- Not the best day for picking…
…so high water came and Ingrid and her parents headed out to Schartner’s to pick berries. While her Dad smartly stayed in the car listening to an audio book, Ingrid and her mom managed to pick 19 pounds of berries while trying to dodge the raindrops.
All laid out to dry..
It took her a while, but Ingrid got all the berries washed, dried, cut and into the freezer. She even delivered a bunch to a friend!
Ready to eat!
…and of course, we saved some from the freezer to eat until the next picking session (next week).
Soft shell crab sandwich.
Later in the day, the sun finally did poke out of the gray skies and it dried up enough for us to eat outside…I had bought some bread earlier in the day over at the Goddard Park Farmer’s Market with the intention of cooking some mussels for dinner. I headed over to Di Mare Seafood in East Greenwich and saw that they had received a shipment of live soft shell crabs in from Maryland. I had cooked them before, but not live ones. I figured that they would make good appetizers- I thumbed through our cookbooks and came up with this open faced crab sandwich. I took two slices of the aforementioned bread, grilled them and then pan fried the crabs in clarified butter for a few minutes. I served them with a simple sauce of cooked egg yolk, oil, parsley and onion along with some fried capers…
Mussels and bread.
…for the mussels, I wanted to try something new. Usually, I do a white wine, dijon and saffron broth but we had some fennel in the fridge along with some frozen tomato pulp left over from another food experiment. I ended up using some onion and garlic in the broth as well, along with some vermouth and steamed the mussels in that for about five or six minutes. The broth was very light (no butter) and went extremely well with the sweet mussels (and was easily sopped up by the bread!).
….as the sun was setting, we noticed that there were a lot of bees taking advantage of the dry weather. We found this one in our Astilbe just hanging out collecting pollen…he stayed there long enough for us to grab a couple of close-ups.
-Josh
