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
Poor Camilla! But at least you had some good eats!
Posted by: Rachael | 11/28/2009 at 10:56 AM
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...
Posted by: Scott P | 12/02/2009 at 08:02 AM
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.
Posted by: Monkeyface | 12/03/2009 at 07:14 AM