Date Tongs

As part of my healthy living regime, I eat muesli for breakfast a few times a week. I am not a natural muesli eater. This is more my style



Your usual muesli milord?
Bollocks to that Carson. I'll have double beans and black pudding, fried slice and a pickled egg


However, I am told by my doctors that the occasional bowl of muesli is good for my moral wellbeing. No added salt. No added sugar. So be it.


Having sampled the various alternatives on sale, and found many taste like this





I have finally settled on



which is OK once in a while EXCEPT it's got filthy little squares of disgustingly mushy, mushed up bits of dates mixed in.



Hello. I am a huge block of date paste. I can often be found in muesli, although I have no place in the human food chain. I am only there to keep the customers on their toes as they spend half an hour each morning picking through the muesli detritus to ferret out every last ghastly bit of me.


So every morning I can be found with my head in a bowl of muesli carefully sifting it through my fingers trying to  indentify all the lumps of date mush.


Until a few days ago, when my missus presented me with a pair of Date Tongs

Date Tongs


I can now be found of a morning daintily picking through my muesli and removing the offending articles. To date, I have collected quite a bit

...and that's just a month's worth...

I don't know what the hell's going on

Sorry team: I don't know what the hell's going on. I can't make my piccies appear here. The only thing I've done is install Windows10 and it's all gone tits up.


I am awaiting a callback from the IT department (aka my brother-in-law) but as the IT department is currently on holiday (inconsiderate oik), I'll have to wait till he comes back. In the meantime, if anyone knows what's happened and why all of a sudden my googlepics won't show up here, do leave a comment or email me, if that's still working.


Arse.


I shall however let you know about my date tongs shortly, pics or no pics



                       I say, do you hev Googlepics?
                       No, I was born like this

Crabs II: The Legend of Snooks Lane

So anyway, as I was saying, I got a conspiratorial whisper as to where I could buy the Crabs at the source.

Follow the road to Snooks Lane and carry on monsieur. Why I am telling you I do not know, as it cannot possibly profit me...

So feeling like Indiana Jones, off we went  late one afternoon, me, the missus and the mother in law. Over the bridge, past the railway terminal, searching for Snooks Lane and the fabled Crab Factory.

Snooks Lane you say? I beg you Sahib, turn back while you still can...

The pavement petered out, the lane got narrower, and the hill steeper. Me and the missus were OK, but my mother in law is not used to the wildness and lawlessness of the countryside. She left Cardiff when she was a teenager, and has lived in Central London ever since, where cars know their place, there are plenty of pedestrian crossings, traffic lights, and wide, even pavements. Having to hold on to my tottering 86 year old mother-in-law as she staggered up a bending lane with no pavement, ditches both sides, and maniacs coming round blind corners at unhealthy speeds reminded me once again, why I hate the countryside.

It was only the thought of finding Crab Eldorado, egged on the thought of getting one over on the Crab Ladies on the Quay that kept us going. Or rather kept me going. The other members of my party were rapidly losing interest.


After about ten days of hard trekking (OK, ten minutes) we came across

and then



Finally, finally, by the dying light of a late summer's evening, almost when all hope was lost and the M-I-L was down to the last of her Mint Imperials, did we eventually arrive at the fabled Lost City of S & J Seafoods of Snooks Lane



Yes. It's not exactly Shangri-La is it?

We lurched gratefully into the yard and threw ourselves on the mercy of the bunch of crabby old women in the back of the shop, as they were picking through a veritable mountain of crab parts


I engaged one of them in conversation whilst buying a hen crab (more dark meat).

"I heard from a reliable source that you supply the crab stall on Lymingtom Quay?"

"No, we don't. They have their own fisherman. We just supply local bars and restaurants. That'll be £6.50."

That cost me another bag of Mint Imperials.

Crabs

Just got back from holiday in Lymington. Lovely apartment on the quay. 6-8 of us in residence (some coming and going of participants over the fortnight). This is pretty much the view out of our window, if from a different angle

Still waiting for someone to fall in. Never seems to happen though.


