More weekend cooking fun

In addition to the great Caprese salad I made, I also made a great main dish Monday night.

Tilapia with tarragon butter and Swiss chard.

I really like tilapia. It is a nice mild fish that is easy and fast to cook.

Usually I save that for an after-work meal. But it sounded so good, I couldn't wait and went ahead and made it on my night off.

This has a lot of my favorite flavors: tarragon, lemon, shallots.

And it was easy.

And it would be easier if the chard (which is more labor intensive in the cleaning) was replaced with some of that pre-washed spinach in a bag.

Hey, you gotta do what you gotta do sometimes, right?

Tastes like summer

I am so lucky here in Southern California.

I have access to great, fresh produce pretty much all year long.

I have a Ralphs Fresh Fare, a Whole Foods and a Trader Joe's all within easy reach.

I have local farmers markets not too far away on Saturdays and Sundays and Tuesdays.

Yes, I am lucky.

But even with this year-round abundance, some things just taste better at certain times of the year.

Like tomatoes in summer.

And all it took to inspire last night's appetizer salad was just to see a little basket of lovely tomatoes at Whole Foods.

I wasn't even planning an appetizer until I saw these babies.

Then all I could think about was making a Caprese salad.

So that is exactly what I did.

At least dinner got cooked

After diving yesterday I was planning to go home and do some housework.

That really didn't happen.

Mostly I squandered the rest of the day.

I did get the scuba gear rinsed and set out to dry.

After that, not much.

But I did manage to cook a decent dinner.

Chicken Marsala with some simple pasta and steamed baby green beans.

Today I really do need to get to some of these chores.

It has been a while since I slept in, not even setting an alarm. And since I didn't go to bed until well after midnight, I knew I would sleep well.

I did. I woke up at 7 a.m., which is just a little earlier than the normal alarm time. But I went back to sleep.

Until 10 a.m.

And now it is almost noon. So I need to get busy.

I have a floor to mop.

Calm day at Vet's Park

Me, with Redondo Beach Pier in the background.

Veteran's Park, Redondo Beach, Calif.

Sept. 14, 2008

Logged dive: No. 14

In with: 2600 psi

Out with: 500 psi

Max depth: 45 feet

Bottomtime: 40 minutes

Manfriend and I were determined to get in a real dive after last week's aborted mission.

We got a bit of a late start, but made it to Veteran's before 9 a.m.

A quick look at the water showed that it was about as flat as it could be.

We geared up easily and headed down the stairs to the sand.

I decided that I was going to try the ankle weights on my tank this time instead of on my ankles.

They get draggy as the dive progresses and the feeling of them on my ankles makes me think my fins are slipping off.

I still need the weight to sink, but I figured it would be fine on the tank.

There was no surf to speak of and we made it out easily with a short surface swim.

The water was pretty green, but we were there so we decided to go for it and dive.

Me again. It was a little sandy down there.

We submerged in about 15 feet of water and started west. Visibility was pretty bad, maybe about 5 feet. There was a bit of a current pushing us north, but we kept on our course.

Tiniest starfish I have ever seen. That is in the palm of my hand.

On the way toward the shelf, we saw the usual sand dollars and starfish and flounder.

I was having trouble with my buoyancy and with my feet. Darn things wanted to float up. It was making it really tough to stay balanced and I was struggling a bit.

As long as I was moving, it was not that bad. But as soon as I slowed down, floaty feet.

Which means my feet were heading for the surface, but my torso was still on the bottom. So there I was, head over feet in about 40 feet of water.


MF was kind enough to take the weights off my tank and put one on each ankle. OK. From now on, ankle weights. No matter how draggy they get.


The dive was much improved after this.


We went just along the edge of the shelf for a while. There were little bits of kelp that seemed to be more interesting today than normal.


On one piece there was a small nudibranch. As I was looking at that, a fish caught my eye in the kelp. MF later said it was a kelp fish. Go figure.

Kelp fish.

Nudibranch.

That black thing is my finger, just to show how small the nudibranch was.

And then, just as I was about to move on, something else caught my eye. I thought it was a piece of the stringy part of the kelp. But it was a very long, thin fish. Almost snake-like. A pipe fish.

You guessed it... Pipe fish.

MF got lucky here and managed to get the kelp fish,
nudibranch and pipe fish all in one shot.

Slimy snail thing in its shell.

We also saw a big, slimy looking sea cucumber, a snail of some sort hiding in it giant shell and a guitar fish, which is a type of ray according to what MF found online later.
MF tried to get a picture of the guitar fish, but it was too fast and swam away in a flash.
It was maybe 2-3 feet long.


That was in the sand as we were heading back in, maybe in about 15-20 feet of water.


In the same area we saw some other creature that we could not identify.


It camouflages itself with sand, but has these little antennae like things all over the surface.

The underside is purple and it looks almost like some sort of strange mushroom.


Very cool.




There also was this big clump of mussels.

With these strange finger-like things growing out of it.

Then it was time to go in. My air was getting low.

After quick surface peek to see where we were, we swam south and then west a bit and surfaced again in about 10 feet of water.

After a short swim to where we could stand, we stopped to remove our fins then walked out.

