Capturing wild food

Occasionally throughout the year I have opportunities to get great locally grown or wild grown food.  My parents keep a sizable garden most years, and I frequently get strawberries, tomatoes, butternut squash, etc depending on how the season happens to be.  There's also a few large patches of wild blueberries that grow near where I grew up.  It's currently scallop season out on Nantucket Island and I'm fortunate enough to bring some home when there's a good season.

It's a good season. 

Scallops have blue eyes, one along each of the ridges at the edge of the shell.  They have one large muscle that they use to open and close the shell rapidly, creating a jet of water out the back and allowing them to move along the sea floor.  This muscle is what we eat, and on the Nantucket bay scallop, this muscle is small, sweet and extremely rich.

We go out at low tide, when its shallow enough to wade out into the bay, and a rake/net like the one above is pushed along the bottom, stirring up scallops, weeds and other shellfish from the bottom.  My dad has become quite an expert at finding them, some of the better pushes can find 20 or 30 at a time.

These are then sorted, discarding any junk, empty shells, and scallops that are too small or do not show a growth ridge, indicating that they've had one breeding season and are legal to harvest.  The sorting table shown is my dad's design.  

A couple hours work with my dad pushing and Matt and my brother sorting, and we have our bushel quota for the license.  A bushel yields about 6 pounds of cleaned scallops.  

My dad openen the scallops, using a shellfish knife to pry the shell open and leaving the uncleaned half shells for Matt, my brother and myself.

The guts are then pulled away from the muscle, leaving just the half shell with the muscle stuck to it.  The muscle is then cut away from the shell and saved.  

The discarded shells and other material is dumped at a public drop off dumpster closer to town. 

The odor is rather strong.  

We prepared some of them ceviche for today's lunch, soaked for about 24 hours in lime juice to cook the outer layer and give the scallop a nice citrus flavor.  The lower picture shows how deep the citrus cooking soaked into the meat.  We used a recipe my Mom found at Jan's Sushi Bar

http://www.janssushibar.com/avocado-scallop-ceviche/