dry for the winter. I'm thinking roasted, home-butchered chicken with garlic, perilla and ginger, or maybe a warming winter tea of lemon balm and perilla.

If you happen run across this fragrant herb in an Asian grocery, or know someone who grows perilla in the community garden or their own backyard, here is a nice little pesto that is tremendous over freshly caught bluefish or as a dressing for soba noodles.

Adapted from Anita Loh-Yien Lau's Asian Pesto from her cookbook Asian Greens:

Juice of one lime

1 cup Thai basil leaves

3 cups perilla leaves, lightly packed

1/2 cup toasted, unsalted peanuts, ground

1 small chili pepper, seeded and chopped

3 big cloves garlic, minced

1 tsp ginger root, minced

1/3 cup vegetable or peanut oil

Mix together all the ingredients and heat in a saucepan. Bring to a boil and simmer for 3 minutes. Chill before using.