Overabundance, though, as we all know, is the mother of invention. Our hoophouse is bursting with radishes and arugula, and I managed to make a salad with them that is actually very good. The sweetness in the dressing balances the bite of the greens and the radishes, and the whole thing goes beautifully with a grilled fish or maybe a pork loin. Perhaps the strongest argument for it is that Kevin, who isn’t a big fan of salad (“this is the food my food eats”), eats as much as I put in front of him.

I’m guessing you may have some arugula and radishes too, it being arugula and radish season, so you might want to try it.

Arugula Salad with Orange Vinaigrette
(serves 2)

5 cups arugula, roughly chopped
4-6 radishes, sliced
1 oz. goat cheese, crumbled (or some shaved Parmesan, which Kevin prefers)

For the dressing:

1/3 c. fresh-squeezed orange juice (I strain the pulp, but you don’t have to)
1/3 c. olive oil
2 T. cider vinegar
2 T. maple syrup
salt to taste

Combine dressing ingredients in a jar and shake like the dickens to emulsify. Pour the amount you like over the salad (the recipe makes much more than most of us would want, but dressing is a personal thing).

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She’s got four more eggs to go (one broke), and we have yet to see whether she can teach them life’s basics, like eating, drinking, and avoiding being crushed by a well-meaning but clumsy mother surrogate.  But we have a poult.

We have a poult.

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We’ve got four overwintered collard plants that are ready for their Little Shop of Horrors audition. Every day, they send up seed heads in what I am trying to make a vain effort to reproduce. To that end, every day I go out there with my kitchen shears and cut off the seed heads. So far, the plants haven’t gotten bitter or woody, and I treat the seed head stalks like broccoli raab.

Feed me, Seymour!

But I know this is a battle I’m destined to lose, if not to the collards themselves then to the slugs who, unlike Kevin and me, seem more than happy to live on an all-collard diet. Before it’s too late, I have to harvest the leaves. Once I harvest them, they have to be washed, chopped, blanched, and frozen.

It is a job I dread, largely because washing greens is probably my single least favorite kitchen chore. I don’t know why I dislike it – there are a zillion jobs that are just as tedious or messy that I don’t mind at all. I’ll sit there all day taking crab meat out of crab bodies with a nutpick, but give me a lettuce to wash and I absolutely, positively, have a prior engagement.

That's a lot of collards

So you can understand that a bushel of collard greens is enough to chill my very soul.

Last night, over dinner, Kevin and I were talking about how to tackle them, and my first idea was to put them in the bathtub. Kevin thought that wasn’t much of a labor-savor, and might be a turn-off to anyone who’s ever seen our bathtub. And then he said, offhandedly, “Why don’t you just do them in the washing machine?”

The washing machine! Genius! Because what is a washing machine if not a salad spinner, writ large?

I went out with my kitchen shears. I cut a bushel of leaves. I ran the washing machine empty, once, to get rid of any residual soap, and then put in my load of collards.

And I checked the dial. There’s Permanent Press, there’s Regular, there’s Whites, but there’s no Leafy Greens cycle. Delicates seemed to come closest. Compared to, say, arugula, collards aren’t delicate at all, but compared to the frilly lacy things that I gave up long ago in favor of underwear that wears well and doesn’t show the dirt, collards are delicate indeed.

Delicates it would have to be, in cold water. I closed the door, turned the dial, and started her up.

Half an hour later, I had a bushel of clean collards!

I can’t say it worked perfectly. The greens got pretty bruised, but that doesn’t matter much for greens that you’re going to blanch and freeze anyway – don’t try this with that arugula. (At least there was no ring around the collards!)  The only other problem is that it left a lot of bits of green in the washer. I left the door open for a while so they would dry, and cleaning the washing machine wasn’t nearly as bad as cleaning the collards themselves.

Kevin thinks we can get it to work better if we just do a rinse and a spin, rather than an entire wash cycle. I think he’s probably right, but I have no idea how to make our washing machine do that. Even so, I will definitely use this method again, either for collards or kale.

Kevin and I may be walking around with little flecks of green, or maybe of slug, on our clothes for a while, but that seems a small price to pay for anything that gets me out of washing collards.

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Yesterday afternoon, we ditched them all to go fishing. Again. We’d had such a good trip on Saturday, and the weather was so glorious, that we couldn’t resist. Not only did we walk away from all our responsibilities, we convinced Gus to walk away from his, too.

