Fish On Mondays

Say what you will about the internet.

It's turning our kids' minds to mush. It's replaced intellectual curiosity with The Google. It will be the end of books and libraries and literacy.

Well OK, maybe so, but let's set those trifling realities aside for a moment and look at the good side.

This looks pretty good, doesn't it?

Now, those who read my scribblings here and in the comments pages of the blogs I frequent will probably have noticed that I shy away from most discussions about cooking. It's not that I don't like the fruits of cooking, or the meats of cooking, or the seafood and desserts of cooking. It's just that I've never been much of a cook myself.

Discussions of things like beer basil butter generally leave me bewitched, bothered, and bewildered.

I am usually left in charge of charcoal grilling and have developed some survival skills there, but that occurs safely al fresco. In our kitchen proper, I'm strictly the sous chef. I do what I'm told and try to stay out from underfoot.

But, with the advent of the internet, that may be starting to change.

Over the weekend, our head chef and menu planner was looking for something different to do with salmon. A few months ago, she discovered a YouTube video on how to make homemade pizza and that has worked out well for us. So, this time, instead of scouring her collection of cookbooks, she headed straight for the interwebs.

The cool thing is that you don't need to be a culinary genius with decades of experience. On YouTube, helpful practiced chefs, both amateur and pro, walk you through all the perilous steps of preparation, just like Julia Child. But here, you can pause, rewind, and replay as many times as necessary so you can get the crucial details right without setting fire to the kitchen. And with the iPad, the video is right there next to your cooktop. Voila! Voici! Or voiever you want.

The video we found for pan-seared salmon over sauteed spinach, mushrooms, garlic, and tomatoes was done by an enterprising Jersey girl named Laura Vitale, who seems to have mastered the art of marketing herself on the interwebs rather well. I don't know what professional chefs would make of her, but her recipe - and more importantly her video - worked out superbly for us.

As usual, my wife did most of the heavy cooking, but, when I wasn't staring at where Laura was wearing her microphone, I learned a lot, too. I think I'm starting to gain the confidence to take on stuff like this, myself.

I even added a secret ingredient to Ms. Vitale's recipe.

Ten blogging points to the first one who spots it in the photo at the top of this post.

City Folk And Shore Folk

My fellow blogger and champion of most things New Jersey, Baydog, has been in mourning of late.

He might manage a smile or two and put up the cheery post to keep up appearances, but underneath, there's the telltale melancholy that we often wear when we've lost a loved one.

In late October, Baydog's beloved New Jersey shore was brutally ravaged and left for dead in the wild Atlantic surf. Worse, appalling images of the violence were splashed all over the tabloids and the evening news. There was no opportunity to cope with the loss quietly or to mourn in private.

Baydog is mending as best he can, as his folk always have. For Baydog is shore folk.

He was raised down the shore, got most of his schooling there, and grew up with sand between his toes. He was babtized in the warm water of Barnegat Bay, took communion in a hard-chined dinghy, and sang in the boatyard choir. He lettered in clamming and wrote his senior essay on the sound of the surf.

I spent my summers just two hours down Route 528 from Baydog, but I may as well have been ten thousand miles away. I was born of city folk.

My city was paved over. Almost all of it. What wasn't concrete was asphalt. And the few odd lots that remained between the concrete and the asphalt were given a peculiar name - vacant - as if whatever had once lived there had moved away. Trees and grass had been herded together and put in places called 'parks' where they wouldn't get in the way of more important things. If you wanted, you could visit a park, but you could never live in one.

In my city, there were no waterways to speak of, outside of the parks. The big river was mainly hidden behind security fences. Our parents would warn us about the dangers and tell us never to go there. In fourth grade once, we all got on the bus and took a class trip to the sewage treatment plant, but that was pretty much the most water I got to see all in one place. And it smelled funny.

Occasionally, we city folk would try to escape the summer heat and drive down the shore (you never drove down to the shore). As we'd approach the ocean, I could sense my parents getting uneasy. We were leaving the safety of the city behind. Not only were there no sidewalks here, but there was sand everywhere, and sand got into your shoes and socks. "Make sure you don't get any sand in the car," we were warned. "It gets into everything."

My parents never really understood these shore people who liked to walk barefoot in the sand. Why would anyone build a house down here? You'd be tracking sand into the house all of the time. How would you keep the carpets clean?

And then there were those awful storms. Didn't these people know the ocean could come up and wipe their houses away? How could they be so foolish?

It wasn't until many years later that I moved to California, far away from my city, where I got a sailboat that started teaching me about the ocean. At first, this city boy was afraid to venture very far from the safety of the harbor. But the boat and the ocean soon began their usual conspiracy.