From another window we can see

Hello, I only open occasionally, but I'm worth it


the little seafood stall down the cobbled street, next to the ice cream kiosk. It only opens Thur – Sun, from 10.00ish or so.

So come Saturday morning, I am sitting in the bay window, half reading and half watching the seafood stall shutter. About 10.10, up goes the shutter. I’m at the stall about one minute later, and there’s already a small queue. It is run, as far as I have been able to ascertain, by the wives of two crab/lobster fishermen.

One of them is giving the display cabinet a quick wipe, and blocking my view of the fantastic fresh crabs stacked up at one end. I crane my head to look round her.

“Shall I pose for you?” she says

“Oh..ah..haha…no, I was trying to look at your crabs”

“Oh, aren’t I worth looking at then?”

“Er..yes..I mean no…I mean…” and we all have a good laugh.

The crabs are all chalked up with numbers on them: 4.35, 5.50, 7.40 etc, indicating the price, but when I came a few years ago, my young son said, “is that the time they caught the crabs?”

So whenever I buy a crab from them nowadays the conversation goes something like “can I have one caught about 5.30?”

“how about this one, it’s a bit later: about quarter to seven. That OK?” (funny they never suggest getting an earlier one, always later!).

Then she said, “cock or hen?”

“I beg your parden?”

“Boy or girl?”

“Er…I’m not sure I know the difference” (titters all round. Cries of, “I thought you had kids?”). I then receive, in front of many interested bystanders, an impromptu sex lesson on crabs. Apparently, boy crabs have bigger claws, and hence more white meat, and girl crabs have smaller claws, but bigger body cavities to hold the eggs, and hence more dark meat. I prefer dark meat, so I came home with the freshest, pretty hefty, and beautiful looking girl crab.

Stuck it in the fridge, then we went off for a wander round the Saturday market that stretches way up the high street.




'Ow abaat a cauliflower love? Only one left...



I have absolutely no idea what I am selling


Got a jigsaw for any rainy days, the Sunday joint from a market butcher, shouting and screaming. A huge pork rib, enough for about 8 – 10 (here you go mate: call it a tenner). Then all the fresh veg for the roast – potatoes, leeks, carrots, fresh peas in the pod, cabbage etc etc, plus masses or fruit: cherries, strawberries, greengages, plums, nectarines, and lots of great salad items. Also a few other useless items one always somehow acquires in a market, then back for lunch.

While the others laid the table with newly acquired pickles (cider apple chutney v good), and cheeses (the Afterburner cheddar with chillies was exactly as stated), fresh sourdough bread, some deli meats, and a huge mixed salad, I got cracking – literally – with my crab. It’s time consuming, fiddly getting all that lovely crabmeat out of all the crevisses, and downright dangerous as bits of razor sharp shell fly about as you whack the rolling pin down on the claws.

But I love it, and after about half an hour of hard graft, you are looking at a bowl of pristine, fresh, light and delicate sweet tasting white crabmeat, and another bowl of fantastically creamy and wonderfully rich and tasty dark crabmeat: one of God’s great gifts to mankind as far as I am concerned.

I then made a tien of crab: mixed some of the white and dark meat together with a little mayonnaise, finely chopped spring onion, fresh black pepper, and half a finely diced avocado. Shaped it into a round, and served.

Yes. Mine looked more like a dull green splat on a plate, but I forgot to take a photo

Gigantic sandwich made from thickly sliced fresh sourdough bread, plenty of unsalted butter, lettuce, thick layer of crab, and a smear of apple cider chutney. Crisp mixed salad, and a plum tomato salad with mozzarella.

Perfection.


However, perfection looked like it could be improved upon, as a passerby on the quay whispered to me that I could get the crabs from the same place the seafood kiosk got them: fresher and cheaper.


To be continued...