Gus is our friend and our mechanic. Fish swim in his veins, perhaps because he is Greek. (His real name is Konstantin, but when he came here from Greece as a young man and applied for a Sears credit card, his full name was too long for the form. “You can be Charlie,” they told him, “or you can be Gus.”) He speaks with the kind of mellifluous Mediterranean accent that makes you think everything’s going to be ok. Which is an excellent bonus in the person who fixes your car.

Last fall, when Kevin and I drove down to North Carolina for our friend Allison Fishman’s wedding, I took our Saab to Gus before we left, since the suspension was making a rather ominous creaking sound. Gus drove the car and heard the creaking, but he wasn’t going to be able to open up the suspension in time to find what it was, fix it, and get it back to us.

“Can I take it North Carolina?” I asked, worried.

“I had a guy once who had a camper,” Gus said, with his mellifluous Mediterranean accent, “and he wanted to take it to California. ‘Gus,’ he asked me, ‘can I take it to California?’”

“’Look,’ I told him, ‘if you have a donkey, you can get to California. You stop, you give it hay, you give it water, you keep going. Take the camper to California. If it breaks down, you stop and you call. They come, they tow, they fix, you keep going.”

“Tamara,” he said to me, “take the car to North Carolina.”

I laughed. “But you’ll fix it when I get back?”

He shook his head. “No.”

“No?”

“No,” he said, and pointed to the offending suspension. “You have to wait for it to get worse.”

When I bring a car to him, we talk about cars for a minute or two, and then we talk about food We first met Gus when he was roasting a lamb on a rotisserie he built out of a washing machine motor, and we knew he was our kind of person. He keeps a smoker in his garage, and smokes a mean bluefish. And, if you ever meet him, ask him to tell you the story about going through customs at JFK with a frozen suckling pig. (“What is that?” the officer asked him. “What do you mean, ‘What is that,’” Gus said. “It’s a pig.”)

Gus

When I called him yesterday morning to ask if he wanted to go for stripers, I could hear the conflict in his voice. He said he had a lot of work, but I could tell he really, really, wanted to go fishing. He said he would try and get everything done, and call me at noon. At noon, he was in.

He met us at the dock at 2:30, and out we went. The plan was the same as Saturday’s: jig up a couple dozen mackerel, and liveline them for stripers. We went out to our usual mackerel spot, though, and found no fish. A few (apparently) on the fishfinder, but none on the sabiki rigs.

I was a little concerned. This was the first time we’d taken Gus out with us, and I didn’t want him to think we were the kind of loser fishermen who fish at random, having no real idea what they’re doing. But the mackerel aren’t always easy to find, and we had time. We saw a few boats farther out in the Bay, and we figured they might be into them, so we headed in that direction.

Sure enough, we hit them. Since I was jigging off one side of the boat and Gus was on the other, I didn’t see him pull in his first fish, but Kevin told me that he lit up. You know how much someone likes to fish by his expression when he gets a bite, and Gus really likes to fish.

It didn’t take us long to fill Kevin’s livewell, and then we headed back to the mouth of Barnstable Harbor to try our luck for stripers.

The theory behind this kind of fishing is that the striped bass go into the harbor to feed when the tide comes in, and then are just about forced out when the tide ebbs. The channel out of the harbor is narrow, and it funnels all the fish into one little spot. Go there on the outgoing tide, at the right time of year, with the right kind of bait, and your chances are good.

We went to the harbor end of the channel and Kevin cut the motor. Gus reached into the livewell, put a mackerel on his hook, and tossed it over the side. Before I had a chance to bait my own hook, Gus had a striper on the line. Literally. It took about seven seconds.

And that’s how the day went. We had striper action for a good two hours. Some of the fish were schoolies, and we watched as the bass chased the mackerel around the surface of the water even though they were too small to eat them. We use a kind of hook, a circle hook, that’s designed to minimize the chance that the fish gets gut-hooked, but is also relatively easy for the fish to shake, so we lost a couple big fish we’d had on the line.

But we caught plenty. Gus got his two (the limit) before either Kevin or I had landed one, but I also ended up limiting out, and Kevin got one. One of mine was just shy of three feet long, and may be the biggest fish I’ve caught to date.

