Airship Goes to Alaska
The weather! It's STILL like this here in Sitka!
Since Tiffani and Deke left on Sunday morning, we've mostly been depressed catching up on work and boat cleaning and laundry and stuff like that. We ordered an oil filter that'll be here tomorrow, so we'll do our 250 hour oil change here in Sitka this week. We also ordered a new carburetor for the outboard from Gary's Outboard, which hopefully will lessen the amount of swearing when we go exploring by dinghy.
We went for a walk the other day down to the Sitka Sound Seafoods retail store to pick up some fish. We got two pounds of large spot prawns (frozen), some halibut, some king salmon, and some coho. We figure it'd be good to have some fish up in the freezer for when we aren't catching and still want to eat some fish.
I love these wooden houses across the street from the fish market. They remind me of something from a video game landscape:
The other night I decided to cook up the spot prawns. I found a couple recipes and made up my own from there. First, I put some tomatoes in the oven with olive oil, salt, and pepper to roast them.
I shelled the prawns, and then made a sauce/stock by browning the shells with a chopped shallot in a pan and then adding two cups of white wine to reduce. I reduced that down until I had about a half a cup of liquid and strained it into a bowl for later, discarding the shells and shallot.
I sauteed the prawns for about a minute in the same pan with a little olive oil and then set them aside. Next, I sauteed some garlic and more chopped shallot, adding the saved stock at the end, and some chopped spinach. When the pasta was done, I added it to the pan with the garlic, shallot, roasted tomatoes, some additional chopped fresh tomatoes, stock, and then tossed all that with a bunch of spinach to wilt, then added the spot prawns and a little butter.
I served this topped with a bit of shaved romano cheese and some of the alderwood smoked sea salt I picked up the other day in Sitka from Alaska Pure Sea Salt.
So good!
Spot prawns are so much better than regular shrimp…so sweet and buttery flavorful. Love 'em! Also, did you know that spot prawns start their lives as males and then all of them at some point change into females?
Last night we grilled up some Alaskan Halibut, and tonight we're going to go out to dinner. We tried to get into Ludvig's Bistro up the road (recommended) while Tiffani and Deke were were but they were completely booked on Friday and closed for the holiday weekend after that, so we'll go tonight and toast Tiffani and Deke on their 8th anniversary.
