Oyster Blog — Store News

  The new sign is up and running! We are very proud of it. But, alas, the a and the f in seafood are too close together. Whoops. If you look closely at this picture, you'll see Adam and the Gladys in the background, bringing in the oysters and clams for the day.

Two winters ago, on a cold November day when it was raining sideways and REALLY slow in the retail store, we started thinking about delicious fresh baked chocolate chip cookies. And so we started making them (from scratch!) to sell in the store. We make them with 1/2 wheat flour, 1/2 white flour, real butter, and real vanilla. They're real good. Granted, we probably sell most of them to the resident cookie monster, aka Adam the wholesale manager: But they're also developing quite a following with the local crowd. In the words of one customer, "They taste like someone's mom...

Larry from New Jersey had some clams, oysters, and smoked salmon sent to him as a birthday gift. We'd like to eat at Larry's house some day; he sounds like someone who knows food. Here's how he prepared the seafood: The Manila clams were simplicity itself. I just rinsed them in a colander, and added them to some simmering tomato-basil spaghetti sauce. I have a very good Italian deli nearby, which provided the sauce, though supermarket sauce would have done. After I added the clams to the sauce, I covered the saucepan, and they opened within six minutes or so....

That's a lot of tree. The giant 'cookie' came from a four hundred year old Douglas fir tree that fell down a long time ago. A big flood washed the tree down the canyon and left it serendipitously in a hayfield. We cut the cookies off the log about four years ago; they've been curing in a woodshed ever since. In the picture below, you can see that the tree nearly died when it was about 20 years old. Something damaged the bark on one side of the tree--either a bear ate it, or another tree knocked it off. The living side...

Here are two grainyhand hermits (Pagarus granosimanus) locked hand in hand. Or claw in shell. The larger male hermit crab, on the left, has his small left claw, which he normally uses for eating, firmly clamped down on the shell of a smaller female hermit crab. He'll drag her around with him until she molts, at which point he'll fertilize her eggs. Visit our March 17th post to learn more about hermit crabs. (Sorry that we can't link directly to the post. It's a work in progress.) Today's hermit crab entry is dedicated to the little girl who just stopped...