Today, all the things we didn’t get done yesterday are still there, and we have that much less time in which to do them. But they will get done – or maybe they won’t, I don’t know. But I do know that we had a great day on the water. We also came home with about 15 pounds of striped bass filets, and Gus had almost as much, plus the leftover mackerel.

We happen to live in a place with world-class fishing, and Kevin and I have decided to make taking advantage of it a priority. On the days when the fishing looks promising and the weather is good, we’re willing to let other things slide to go out and try our luck. It is a luxury to be able to do that. An indulgent, time-consuming, expensive luxury, and one I feel lucky to have. Because I really love to fish.

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He made the call to the contact in the ad, to a woman named Lucy. She was in Bourne, about fifteen miles from us, and Kevin told Lucy that I’d come pick them up.

“Wait,” Lucy said. “Your name is Kevin and your wife’s name is Tamar?” Kevin confirmed.

“Are you Starving off the Land?”

Turns out that Lucy is a regular reader and commenter! Which means there’s a kind of goes-around-comes-around rightness in turning her tubs into our livewell.

I zipped over with a check, and Lucy and I put the tubs in the car, talking about chickens and bees and gardens. We kept talking for quite some time, and could have gone on all day, I suspect, if both of us didn’t have to get back to work.

I brought Lucy’s tubs to Kevin for inspection. They were perfect. And if the first one didn’t work out, we had a back-up.

The tub was the big hurdle, but Kevin needed a few other things to get the job done. We needed a lid that was heavy enough to stay put when the boat was moving, made of a material that could withstand salt water, and fittings to attach the input hose at the bottom of the tub and the outflow hose near the top.

For the lid, we went with stuff called Azek, which is essentially boards made out of PVC. We learned about Azek from Bob (our friend, fishing instructor, and builder), who used it as trim when he put new doors and windows in our house. We bought one board, and Kevin cut a piece about two inches wide to span the top of the tub and snap in under the rim. Then he added semi-circles of Azek to each side of the center span with hinges, to make the lid you can lift up to put fish in or take them out.

Once that was done, it was just a question of hose fittings. Our boat has a pump that pumps in seawater for washing the deck, so we had a ready-made water supply. Kevin used a washing-machine hose to connect the pump to the bottom of the tub, and made the intake with PVC fittings and fluffy rubber washers to make sure it was watertight.

PVC and fluffy washers also connected a wider outflow hose about five inches from the top of the tub (to leave room for sloshing), and that hose was long enough to drain the water off the back of the boat, over the transom.

This past weekend, we used it for the first time. Would it work?

It worked!

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We went out to the head of the channel, about two miles outside the harbor, and jigged up a couple dozen mackerel to use as bait. Then we went back to the harbor and did loops drifting from the mouth out to the bay, livelining the mackerel.  When we got to the head of the channel, we’d motor back and do again, floating with the tide as it went out.

At first, there was nothing. And then, there were bass. By the time the day was over, we had each caught one. Both fish were 32 inches. Both fish were 11 pounds. They were virtually identical. We had caught them exactly the same way, on very similar tackle. So why does Kevin look like a manly boat captain, holding the fish that is the due of a skilled fisherman …

… and I just look like a dork?

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Myron is the number-two guy at Ketcham Trap, the New Bedford fishing supply business we buy our oyster cages from. The number-one guy is Bob Ketcham, and both Bob’s wife Mona and Myron’s wife Michelle work alongside them in the office. The four of them, essentially, are Ketcham Trap. (I should note that, technically, the business is called Ketcham Supply Corp., but we’ve been calling it Ketcham Trap too long to stop. Is that OK, Bob?)

Myron is the person we deal with most, and we like him for a lot of reasons, but mostly because it’s impossible to be in a bad mood around him. This is particularly true when Michelle is with him, but when she’s off doing other things, he’s capable of doing the mood elevating solo. He has an irrepressible, off-color, gleeful good nature. He thinks everything is funny, or maybe stupid. He is smart and irreverent and good at what he does.

We’d ordered 150 oyster cages, each four feet by three, and six inches deep. Myron could have had them delivered to us, but we figured that, now that we have a big hairy truck and trailer, we could save the delivery charge by picking them up ourselves. We weren’t quite sure they would all fit, but Myron assured us that a full-size pick-up with trailer could handle the load.

