I made my annual pilgrimmage to Half Moon Bay in search of Pacific rockfish and lingcod yesterday, and I was not disappointed. I caught a 26-inch lingcod as well as five nice rockfish, which some people out here call “rock cod,” a term I find confusing because they taste nothing like a cod. Both lingcod
Fish
Crabbing on Bodega Bay
Can I tell you how happy I was when my friend Jason suggested we go crabbing on Bodega Bay the other day? I’ve been having a longstanding affair with the genus cancer. As a boy I chased down little green crabs on Block Island and wondered why we couldn’t eat them. One of my fondest
Yummy Fresh Smelt
Have I mentioned how much I love eating little fish? Oh yeah, I did — a few months ago when I found fresh anchovies at the Davis Farmer’s Market. Well that same vendor had gobs of fresh whitebait smelt yesterday, and I was immediately seduced by their beauty. Fresh smelt let everyone around them know
Filleting a California Halibut
I’ve said it before, but this past weekend reminded me why I find the process of turning an animal into meat rewarding on several levels. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I am particularly fond of slime and guts and those smelly places within the nether regions of any creature’s body. It’s that I
Spring is for Stripers
Today was the first warm day of spring, the first day over 80 degrees — a day that will surely do violence to my lettuce patch. It was also the first day I thought to escape for a little while to the river, where my friend Jason and I dipped our lines in hopes of catching
Need a Good Fishing Guide?
I am happy to announce that I’ve become a fishing guide, in a way: I am the new proprietor of About.com’s Fish & Seafood Cooking website. This is why there’s been a dearth of fish recipes here for the past month or so; I was building my new site and have shifted all my fishy energies
Grilled Fish Collars
Fish collars? What, you may be asking, is this strange thing? I bet you didn’t even know fish had necks, let alone donned formal wear. Actually, a “collar” is the piece of meat that is right behind the gills and includes the pectoral fins. Few people other than Asians make much use of this cut of fish (if you
A Shad-tastic Dinner
My friends Elise, who runs the blog Simply Recipes, and Garrett, who runs Vanilla Garlic, came over for wild game dinner the other night, and Garrett just posted on the meal, which covered chinook salmon to venison to elk to wild duck broth to a confit of wild goose gizzards. Very kind words, for which I’m