Yesterday I took the shrimp we bought the previous day at Flowers' Shrimp Shop and made one of our favorite recipes. It's a salad with a very unusual-sounding combination of ingredients, but it's surprisingly delicious. I first had it at the home of a friend who has her own personal chef. And the day I visited, with other friends, to play with a ladies' string sextet, the chef made this salad. The cold ingredients are romaine lettuce, grapefruit, bell peppers, avocado, and mushrooms.
Once you have everything prepped, you lightly sauté shrimp in a little olive oil. They used fajita seasoning, but I use our standby favorite seasoning, Tony Chachere's.
Toss it all together. The juice from the grapefruit makes up most of the dressing, but I also add a little olive oil and rice vinegar, and just a touch of soy sauce. It's a spectacular looking salad, and it tastes even better, with the cold fresh ingredients and the warm, spicy shrimp.
'Once we plated it up, I added some seasoned sunflower seeds for a little more crunch. Delicious! Don't let the unusual ingredients put you off. You owe it to yourself to try it.
After we digested a bit, we gathered up our fishing gear and decided to try our luck, for the first time. It was quite windy, but it has been for several days. We finally decided that if we waited for the wind to die down, it could be months!
We fished and fished and fished and fished... And the only bite I got was a crab eating the shrimp off my hook. So I shortened the leader a bit to keep from giving him too much of a free dinner. At one point my line felt heavier, and I was so excited...only to reel in a good sized clump of seaweed.
After the wind pushed my line over on a back-cast and caught my chair behind me, I decided to leave the fishing to Curt for a while and I went in search of the dolphins that we've sometimes seen in that little part of the bay. Eureka! I had much better luck at that than at fishing!
Finally I'd had enough fun fishing, so I went back to the house, but Curt tried another place for an hour or so longer. No luck there, either, but he got in a conversation with a fisherman and learned more about it. So of course we'll try again!
Today, Thanksgiving Day, we decided to walk around the harbor before starting dinner. It was even more windy, but not especially cold. We found our own personal flock of White Pelicans, who have set up housekeeping across the street from our cottage. What a treat that is!
As we strolled by the boats at harbor, we got to watch a reddish egret (left) and a great egret (right) who had staked a claim on one of the boats. They pretty well ignored each other...
He hopped down into the tank and we got to see him get several courses of his free meal for the day. The shrimp he grabbed were HUGE, and he had to work hard to get them down. It was hard to get a photo, because everything was the same color, but if you look real closely just behind and slightly to the left of the yellow float, you can just see his head poking up with a shrimp crosswise in his bill.
A patchwork quilt covers the bow end of the mast on this sailboat!
We found a few unusual birds...each cleverly made of a single piece of PVC pipe:
And from the far side of the harbor we could look across and see the roof of our cottage. It's the gray roof just below the American flag in the distance. That kind of shows you how close we are to the water. What a great place to live!
I'll have to cover the rest of the day later. It's getting time for this seacoast dweller to go belowdecks and crawl into her berth. Good night!
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