Rice and Peas with Trout

Not quite a soup, but something closer to a broth stew, this dish is a quick way to add together some easy, edible and healthy favorites.

 
The recipe itself calls for a variety of ingredients that could be eliminated in order to simplify, like chopped onions, fresh thyme, white wine, horseradish or even parmesan cheese.  I chopped up half an onion to sauté with oil and butter then added what is called arborio rice, a short grain Italian rice, which is fat, starchy and very absorptive when cooked, into the mix along with three cups of chicken stock to soak, and some good frozen peas to cook.

Along the way, the recipe calls for cooked trout, a difficult ingredient to find unless you have your own private catch stockpiled in the freezer. At our grocery store, fresh white fish of any kind comes and goes, but there is always the frozen Alaskan cod available. I defrosted that, seasoned it with lemon pepper, drizzled with oil, and broiled until it started to flake under the heat, then draped those pieces over the arborio rice combination.  I didn't add parmesan cheese, and I didn't add horseradish – what I was left with though was a very clean three part hot meal of peas, rice and fish.  We all agreed trout would have "added" that little extra fine-tuning, but will have to wait for next time.

Island Living

The idea behind the scene above, at Sunset Beach over on the west side of Captiva Island, is that if you are in fact going to eventually get buried alive, well damn it if it doesn't go better with a Tiki Hut  glass of afternoon Chardonnay.

The wave runners here are nosed towards the medicinal waters off of Caya Costa, shelling mecca -- the next island on the great chain of barrier islands.  The Land's End off of Captiva is a narrow channel, barely large enough for two cabin cruisers to pass each other, and on into the marina where the manatees poke their snouts up above waters in boat slips for Harbourside diners to see before they head into eat.

Habourside Restaurant, Land's End

When you walk along the north tip of Land's End, the name of this area resonates, here at the Red Herring Strait where you can see the location where some wishful thinkers once tried to build their dreams on essentially an unhabitable island.  They add to the mystique of the possibility of living on a deserted island...across from a resort.

Under these same waters the bottle-nose dolphins thrive beautifully.  It is shallow in these waters, only four and a half feet deep in all directions, so sharks do not thrive and the dolphins don't have to ward off

any major predator.  On the dolphin Cruise, the Lady Chadwick, hard to believe, attracts our swimming friends under the ocean, because it provides a free wake to glide behind.  Nine-five percent of all cruises spot dolphins.

For us, they appeared around halfway out to sea, so to speak, jumping up into the air along the side of the ship, flipping and cross-swimming as if true showmen.  The captain told us to clap and howl when the surfaced – the dolphins are attracted to the sounds and the safety of the steady of direction of the large ship.

 Back on land, the Green Flash and Doc Ford's restaurants are nice places to sit on sturdier ground and enjoy the food and beverage.

Green Flash overlooking the Captiva chain

Doc Ford's on South Seas Resort

At Keylime Bistro, home of the world famous key lime pie

Ding Darling

On the way to Captiva you pass 7,608 "acres of precious refuge" off the coast of Sanibel, part of the National Wildlife Refuge at the J.N. 'Ding' Darling Park.  Here you might see any number of 272 known species of birds, 60 species of reptiles and amphibians, 35 species of mammals, and 102 species of fish and 14 threatened or endangered species outright.  In other words, here down at the mixed waters of these islands in the Gulf of Mexico, you visit an absolute hotbed of wildlife.

Ding Darling himself was an interesting character, originally from Iowa, a syndicated political cartoonist and friends with Wisconsin's own Aldo Leopold in the 1930's, he turned his passion for fishing the Florida island waters into a passion for preservation at a time in American history when that idea didn't really exist, at least in mainstream culture: natural resources, in all its forms, was there for the taking, not the giving back to.

We got a kick out of this cartoon, located in the museum portion of the preserve, for its mocking of the zealously unrestricted hunter.  What Darling recognized even back at a time when these attitudes would have been exaggerated, was that unrestriction simply leads to extinction of species, and therefore there needed to be, he countered, certain parcels of land, water and air that were off limits to hunters and industry, or else we know the consequences.

The sign in the top photograph is at the trailhead of the Indigo trail, a beautifully kept gravel trail that moves through two miles of deep mangroves, lined on both sides by estuary creeks.  We came out at noon, under an overhead sun, and not a lot of wildlife was stirring, so we decided to walk back to the car and enter into the 4-mile long nature preserve drive, lined here by large and open waters surrounded by small island chains and teeming with flocking and feeding birds.

