Mudsuckers Instead Of Turkey

Sick As A Dog On Gobble-Gobble Day

There were all kinds of plans for today.  Plans for crabbing, plans for "throwing the

ball around," plans for a brisk hike, plans for a homey Armenian holiday in Half 

Moon Bay courtesy of everyone's favorite surrogate nuclear family: the Baloians. But 

all these plans were summarily thrown out the window when Camilladilla suddenly 

sat up in bed at 04:30 this AM and announced:  "Oh my God, I think I'm sick."  Of all 

the days to be stricken with food poisoning!  Anyway, this storied champion of a 

wife, somehow managed to keep herself upright long enough to produce two 

sterling appetizers (proscuitto wrapped roasted pecans a la goat cheese and pear 

slices a la chevre) and a rice dish (Camilla's famous "forbidden rice") to 

compliment what no doubt would have 

been another Lisa Baloian/Cissy 

Baloian/Kat Covell-Baloian gastronomic 

tour de force.  But it wasn't meant to 

be.  The food poisoning returned with 

a vengeance at high noon and even 

now, at 18:13, 14 hours after the first 

attack, Camilladilla lies in bed after

yet another bout of the Linda Blairs, moaning and whimpering miserably... in fact 

I better go check on her... Now I'm back.  I think she's improving. Keeping the door 

open in case I am needed. Looks like I'm the only one here at H.Q. who will be 

eating dinner tonight. It'll be two top notch appetizers and "forbidden rice" which is

okay by me... I'm not the biggest turkey fan

anyway.  Hey wait a  minute.  Maybe this would 

be a good time to bust out the canned mud-

suckers! (see post from 11/13). Wow.  Canned

mudsuckers as a substitute for Thanksgiving turkey.

 How MFN of me!  All right, Camilladilla is snoring

away in bed.  Okay... here we are. Got my can of mudsuckers... Got my box 

of crackers... Lets see... opening the can right now. Maybe I should document this

moment.  I am probably the first non-Russian ever to open a can of byczki in the 

city of San Francisco.  And on top of that, to have the little buggers for 

Thanksgiving, Igor Litvin, eat your heart out!

The author poses with T.G. dinner: a can of byczki (bullheads)                                The can is opened.

 Contents revealed: mudsucker fillets stewed in tomato sauce                       Down the hatch. Byzcki on a cracker.

         The author considers the flavor of byczki  Hey... not bad!  Quite good in fact.  These Russians are on to something!  But why the goby-like face? 

  

Wow.  What a flavorful little fish!  Not "fishy" at all.  Quite sweet actually.  Way

better than monkeyface eel that's for sure.  Kind of unagi-like, in fact. The

tomato sauce was the perfect compliment--but I'd like to try them without it.

Guess I'll have to catch my own. Islais Creek sewer sluice look out, here I come. 

Huh... Time for a few more... These guys are great... I just polished off the

whole can. Somehow I didn't suspect that I'd actually like them.  Tell you what, 

I will eat these mudsuckers again.  Definitely... and at only $2.99 per can it's a

win-win for everybody (except of course the mudsuckers).

    

{The Monkeyface News editorial machine is aware that we are using

the terms "bullhead" and "mudsucker" interchangeably. In our waters a 

"bullhead" is a Pacific staghorn sculpin, and a "mudsucker" is either a 

longjaw or a yellowfin goby. The Russian word "byczki," however signifies

"bullhead" even though the creatures inside the can are "gobies" or by our

colloquial nomenclature: "mudsuckers." The Monkeyface News linguistics

staff is working round the clock to bring you this cutting edge 

information--not sure where else you might find such illuminating stuff

about mudsuckers and bullheads}.

        Our native goby:  the longjaw mudsucker 

Two days ago the MFN received an e-mail, regarding our earlier mudsucker 

post, (see 11/13) from esteemed marine biologist Milton Love, (who among 

other things happens to be the author of two of our favorite fish books:

Probably More Than You Want To Know About Pacific Coast Fishes and the 

weighty tome: Rockfishes of The North East Pacific.  With his permission we 

reprint his e-mail here in it's entirety:

Hi {Kirk}. 
Regarding mudsuckers - here is a paragraph from the draft of my new Probably More: 

"In an essay published in 1877, W. L. Lockington noted that the Chinese living around San Francisco Bay dug them out of mud banks and ate them. Then, perhaps because it was widely stated that the Chinese would eat any fish, he also noted that a “gentleman” [read white person] had acquired some from a Chinese fisherman “and that he had had about eleven specimens cooked, and found them good tasting, he thought, something like eels.” {MFN: the mudsuckers eaten by said "gentleman" were undoubtedly the native longjaw mudsucker, Gillichthys mirabilis, pictured above}.

 

Unfortunately, due to the fact that my Thanksgiving  byczki were filleted 

and soaked in tomato sauce it was difficult to determine the exact species. 

Nevertheless, due to the size of the chunks and the familiar pattern of the 

skin, The Monkeyface News editorial machine is going to go out on a limb 

here and say for the record that these were yellowfin gobies we just ate. 

Anyone who wants to prove me wrong is welcome to try.  In closing I leave 

another picture of a goby taken by the author after tremendous hardships 

in the salt ponds of Alviso.  

 The emperor of ballast water invasives: the yellowfin goby.  I'm fairly certain this is what I just ate.

Anyhoo... Happy gobble gobble day.  Goodnight...

I wish I could give a happy update of Camilladilla's condition, but she just 

woke up and is still sick... whoa... she's going on 16 hours here.  Better go 

make myself useful.

From 50 miles north of those terrible salt flats where gobies splash and 

frolic, this is Lombard of The Intertidal, signing out.

Happy Thanksgiving

(Of course you all realize that the entre for the first ever Thanksgiving

 dinner was American eel, right?)

Tune in next time for more fishiness...

--Kirk-out

                             

Comments

[Rachael]

Poor Camilla! But at least you had some good eats!

[Scott P]

So how often do you (please interpret this as plural you, not singular) get food poisoning? Myself, since I have found that the funky out of the way places tend to have the most interesting and, sometimes unusual flavors, succumb to it whenever I go wardriving for new eateries...

I think that while willing to try the (perhaps misnamed) lepard shark ceviche, it would have likely put me on a 3-day moratorium against anything solid...

[Monkeyface]

Hey Scott... just to clarify. Camilladilla's food poisoning had nothing to do with shellfish. In all these years I have never ever gotten sick from stuff that I picked/dug up/caught. Though I have gotten sick on canned clams and restaurant mussels. Thing is, if you pick them yourself and cook them yourself, you are constantly checking them out and looking for certain things--like dead mussels. And as long as you call the biotoxin number before you go you'll know where the bad algal blooms are. 1-800-553-4133. Also if you want to volunteer for the OEHHA you can go out into the field, collect a sample of mussels, send them to the lab, and find out the very next day if they are safe. Then go into the field and pick mussels or dig clams with no sense of foreboding at all. To volunteer call this number: 510 412-4635. Talk to Greg Langlois. I got the # off their website.