Day 130, Year 7: Happy St. Patrick’s Day
Date: Saturday, March 17, 2012
Weather: Cloudy Turning Sunny, Warming Up
Location: Brewer Fiddler’s Cove Marina, N Falmouth, MA
St. Patrick’s Day has always been lucky for Mark. The name Handley or Hanley is Irish and over the years many good things have happened to us around this time of year. I’m hoping our luck this year will be the delivery of a healthy baby Goldstone next week.
I picked up Sam and Jonah this morning and brought them to Windbird as promised. We had bagels with cream cheese and smoked salmon for breakfast and then watched and helped Granddad work on stripping the caulk from between the teak decking. We checked our seed pots and found that the broccoli has sprouted and then we went out on the dock to take a walk to the end of boardwalk and to “fish”. Both boys have a stick with some line tied to it and they love to catch seaweed and pretend that it is salmon (Sam) or tuna (Jonah). Jonah caught two big yellowfin tunas and Sam caught 239 salmon. It was a very lucky fishing day! We had lunch and then we took the boys home so they could go to a birthday party. Joey, the very Irish little two year-old next door, turned two today. You can’t get luckier than being Irish with a St. Patrick’s Day birthday. Happy Birthday, Joey.
I spent the remainder of my afternoon and evening working in the galley. I first washed the weeds that I picked in Heather and Jed’s garden. Since they are tilling everything under tomorrow, I wanted to save these beautiful green clusters. I have been nibbling on them since January, and I knew they were some sort of cress, but I didn’t know specifically what these weeds were. After washing them carefully, I spent some time searching the internet and found that they are called hairy bittercress (Cardamine hirsute). They do pack a punch, like arugula, but they aren’t hairy and they aren’t bitter, just spicy in a peppery kind of way. I found that the leaves can be eaten in salads or cooked like turnip greens. I grew up eating a February weed called creasy greens (Barbarea verna). This is an upland cress and is always cooked. The hairy bittercress looks almost identical but I think this cress will be best eaten raw in salads. My next task was to make Magic Mineral Broth. Sometimes the simplest cooking tasks can be overwhelming when working in the small quarters of a boat galley. I made this broth in Heather and Jed’s kitchen in their big pot with no problem a couple of weeks ago, but any recipe that starts with eight quarts of water is problematic on a boat. I discovered that my largest pot would only hold five gallons of water along with the huge list of veggies that are added. I tried to adjust the recipe, and that was the first frustration. The second was that there was so much steam coming off the pot that I had to open the hatch and open the cockpit doorway to allow the steam to escape. Thankfully it wasn’t freezing outside or we would have had icicles in the cockpit. I had planned to can the broth as there just isn’t room in the freezer, but then I realized I didn’t have canning lids. Soooooo, we had to head back into town to get those. I was using the new canner the kids got me for Christmas for the first time, and discovered that it holds seven pints or seven quarts, but what the directions didn’t tell me is that it can only do this if the jars are not wide-mouthed. Of course, I had prepared and filled only wide-mouth jars, so I had to get out narrow-mouth jars and start again. I only ended up with eight pints of broth out of all of those veggies and all of that water and it took all evening to get it canned, but I did it. I know it will be easier next time. The last task was to make a pesto to go with tonight’s dinner. I used the food processor attachment to my new immersion blender to do this and it worked great. So that was the success story for this evening. Tonight the “cancer-fighting kitchen” was a frustrating one, but I know that I’ll get better at figuring this all out.
