Tuesday, November 1, 2011

Prawning


Today we got to go Prawn fishing.  Ashley, a UVic Environmental Studies graduate student, works with a local fisherman (named Guy) to collect Prawns for her research every week.  She couldn’t make it out this week, and arranged for us to fill in for her.  Katrina, Kris (another UVic grad student) and I met Guy at his vessel, the Michelle Rose, in Sidney and spent an hour pulling up prawn traps near DFO’s Institute of Ocean Sciences.  Ashley’s research required juvenile Prawns and Guy said that he put the traps in the water just a couple hours earlier because the juveniles enter the traps first; if you leave the traps in too long, the adults drive the juveniles out.  It was really pleasant on the calm water, and Guy was full of interesting stories about the BC Coast.  This trip was for science, not the dinner plate, but it was still fun to learn more about an excellent wild food.  I was also impressed by Guy’s cooperation with conservation scientists like Ashley.  He was not only volunteering his time for the project, but he spoke about the different fisheries that he participates in with the long term invested interest that you would expect from someone whose livelihood is dependent on natural heritage, but for some mysterious reason has failed to manifest itself during some unfortunate periods of our industrial relationship with the earth.

When we got back I decided it was time to start processing the apples that we picked with Ryan yesterday.  I quartered, boiled, and sauced about 1/3 of our apples.  We have about a gallon of sauce in the slow cooker to make some more apple butter and another gallon that still needs to be strained.


Kris invited us over to sushi which featured his smoked Coho Salmon and fried salmon skin.  Then I dropped by Shin and Andra’s house for Evergreen Huckleberry (Vaccinium ovatum) pie.  It is wonderful having friends that love wild foods!




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