It wasn't long before the ocean stopped smelling 'fishy' and started smelling like home to me. And it wasn't too much after that that I began thinking about those foolish shore folk back in New Jersey. I was beginning to understand their foolishness. And I was getting a little foolish myself.

Some of us live lives that are entirely too safe. Boats can spring leaks. Boats can leave you stranded out in the middle of nowhere. Boats can sink. But sailors keep sailing. Sailors need to sail. It's what we do.

I'm beginning to think those foolish New Jersey shore folk knew very well what the storms might bring. But they also knew things city folk would never learn.

In time, the shore's battered barrier islands will recover. The shore folk will recover. And Baydog, I hope, will recover. They all will have been changed a little by their ordeal.

Meanwhile, back in my old home town, the city folk are safe, untouched by the ocean, untouched by the storm.

Cheers!

For a few days now, I've been trying to summon the strength to write a cheery Christmas post, but this just doesn't seem like a good year for cheery.

My wife did whip up one of her clever alternative Christmas trees, which I've blogged about before and before.

I think this Christmas Guy looks kind of cheery and jaunty in an alternative kind of way.

And we took our usual stroll through one of Sacramento's established neighborhoods, where the affluent owners dress their fine old homes in a style that reminds me of how Christmas used to look before it was digitally enhanced and brought to life by Disney animatronics. There was hardly an inflatable, dancing Santa or computer-controlled flashing light display anywhere.

I took some photos and set them to some cheery music as you can see in the video at the end of this post.

But I'm still not really cheery.

I think the 700-pound grinch in most of our living rooms this Christmas is the grim memory of some school kids who won't be celebrating Christmas ever again.

The talking heads on our televisions drone on about what must be fixed to prevent future tragedies. They hardly mention that the ultimate tragedy was a human mind that broke in a way no laws or politicians will ever be able to fix.

At Christmas, I'm reminded that, as humans, we need other people in our lives to survive. Not to feed us or buy us iPads, but just to care that we are alive.

Christmas is mostly about getting off our usual treadmills and stopping to connect with the people in our lives whom we may have neglected all the rest of the year.

Remember to tell the people you love that you love them. Even if they piss you off some of the time. It could turn out to be the most important thing you ever do.

Now, let's go out there and make the best of what has been a pretty scary Christmas.


Cheers, from O Dock.





(And please, to keep all of the extra high definition pixels in this video from escaping, click the little gear thingy once the video starts, switch to HD, and then click the 'full-screen' doodad.)

One Blogging Day Before Oblivion

Well bloggers, it's December 20th, 2012, and you know what that means.

Yup, just one more day before oblivion to tidy up affairs and post those last minute posts.

Of course, those of us with boats that can go out on the big, badass ocean with accommodation onboard for pooping aren't sweating it too much. We can just sail off into the sunset like we've always planned to do anyway.

And now's a good time to do that for another reason. You wouldn't want to leave on a Friday, would you?

But what about those of us with boats too small for an extended ocean passage? What are those poor unfortunates to do? I think I'd look for solace in some distilled products and maybe, at last, dust off that old bible that you've never opened.

You know what they say. There are no atheists in Fox News foxholes.

But what's that?

You can't find your bible? I was afraid of that. Well, as always here at O Dock, we step up at crucial moments of peril and provide the vital resources our readers need to make it through the day, and possibly through all eternity.

So, if you have only a small boat and can't find your bible anywhere, here is a small snippet of it that should work in a pinch, or even if you're footing off:

The Laser's Prayer


The Laser is my shepherd, I shall not want.

It maketh me to lie down in strange postures,
It saileth me through the still waters, it restoreth my soul,
It leadeth me in the paths of starboard tackers for the wind's sake.

Yea, though I roll downwind in the shadow of death,
I shall fear no evil, for thou art with me.
Thy vang and thy sheet they comfort me.

Thou preparest a regatta before me in the presence of mine enemies,
thou annointest my head with a trophy,
my cup runneth over.

Surely, soreness and mildew shall follow me all the days of my life,
and I shall dwell in the fleet of the Laser forever.

I Got A Bad Phone

Thanks to my readers for explaining that mystery object that came flying out of my kitchen drawer in the last post.

