Ty and I have some fun friends, Mark and Robin, who live on Lake Conway. They invited us out last weekend. Our friend Sujith went along. We took two canoes out and saw an osprey nest. The nest was so huge that we thought it could be a bald eagle nest.
The larger osprey squawked at us and then took off in large circles around us, performing jet ski-like maneuvers through the bald cypress maze that is Lake Conway. We watched the smaller one for a long time. It was a more juvenile creature with white splotches. Mark remarked that it gave the bird an Andy Warhol air.
Next time I’m going to bring the nice camera.
Hi, I’m Julee, your cruise director on the Love Canoe.
We took a garden tour through tomatoes, red lettuce and the corn canoe!
We have been really talking up the cotton gin waste compost mix we got from Freyaldenhoven’s Greenhouse of Conway, so Mark and Robin got a load for their canoe planter. I brought them some multiplier onion seed my grandfather smuggled into the country when he immigrated.
For dinner, Robin made a great cold potato squash soup from The Enchanted Broccoli Forest. Mark grilled up some salmon and catfish with curry and without. I definitely prefer salmon, but when you’ve just canoed Lake Conway, you need to eat some catfish.
I’m so glad I tried it, it was definitely the best catfish I ever ate. Normally, I prefer fried catfish because it seems to keep all of the moisture in, and give some shape to the otherwise flaky mass. Mark has got a secret to grilling catfish, and I think he derived it from years of cooking other fish. He leaves the skin on the salmon, and cooks it skin side down. This creates a char buffer, but also the skin has a layer of fat next to the meat that keep the fish moist, but the fats rise up through the meat to cook it.
Catfish do not have the same sort of skin, and it gets discarded in the cleaning process. To make up for this lack of fatty buffer, Mark cooks each catfish fillet on a flat of bacon. He says sometimes the bacon crisps up, sometimes it isn’t as well cooked. The catfish is always the same uncharred moist goodness.