How to Catch Crabs By Hand

How to Catch Crabs By Hand

Crabbing with a Net

Blue crabs will get quite large in the Chesapeake, especially in the fall after they have fed all summer long on bay nutrients. Photo Credit: Charlie Petrocci

The simplest crabbing method (in terms of equipment required) is the dip net. With a long-handled net you can wade a cove or shoreline, on foot or from a boat. When you spot a crab you dip and net it. Put your catch in a basket or cooler. This method requires greater patience and hand-eye coordination than the line methods.

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Drop Lining or Chicken Neckin'
This is catching crabs by hand on a sing line (or string) with bait tied to the end of it - usually chicken necks.

What you will need:

• A line (ball of string) - string is easy on the hands to control and pull in - and the crabs really don't care what you use.
• A small stick - (maybe 8-12 inches long) to tie your line to
• Bait - raw chicken necks or raw fish heads. Most local grocery stores carry chicken parts you can use for crabbing. Some crabbers swear by bull lips. Others use salted eel. Bait shops and dockside fish markets will also sell you leftover fish heads. Crabs will pretty much eat any uncooked meat but these are what most people use.
• A small net - to help wrangle those ornery critters
• A cooler, a tall bucket, or a bushel basket with a lid - for your catch - Some folks keep their crabs in a live well in the water, which helps them to live longer.
• Gloves - to wear when handling the crabs
• A buddy - because two sets of hands are better than one - and it is always more fun and safer on the water with a friend along.
• A ruler - or some other way to measure the size of your catch.

What to do:
1. When you get to your crabbing spot, tie one end of a 5-6 foot line on to your stick
2. Tie a piece of your bait securely at the other end of your line
3. Drop your bait into the water holding securely onto your stick.
4. Wait for the tug of the crab eating your bait.
5. When you feel a nibble, slowly raise the line to the surface. Go slowly and try not to scare the crab. Gently reel in your line wrapping it around your stick until the crab is hanging in the air.
6. Either drop the crab into your bucket or use your net to grab your prey and then drop it in the bucket from the net.
7. Crabs should not be without water or air for too long. Crabs can live in coolers with ice because the ice slows down their system. Never cook and eat a dead crab. Eat your crabs the same day that you catch them.

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Crab Traps
Collapsible crab traps are used in a similar way to a drop line. They can be purchased at most bait shops or hardware stores on the Eastern Shore. Don't forget, you'll still need something to keep your catch in.

1. Fasten your bait to the bottom of the trap.
2. Fasten a sturdy line to the trap.
3. Lower the trap from a dock or boat.
4. When a crab goes in to feed, pull the string and trap the crab. Then hoist it ashore and drop into your bucket or basket.

Haldikolyacha Patolis (Turmeric Leaves Patolis)

Turmeric Leaf Patholis are different from Jackfruit leaf patholis.

Mom made some when I was home last week.
Couldn't resist putting the picture up.


For the recipe : Visit http://www.mangaloreworld.com/content/view/491/202/

Turkish Delight

One of my groups had a discussion about Turkish Delights & Vivek gave this link.

Looks kinda like a marshmallow



U can get the recipe at http://www.bbc.co.uk/kent/food/kids/turkish_delight.shtml

Recipe : Pandi Curry - Coorgi Pork Curry

Not too sure how authentic it is. But I got it from an old recipe book of my grandma's :

I have lots of pork recipes. I'm Mangi & we do love pork.

I approximate a lot in my recipes, I don't measure before cooking. so i hope i can give reasonably clear details.

for 1 kg pork

Cut pork into medium size pieces. Wash & smear with 1 tsp turmeric powder, 1 tsp chilli powder & salt to taste in a large pot.

grind coarsely together
4 large red onions
8-10 cloves garlic
5-6 green chillies
1/2" ginger

Roast and powder finely (or use powdered versions)
1 tbsp corriander seeds
1/2 tsp mustard seeds
2 tsp cumin seeds
2 tsps black peppercorns

Add the ground masala & a cup of hot water to the pork & let it cook well. (Pork needs to be cooked thoroughly to kill any traces of parasites)

When almost cooked, add the masala powders (I also like to add 2-3 bay leaves - large leaves different from curry leaves - at this stage for an aroma, but this is more a Mangi thing than a Coorgi thing)

When well cooked, add 3 tbsps vinegar or Kochampulli according to your choice of sourness. There should be a thick gravy for the curry.

(Note : I add the kochumpulli when grinding the masala, but it turns the curry a darkish black when ground)

(Hint : Soak Kochumpulli for 5 minutes in a little hot water to start the release of flavors which sometimes gets stalled in a thick gravy)

Recipe: Sannas - (Rice Cakes)

Soak separately (at least 4 hours) :
1/2 kg boiled rice
250 gms raw rice

Grind both varieties of rice together with milk of 1 coconut (1 packet of Dabur Homemade coconut milk also works)

Add salt to taste & a little dry yeast. Put in a large vessel with space to ferment. Cover with a cloth & allow it to fement.

Steam in greased moulds around 15 minutes in a steamer. Much less in the microwave. Idli moulds will do fine if u dont have sanna moulds. The shape will be different though



This is what they should ideally look like
They go great with any coconut based curry or pork.