On the day I was born
The hipsters gathered 'round
And they gazed in wide wonder
At the geek they had found
The head hipster spoke up
Said "leave this one alone"
She could tell right away
That I had a bad phone


I had a bad phone

B-B-B-B-Bad

B-B-B-B-Bad
B-B-B-B-Bad
I had a bad phone

I broke a thousand screens
Before I met you
I'll break a thousand more, baby
Before I am through
Can't find no custom case
That's mine and mine alone
I'm here to tell ya honey
That I got a bad phone

I got a bad phone
B-B-B-B-Bad
B-B-B-B-Bad
B-B-B-B-Bad
I got a bad phone

AT&T made me beg
Verizon tried to steal
Their plans all made me blush
Rollover minutes were no deal
They say I gotta upgrade
Or else I'm all alone
Nothin' they can do, they said
That I got a bad phone

I got a bad phone
B-B-B-B-Bad
B-B-B-B-Bad
B-B-B-B-Bad
I got a bad phone

Photo Quiz

Regular readers of this blog will no doubt be relieved to learn that I narrowly escaped serious injury in a drawer cleaning incident at my home yesterday.

It was the drawer in our kitchen where we throw stuff when we can't figure out what else to do with it. Everyone has one of those drawers in their kitchen.

I wouldn't have been fooling around in that drawer to begin with, but we'd reached that rare intersection in time when several of our battery cycles coincided - something like a lunar transit of Saturn, only for batteries. Usually, you run out of AA batteries one month, and then you run out of AAA batteries a few months later, and then, maybe once a year or so, you need D-cells.

But miraculously, we ended up needing all three sizes at once - a sort of alkaline syzygy.

So, off we went to Costco to replenish - along with our toilet paper stocks and dwindling reserves of peanut butter - our supply of those indispensable little cylinders that power the constellation of beeping, buzzing, and blinking devices that make modern life possible.

Imagine the paralysis that would seize our nation if, suddenly, all the batteries in all of the remote controls in every living room in the land were to die at once. We are not a nation dependent upon fossil fuels so much as upon batteries.

I think I made it through the 1960s and most of the '70s on a grand total of about 14 AA batteries. When anyone today alludes to the loss of innocence in America, that is the first thing I think of.

We returned from Costco with 64 rolls of toilet paper, a four-gallon vat of peanut butter, and the 'small' packages of three different sizes of alkaline batteries, which means in Costcospeak, a minimum of 36 batteries in each size.

If you know anything about the ungainly packaging of Costco batteries and the dynamics of a drawer that has been collecting household flotsam for over twenty years, you probably have some inkling of the precarious situation I was about to face.

It was somewhere between wrestling the D-cells and the AA's into an already overflowing drawer that this, well, this thing, came hurtling out, thudded to the floor, and nearly took off my toe in the process. It was the size of a brick and weighed what a brick weighs. It must have been stuck in the back of the drawer for at least 15 years, and I had absolutely no idea what it was.

It was made of gray plastic, had some numbered buttons on it, and a sort of stick coming out of it. I think it was some kind of fashion accessory from the early 1990's because I've seen movies from that period that show urban hipsters carrying them. I can't imagine how stupid those same hipsters would feel walking around with something like that today - probably as stupid as they'll feel 20 years from now walking around with tattoos all over their arms and necks and, well, just all over. You know how cruel urban hipsters can be when they spot you still done up in something that's so last year.

I was going to let this relic from the past go, until I realized this is photo quiz month in the blogosphere, so I thought if I posted it here someone might be able to track this down on the Google and tell me what the heck it is.

I really only need to know what it is, but if you also know what direction I was facing when I took the picture, what cabinet we keep our popcorn in, what that smudge on the floor is, and what Tillerman had for lunch yesterday, feel free to write that in, too.

It's the seemingly irrelevant details that breathe life into any photo quiz.

And, oh - here's a bonus photo to help you out, with the thing next to a shoe to help establish scale.

As with any photo quiz, originality counts and there's extra credit for all responses written in verse.

..

Fish On Saturdays

If you follow Joe Rouse's blog, you know how much Joe likes fish.

He's always posting photos of some of the tastiest fish you could shake a fishing pole at.

So, I wasn't surprised yesterday when Joe posted this photo he took of a mural painted on the wall of a San Francisco seafood restaurant. That certainly is one very nice fish.

But being the perfectionist he is - and not liking anything to distract from the appreciation of his fish - Joe even fired up Photoshop to take out a distracting No Parking sign that was getting in the way.

In Joe's words:

"...Then I ran the photo through Photoshop and zapped a no parking sign into oblivion. God, I love technology!..."

But Joe can be so modest sometimes. His Photoshop skills are much greater than he lets on. Here's the original mural, and you can see that Joe has taken out more than just a No Parking sign. There is just nothing that will stand between this man and his devotion to fish.