Stand Up and Count

It’s 2010 — the year of the Census. From coast to coast US census workers are going door-to-door to gather the last bits of data about who we are and where we live.

But did you know that right now, on every continent, someone is probably counting something, and it’s not just people? In these strange times species are disappearing from one place while others are appearing where they never were before. Scientists want to track these trends. This short slide presentation explains why such research is important.

No matter where in the world you live, chances are good that someone would like you to record data about some living thing residing somewhere near you. Citizen scientists are counting bats in my state of Connecticut, freshwater sponges in Wisconsin, and opossum in South Australia. In New York City volunteers are recruited for the Cricket Crawl. In California’s Central Valley the subject of interest is the long-billed curlew. They are searching all over the place for butterflies, fireflies, and ladybugs. The Great Backyard Bird Count, a joint project of The Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Audubon, takes place for four days each February.

There are opportunities to monitor water quality and invasive plant species. And for the generalist in the group, there is even a call out for people to record absolutely everything they observe in a location they visit regularly. These and many more opportunities can be found at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology website. 

There should be a project right for you  — no matter who you are or how much time you have on your hands. If by some chance you don't find one that is a perfect fit, you can use the tools at Citizen Science Central to organize your own.

Go outside and count something, even if it’s from your back porch while you are sipping something cool (or hot if you decide to count birds in February). Science needs you!

FYI In March I had decided to participate in the Lost Ladybug Project, but I have not seen another since that lucky day in early spring.

Meatless Monday: Make Your Own Butter

I often blog on food or food issues on Monday in support of Meatless Monday, one of several programs developed in the Healthy Monday project, founded in 2003 in association with Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Communications. Meatless Monday’s goal is “to help reduce meat consumption 15% in order to improve personal  health and the health of our planet.”

It’s vacation time. Some of you may have out-of-school kids who occasionally whine that they are bored. This DIY experiment might be just the boredom fix you need.

The idea for our Great Butter-Making Experiment came from my friend Kevin, who told me how easy it had been for him to make butter from organic cream he had purchased on sale. He sent the following synopsis:

“Leave an opened pint of heavy cream out overnight, pour it into a mixer or blender & whisk for about 10 minutes, voilà… I used organic cream which was on sale for $3.25. One pint yielded 14 ozs. of butter; the cheapest organic butter in the store went for $5.89.”

This sounded like a very good and very easy thing to try.

Kevin also posted a link to a video which showed how to make butter merely by shaking cream in a jar. “How green,” I thought. I clicked and I watched.




This outrageous and educational video by the eccentric Robert Krampf has been viewed over 81,000 times! Whether or not you decide to make butter, you have got to check this video out. Krampf made it look like so much fun, I decided that his method was the way to go.

With the thought of trying butter-making sometime soon, on my most recent visit to Whole Foods I bought a pint of organic heavy cream with a good date, and I set it in the fridge.

On Saturday I decided the time had come. Blueberries are in season, and I had bought a quart at CitySeed on Wednesday (too hot here to pick my own.) We both agreed these plump, sweet beauties would be excellent on pancakes topped with homemade butter. I duly set the cream out overnight —  guessing that “room temperature” was more likely to be in the room with the A/C set to  76° than in the kitchen where it was 85°.

The next morning we poured the cream into the jar. Don began shaking it, vigorously, once a second, as Krampf had instructed. Nothing much happened. After about ten minutes of this, I took the jar and, Ignoring Krampf, shook it back and forth vigorously. I soon ended up with a jar of whipped cream, with no liquid.

By this time the pancakes were almost ready, so I decided to switch gears and see if I could salvage the butter by use of a machine. I got out the Bamix, plunged it into the cream, and soon after had a nice jar of whipped butter. It looked beautiful when scraped into a paté bowl.

Our "whipped" butter

What had gone wrong? We were ready to blame it on an incorrect “room temperature” when I decided to read the cream carton. There was another ingredient besides cream listed — carageenan. Carageenan, derived from red seaweed, is added to products to keep them from separating. I suspect that no matter what the room temperature, this cream would never have turned into butter with the Krampf method.

I will have to give this experiment another try with 100% cream bought at the farmer’s market.

The whipped butter did taste great on the pancakes. And the next time I have extra cream, I will know to turn it into butter rather than pour it down the drain. You can read more about making mixer butter at Cooking for Engineers.

I hope you decide to give DIY butter a try. Just be sure to read the ingredients on the cream carton first. And you might consider making the butter before you start grilling the pancakes.