None of that sand-eating stuff this week.

There still were no waves at all. Perfect.

I was able to walk out easily.

Then a quick cleanup followed by a cheap pancake breakfast at a place not too far from the beach. We then went to the dive shop to refill the tanks for next time. I also bought a dive knife and a small light.

After that, home to clean all the gear and spend the rest of the day doing mostly nothing.

Excellent!

Week in review

It's just been one of those weeks of work, sleep, work, sleep.

I can't really think of anything interesting that I did.

How sad. I didn't even cook anything new or exciting.

Today I will be making guacamole and salsa to take to a barbecue in honor of my nephew's birthday. He turned 2 yesterday.

Amazing. I can't remember where the time went between when I first held this perfect, beautiful baby to now.

He is a kid, with words and attitude and, yes, even opinions in his own way.

Family barbecues are always fun. Even better that I am off work on a Saturday for a change and get a three-day weekend.

I will have time to get in some fun and some chores.

Tomorrow may include diving. Manfriend is working on some home improvement projects at his place, so the diving depends on how he feels after doing that all day today.

Monday will be chores.

I know, I know... I lead an exciting and glamorous life here in the big city.

A little experiment

Yum. Pasta.

I had not made any for a while and was craving it tonight.

I played around and came up with penne with asparagus and grilled chicken in vodka cream sauce.

Or something like that.

It was so good. Manfriend was digging it, too.

Buon appetito.

Or something like that.

Lots of divers, no actual diving

Not for me anyway.

Sunday was supposed to be another dive day at Vet's Park in Redondo Beach.

Manfriend and I got to the parking lot by 8:30.
We checked the surf and, since it looked no worse than the week before, decided to gear up and head down.

I am definitely getting faster with getting my gear together and getting into the wetsuit, etc.

Once we were both ready to go, we headed down the stairs to the sand.

Yep. It looked less surfy than the week before. The waves were crashing at waist high instead of head and shoulder high. There was a fair amount of surf, but since it was shallower, I felt fine with it.

The plan was to get out past where the surf was breaking, get the fins on and swim out.

I made it out and got one fin on while I was in a place where I could still touch bottom.
I was about to put the other fin on when MF, who had just passed the surf zone, raised his hands.

In one hand he had his fins. In the other hand, he had his camera... Oh wait...
No he didn't.

Crap.

Crap, crap, crap.

Somehow in wading through the waist high waves, the camera had slipped from his hand and was nowhere to be seen.

The water-tight housing is clear, but with a lot of red all over it. And it is supposed to float.

We figured it would pop up.
It did not.

I took off the fin and we waded back to shore.

Scanning the shore and surfline we saw no sign of the camera.
In order to look for it, we dumped our BCs, tanks, weights and fins in the sand.
Back in the water with masks and snorkels, we tried to find the camera.

No luck.

All I saw was sand swirling around. Visability was bad, even in waist-high water.

Surf was still breaking, churning things up pretty good.

No camera.
And I was getting dizzy from looking through the mask at swirling sand.
We swam out a little further, past the surfline.
Still nothing.

Back on the sand we walked up and down the shore a little bit.
Still nothing.

Finally, MF decided that it was just gone.
Which totally sucked.

As he said, it's not that it was all that expensive of a camera. But the camera combined with the housing combined with the memory card, well that added up.

Not to mention the pictures on the card that he had not downloaded yet.
Bummer.

So, with that, and with the waves now picking up and me not feeling good anymore about making a dive, meant that we were done.

We rinsed off as best we could. Setting the gear in the sand meant that it was extra sandy and would require thorough soaking and cleaning later.

Back in the parking lot we got cleaned up and changed and packed everything back in the car.

Then we decided to go back to the shore to give one last look for the camera.

We saw nothing near where we had gone in the water.
Turning to the north, we saw a few divers coming out.

These people were hard-core. They had three tanks on their backs and one guy had another tank at his side. I wondered where they had been with all that air.

Then, just as I was ready to turn back toward the stairs, one of the divers held up a camera.

It took a second to register. It was MF's camera.

Wow.

MF asked the guy, "Hey, where did you find that camera?"
The diver, who we later learned was named Jeff, said he had found it out well past the surf zone bobbing in the water.

Amazing. They came in a bit north of where we had gone in.

Lucky day for MF.
All the little crevices of the housing were pretty well crusted with sand. But the camera inside was intact and dry. Excellent.

After this little bit of good fortune, we headed back to the car and then to Old Marineland site (Long Point) to meet up with another group of divers who were barbecuing in honor of a couple of birthdays.

Some shrimp with a simple season and then grilled and
the pork tenderloin that I marinated all night before this. Yum!

My contribution, a cous cous salad and a couple of these pork tenderloins to throw on the grill.
Oh yeah, and beer and the fixing for some tasty screwdrivers.

Korean ribs and shrimp, in progress. There were two grills working
and plate after plate of meat: shrimp, beef, chicken, pork, sausages... Protein overload!

The feast also included Korean-style beef short ribs, kimchee, rice, hot links and shrimp.

It was a nice day to hang out, but after a couple hours it was getting warm and we had another party to go to.

More on that one later.

Right now, I have to get back to my household chores.