Near the end of the drive (air conditioned by this point in the rented car), we saw three cars pulled alongside the road and viewers gawking down at the edge of one of the pools.  We got out of the car and, down at the bottom of the small bank, finally our Florida alligator, sunning in the shallows as still as if it were a statue.

We peaked up over the edge of the bank and took our picture along with the handful of others.  As we stood in sort of half amazement and half fear, I looked over to the thick bushes about five feet to our right and saw a very dark shadow lying still in the heavy shade.  A second alligator. This one so well hidden nobody had yet seen it but we were all walking ever closer toward it in order to get our snapshots.  As I pointed out this second one to others, grandmothers began to briskly walk in the other direction and moms holding the hands of their little kids scooted back to their cars.  We slowly moonwalked back to our own car, a little shaky, but knowing we certainly saw the real thing.

At the head of Indigo Trail, Ding Darling

Under the Ficus Trees

The visitor to Captiva can imagine the centuries of adventure here as you stand under the ancient ficus trees which are especially common in the Fort Myers, Coral Gables and Sanibel areas.  This one is growing in the entry parking lot near registration and part of what is called the Resort's 'Scout About' program, a wonderful little kid-friendly program that entices kids to explore some fifteen locations scattered about the grounds.  Each find is a wooden stand that describes something about the natural habitat and offers a color coded wristband.  Collect all 15 and turn them in for an explorers wristband gift and your name on the wall of the Scout About explorers shack.  The two explorers above, map in hand, ran around the island seeking clues, then took turns reading the location descriptions out loud.

This Scout About was a fun one.  To get here, at night, we passed by a little walk-over holding pond that advertised a few signs warning not to feed the alligators please.  We never did see alligators at this particular spot, mostly just families and strollers, but we kept a small part out of the corner of our eyes especially reserved for the low-lying green shadows.  We walked to the backside of one of the resort complexes to the dunes overlooking the roaring of the ocean.  This area was not lit by

streetlamp and without the aid of the small light on the iPhone, completely dark in among the chest high dune brush.  The sun had set and the ocean, without eye-adjustment to the dark, looked literally like another planet.  Carly quickly read the description and we hustled off with our wristbands, living to see another day on the island.

Near Land's End, Captiva, the chairs set up for a wedding

"They picked up the gear from the boat. The old man carried the mast on his shoulder and the boy carried the wooden boat with the coiled, hard-braided brown lines, the gaff and the harpoon with its shaft. The box with the baits was under the stern of the skiff along with the club that was used to subdue the big fish when they were brought alongside."                                     –Old Man and the Sea

                                               




The time had come to tidy up the fire pit by piling sand over the small flames but making sure to recover the warm periwinkle shells.  The Grandfather had handed the granddaughter a mesh bag to bundle her

shells and she had ducked off upshore in search of "a pair of Angel Wings," or she hoped, the "Baby's Ear."  She had flung the bag over her shoulder and half of her body tipped as she ran as a shadow, the 

coarse clinking of shells following her.  The grandfather shook his head and muttered to himself, "so hard to get them here, so hard to leave."  He could envision faded images of his own children, as if in square photographs, little monographs written perhaps in the corner, of the same thing, the same story over and over.  'It will come to them soon enough.  Every day is the adventure, of course.  Every day.  Not then, not tomorrow, but here and now.' The day would come when the granddaughter herself, a grown woman, would break the monotony of a day at the beach in Captiva and suggest a solo passage across the bluestream strait and glide over dolphins.  He smiled and lifted the noses of the two kayaks that had laid dormant on the hot dunes for half a day now.  The Willets had long gone; the last fin had submerged a hundred yards off beach; a spinnaker still stood 

a jagged silhouette like a toy in the distance.  He called her name several times, but not too loudly, the kayaks now bobbing as if they weighed nothing.  She arrived with the bag full and her other arm, cupped up against her sternum, glistening with dark shells.  "What about these?" she asked, "they don't fit in the bag, but I will never see these again.  What if there is another Junonia?" she asked, the innocent pout of the face saying everything. "Bring them if you can," he said, "I have an idea."  He lifted her from under her arms into the pit of her seat.  "You can tie your bag to the stern rope and drag it through the water, so you can paddle, how about that?"  The pout had turned to a smile. She carefully placed the other shells onto the floor of the kayak in a perfect order.  He pushed her off and the nose cut through the soft pastel

water toward the next landmass where palm trees, wide and black, stood immoveable against the coming night wind.