That's Nana's Pork Indad in the picture.

Are you a gourmet snob?

Brilliant Article in The Guardian by Self-confessed gastronome Tim Hayward on 10 tell-tale signs that you love food a little too much.

Friday June 23, 2006
The Guardian

The chef's table
Located inside the kitchen, this concept has been introduced in several restaurants (though Gordon Ramsay's is still considered the ultimate) and throws foodies right in among the fire and knives. Most foodies have never worked in a professional kitchen, so they are oblivious to the deep, psychotic hatred that cooks hold for anyone or anything that distracts them during service. Still, dining sumptuously with a table of yapping sybarites while surrounded by overheated manual workers does display a certain, pre-revolutionary elan. The fact that they hate you and are armed with knives and boiling fat merely adds a seasoning of danger.

Ironic food
Throughout history chefs have amused diners with little culinary jokes: roast suckling pigs with peacock wings, pies full of blackbirds; not, admittedly laugh-out-loud hysterical but enough to enliven a dull banquet. The modern equivalent - "ironic" food - has a far more vital purpose than mere entertainment. Foodies chortle wryly at a foie gras hamburger in a brioche bun for the same reason that people laugh loudly at all the references in Shakespeare in Love - to make sure you're aware exactly how clever they are.

Ordering 'off-menu'
Having managed, by luck or influence, to get a booking at a top restaurant, most people would be happy to choose from the menu. A really high-grade foodie regards the menu as a list of raw materials and, in a jaw-dropping display of arrogance, will discuss with the waiter a completely new combination of the available ingredients. Ordering "off-menu" is the foodie equivalent of skiing off-piste - risky, performed by those with more confidence than ability, but extraordinarily impressive if you can carry it off.

Kitchen slang
Foodies love the arcane patois of the professional kitchen and, whenever possible, use it in general conversation. "Frying off", sounds gratifyingly professional, which, of course, it is, in the right circumstances. "I'll just pour two pints of industrial-grade grease into this metre-square brat pan, fry off 800 battery chicken breasts, slap them under the heat lamps and hope no one dies on my shift." That's professional. "I'll fry off this Marks & Spencer salmon fishcake," on the other hand, is just absurd.

Foodie/chef relationship
Foodies believe that no one appreciates great food like they do, except maybe the person who cooked it. They believe they have a bond with the chef and that making a little fuss in the restaurant, showing the staff that they know what they're about, will result in better service, better food and ultimately a visit by the man in white to meet the erudite fellow gastronaut on table eight. No one has been brave enough to ask chefs how they feel about this "bond" but it's a fair bet that anyone who calls you out in the middle of service to have their ego massaged with a discussion on the provenance of your mushrooms is not going to stay your best mate for long.

Fats
A collection of oils arouses little comment these days, (at least three single-estate olive oils and a bottle of Moroccan Argan are currently de rigueur) but extreme foodies also collect solid fats. Pork, duck, beef dripping, rendered pancetta trimmings, are all saved in little jars at the back of the fridge. Sometimes at the end of the meal the host may take a favoured friend over to view this little collection, proudly pointing out the goose fat left over from Christmas. Few civilians, with the exception of mass murderers, are entirely comfortable with this disturbingly forensic display.

Molecular gastronomy
A term coined in 1969 by a French physicist called Hervé This, who was attempting to popularise science through cooking. Foodies have embraced this as the nearest thing to a movement currently available. "Molecular gastronomy" is to blame for foams, food eaten blindfold, liquid nitrogen in the kitchen and desserts served in syringes. Only a real foodie can say "Molecular gastronomy" with an entirely straight face and without making little quotation marks with his fingers.

Outrageous equipment
Now that merely "professional" equipment is available to any oaf with a credit card, "specialist" or "bespoke" kit is a foodie essential. Take knives as an example. Somewhere in a back street in Tokyo there's a brilliant, wizened sashimi chef who was first allowed to slice fish after 20 years of washing dishes for one of the great masters. This sensei has been cutting sashimi for longer than you've been alive. He doesn't need a £900 hand-forged sashimi knife, individually weighted to fit his hand - though, apparently, a foodie who throws the occasional dinner party for friends in Muswell Hill does.

Travel
The problem with the UK's culinary renaissance is that it's now too easy to get great food. What was cutting-edge ethnic cuisine five years ago is now available to anyone who can pierce the film and nuke it. For a foodie to maintain distance from the merely discerning, travel and research have become essential. We're not talking about touring France for the 3-star restaurants here - that's for retired solicitors - we're talking Vietnam for the frogs.

Collecting 'restos'
American foodies are in a different league and have taken to gastronomy with a frightening enthusiasm. They began the trend for "collecting" Michelin-starred restaurants, a sort of culinary Munro-bagging which reduces the sublime to the level of "extreme" sport. They're also responsible for the most egregious foodie pretension, just beginning to creep into British usage, using the term "resto" as shorthand for restaurant. Pray God we can pull together as a nation and stop this in its tracks.

· Tim Hayward is UK editor of the website eGullet.org