So, yesterday we hooked up the landscape trailer to the big hairy truck and headed out to New Bedford.

To look at it, you probably wouldn’t know that Ketcham Trap is a thriving business. It’s in an old three-story brick building that looks like a warehouse but was, for many years, an elementary school. “It was my elementary school,” Myron says with a grin. “And all the teachers told me that, if I didn’t shut up, I’d never get out of here.” That he now makes a very good living in that very building, and still doesn’t shut up, is a bit of irony that Myron clearly relishes.

The building is in a gritty part of town, and the signs on it are hand-lettered and irregular. The lot is piled with lobster pots, oyster cages, and giant spools of rope. The office has bare floors, haphazard furniture, and surfaces covered with gloves, boots, and jackets. But Ketcham supplies a wide range of fishermen, lobstermen, and oyster farmers, in a part of the world that has a lot of all of them. I don’t have access to their books, but I know Myron takes way better vacations than we do.

We pulled into the yard, and parked next to our order, which was stacked on pallets. The stacks seemed awfully high, and it looked like, contrary to what we’d been told, we wouldn’t be able to get everything loaded. When Myron came out, that’s what said to him. “Well, you didn’t tell me you had this little toy trailer,” he said. That’s the kind of thing Myron says all the time.

“We won’t get it all, but we’ll get most of it,” he went on, and called a couple of young guys who worked there over to help.

It wasn’t Myron’s job to load our truck. We were doing the pick-up, and were fully prepared to do the loading. But Myron knows he’s loaded more trucks with more oyster cages than, possibly, anyone on the planet, and he’s better at it than we are.

Myron, loading

When you’re trucking items that are relatively large, but light, using diesel fuel that’s expensive, packing the truck as full as possible is the name of the game, and Myron packed our truck in a way I never would have thought of. He piled one stack of trays in the bed until it came up to the top of the bed walls, and then he piled two stacks on top of that, balancing on the single stack and the walls of the bed, with the edges sticking out about a foot.

Then, a single tray on top, over the seam between the two stacks, and a bunch of rope tied tightly and strategically. We got 52 trays on the truck, and another 60, stacked the same way, on the trailer.

Kevin, surveying the load

I’ll admit that I was a little skeptical. It looked a bit precarious to me. But Myron assured us he’d loaded lots of trucks that way, with only the occasional mishap. He told us he used to pack even more aggressively, and he once, in his youth, seriously overloaded his delivery truck with lobster pots. He wasn’t halfway to his destination when he saw the flashing lights behind him, and a cop pulled him over.

The cop walked around the truck looking at the tower of traps, and then came to the driver’s side window. “Son,” the cop said, “Just where you goin’ with all them chicken coops?”

Since then, he’s learned to walk the fine line of just enough overloading to avoid the scrutiny of law enforcement. And he does it well. We got home without incident and at least one police officer passed us without paying us any special attention.

Other than the boat, the cages are our biggest expense, and it’s good to know that, with this order, we have a full complement. They have at least a five-year lifespan (if all goes well), so we won’t have to do this again any time soon. Which means that, next time we’re in a bad mood, we’ll have to find something else to buy at Ketcham Trap.

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So you will allow my a moment of pride in our hoophouse. It is full of leafy, bug-free greens, crisp, blood-red radishes, and tall, strong leeks. It has bushy, thriving herbs and a patch of lemongrass that looks like it’s going to make it.

It is a beautiful thing.

I know that it will last about seven seconds. The only reason it looks so good is that it’s too early for bugs and bolting, and only the most intrepid weeds (you know who you are, chickweed) have gotten a foothold. Come back in a couple weeks, and everything will be back to normal.

But, between the kale, arugula, and collards in the hoophouse and the overwintered collards in the garden, I harvested about ten pounds of greens in April. In April! I am pleased with myself out of all proportion.

Until I try and figure out what’s for dinner. I’ve made soups and stir-fries and creamed greens. There have been salads and frittatas and at least one pasta sauce that would have benefited from having fewer greens. I’ve blanched and frozen several bags of collards and kale, which I’ll be very happy to have in February.

Anybody got a favorite use for leafy greens? I’d be mighty appreciative.