PS I mentioned our butter-making experiment to my mother-in-law, who grew up in rural Illinois during the Depression. She told me how the kids in her family would churn cream into butter which would then be traded for groceries at the local store. She added that the kids would fight over the buttermilk in the process. Some things never change.

Where Have All the Codfish Gone?

For at least one boat in the Chatham fleet, July 5 was a good day. We watched it dock and unload its catch at the Chatham Fish Pier late that Sunday afternoon. The crew came home with a considerable amount of cod. But I have been going to Cape Cod since the ’60s, and this is not the catch I remember as a kid, or even a decade ago. These cod were smaller and made up less than half of what was unloaded — most of the remainder was dogfish.

Dogfish, a species of shark, were rarely seen in the past — certainly not when cod were longlined. The Pier Host on duty explained that in longlining some 4500 hooks, spaced 6 feet apart, would each be baited by hand.  As soon as the line was set out, the fishermen would begin to haul in the catch. Each fish was alive and fresh, and the small fish could be thrown back. This was how our host used to fish. But baiting is labor intensive, and the bait fish hard to come by. Boats in the Chatham fleet all use gillnets now.

Dogfish, a type of shark.

Dogfish get caught in the nets along with the cod — both are groundwater fish. They are subject to regulations of the New England Fishing Management Council and are currently worth 15¢ a pound. Each boat is allowed to net 3,000 pounds a day (until the regional maximum of 12 million pounds is reached) which about pays for the trip’s gas. The dogfish are shipped to New Bedford for processing—the flesh is sent to the UK for fish and chips, the fin to Asia for shark fin soup, and the reminder goes to fertilizer. Nothing is wasted.

Seals patrol the pier area.

In days past only sea gulls patrolled the dock area, waiting to nab any fish that might drop as the catch was loaded into the lifts. Today both gray and  harbor seals are a common sight. Seals have been protected since the Marine Mammal Protection Act became law in 1972. A rarity in Chatham waters in the 1980s, they have since become commonplace. They feed on the same small fish that cod eat and traveled to the Cape in pursuit of food and have stayed there. Seals are voracious eaters and ruthless killers. They have been known to catch a large fish, to rip out its highly-prized internal organs, and to leave the remainder of the carcass on the beach. Seals are certainly not a fisherman’s friend.

Cod used to be the average person’s fish. I remember a price of $1.99/lb. This year it was being sold for nearly 5 times that – $9.99/lb.

Where have all the cod gone? Why are they so scarce off Cape Cod?

The short answer? Over-fishing.

In Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World (Penguin, 1997), Mark Kurlansky weaves a fascinating and well-documented tale of this remarkable fish, its impact on the world’s economy, and its twentieth century decline. Gastronomes will enjoy the latter pages which offer six centuries of cod recipes.

Fishermen have been chasing cod around the world for over a thousand years, ever since they discovered a way to preserve the fish, traveling farther and farther as the nearby stock grew scarce. It was upon the trade of salt cod that early entrepreneurs in Massachusetts made their fortunes. A ten inch female cod can lay 9 million eggs in a single spawn, and a world without cod would have been unimaginable to the American colonists.

Cod, with their signature white stripe.

But cod is now, without a doubt, endangered. The governments of Canada and the US have each put regulations in place in the hopes that the cod biomass can once again reach a sustainable level. There are 200 mile fishing limits off the coasts of both countries. Some areas in the Georges Banks are totally closed to fishing.  Other legislative constraints include size limits, catch limits, and gear restrictions. The Monterey Bay Aquarium has listed Atlantic Cod as a species to avoid.

And what about the day boaters in Chatham and Provincetown, the last remaining commercial fleets on Cape Cod? Besides the rules about how they fish and what they catch, they are also required to equip their boats with costly radar so their location is always known. They must travel farther out to fish, and the cost of fuel has gone up. The invasion of the seals is not helping the situation.

Many Chatham fishermen were born into fishing families and see their way of life endangered. Some have retired from commercial fishing to operate charter fishing boats or to offer seal tours. But others have chosen to remain in the fleet. They know the supply of cod must be restored for their way of life to be preserved. Many of them are supporting a community-based strategy to help their fishing fleet survive.

And did we eat cod while on the Cape? I have to admit we did. It is not the day boater’s type of fishing that has wrought the real damage. Supporting the local economy and indulging a craving for fresh seafood trumped the Monterey Bay Aquarium pocket guide this time. The fresh cod cakes and fish and chips tasted great.