Meanwhile, it’s time for my monthly check-in on our progress toward our 2012 goal of getting 20% of calories from first-hand food, and I’m very glad to have something to report other than eggs. Eggs are still the bulk of calories, but they have been joined by a significant harvest of leaves.

April greens

As in March, we’ve gotten about 18 dozen eggs, at 800 calories per, for 14,400. The ten pounds of greens were quite sturdy and dense (except arugula, which was a small fraction of the harvest), so I’m figuring they’re about 200 calories per pound, for 2000 calories.

I don’t want to forget my radishes, even though the 20 calories from the one large bunch are well within my rounding error.  But if I add in the sage, oregano, marjoram, and mint, I figure I can get that up to 100.

So the total for April is 16,500. Still not up to 20%, but we’re coming up on fishing season. I’m hoping for a very productive May.

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Amazon was planning a four-city billboard campaign for the Kindle, starting at the end of April. The gist of the billboard is that you can get your newspaper in a Kindle edition, and there is, of course, a picture of a Kindle.

The Kindle in the picture has a screen, of course, and on that screen is text. Not just any text, though, text from a science story about fish that I wrote for the Washington Post earlier this month. The e-mail was to ask permission to use my name.

Permission was readily granted, and there are now billboards in Atlanta, Chicago, Philadelphia and Washington, DC that have my name on them. It’s in very small print, but still.

And, although they don’t owe me anything for the use of my name (per my contract with the Post), they are sending me a Kindle, just to be nice.

I can’t help thinking all this is pretty groovy way to get launched into the digital age, and I will send a nice little jar of our homemade sea salt to the first person who sends me a photograph of one of those billboards.

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This particular incident had been brewing for quite some time. It dates back to our purchase of a relatively large boat, and a commensurately large truck. Together, they pushed the limits of our long, narrow, steep driveway. They could get up and down it, no problem, but they hit a lot of tree branches and rhododendrons along the way.

This morning, we took the boat out at the crack of dawn to go fishing for striped bass. Weather and batteries conspired against us, and we had to give it up and come home again. As we turned into the driveway, I noticed our fish net dangling from an oak limb overhead. It had been snagged out of its rod holder on the boat’s roof as we drove out and hung there as a testament to the driveway’s need of trimming.

The particular branch that snagged the net had been on Kevin’s radar for a long time. The tree it was attached to is sixty feet tall and dead, and he thought he could simply snap the limb off with a rope. It wasn’t a big limb, and — silly me — although I had some reservations about anything involving a truck, a rope, and a tree, I didn’t think too much could go wrong with this particular tree. Besides, the alternative was to get out the rope saw, and if there’s one tool in Kevin’s arsenal I hate, it’s the rope saw.  (And you can read about the  previous Tree Stooges episode that engendered that hostility.)

Since we hadn’t been able to go fishing, we’d spent the morning shoveling compost, and I was tired enough to want to skip the limb-snapping exercise, but Kevin still had enough energy to tackle it. He didn’t need my help, he said, so he went out to do it alone.

About ten minutes later, he came bursting into the house. “Honey!” he said, “Your husband’s a jackass!”

Pretty much every possible permutation of a truck, a rope, and a tree flashed through my mind. Since Kevin was standing in front of me, apparently unharmed, I knew we weren’t looking at the worst-case scenario, but there are scenarios this side of worst that I would prefer not to have to face on a beautiful Sunday afternoon.

I sighed, put on my boots, and followed him out the door and up the driveway. He started telling me the story.

“So, I got the rope around the limb, just like I planned,” he said. “And I tied it to the front of the little truck and started to back up.”

Oy.

“And then I heard this big crack, and the limb broke off right at the trunk, and came down in the driveway, just like I planned!”

Okay, we’re safe so far.

“And then I heard this even bigger crack!”

Oh shit.

“And the WHOLE TREE started to come down!”

Oh shit. Images of destruction ran through my mind. It fell on the truck. It fell on a chicken. It fell across the driveway, and we better hope we can get the chainsaw started.

All that's left

“And it fell right into the woods! It was perfect!”

Whew. All’s well that ends well, and at least we’ve both learned our lesson, and my husband recognizes the jackassness of snapping branches off really big trees using trucks.

Or so I thought. Turns out Kevin thinks that snapping branches off really big trees is the bomb, and an excellent way to keep the driveway clear. But only a jackass would do it without his wife there to get it on video.

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