Bubbler Crabs

Bubbler Crabs

I’ve felt like a bubbler crab lately.  I’ll bet you have too.  

Bubbler Crab

These little sand-colored crabs occupy the highest low tide line, ensuring a twice-daily banquet delivered by the tide .  When I walk my local beach at low tide, I see whole colonies of them — identified by the little balls of sand they leave behind.  

Their colonies are about a meter wide, and stretch for a block along the sand, stop for a meter or two and then start again for another block — a good half-kilometer or so all together.  Some areas are crab metropolises and some are lonely outposts of crab-dom.

Twice each day, these tiny creatures come out of their holes and glean the sand for food, molding the cleaned granules into a ball forced up through the mouth-parts, then discarded on top of the sand, another ball already begun. The sand balls are the leavings, the crusts of bread left on the plate, the shells, the gristle, the clumps of fat, pits, seeds, stones, grit, and other inedibles of sand bubbler crab cuisine.  

Each line of sand balls occupies the edge of a trench that a crab has mined, and each ball represents the limit of the outward expansion until the next mining operation is undertaken.  And always, an escape route is cleared for a quick retreat back into its home hole.

Bubbler Crab Colony

The sand bubbler crab is perpetually wary.  Silver gulls, menacing giants in sand-crab juxtaposition, prey on the knuckle-sized creatures.  The crab’s frenzied gleaning and cleaning gives it away.  Darting home or freezing in place are the necessary but risky survival strategies, depending on how far the crab has ventured from its home hole.  Near = dash home.  Too far = freeze in place.  Only the crab knows how far is too far or how near is near enough.

Once the sand dries out, the eating frenzy and ball creation ceases. Gulls head for more promising territory, leaving the odd red-legged sentry behind.  The sand crab tidies its hole, ejecting little puffs of sandy detritus, and readies its den for the next tide.  It will poke an eye-stalk out of its hole (or perhaps a leg to get the eye-stalk into viewing position), but will zip back into the hole at any hint of predators, footfalls, shadows, or any other likely danger.  And it will wait for the advance and retreat of the tide for another smorgesbord of minute morsels.

I, too, am hunkered in my little hole, cleaning out the overly sandy bits, and waiting for the next tide.  Rather than living in dread of the next silver gull of disaster to view me as a tasty treat, however, I’m trying to be wholeheartedly positive in the present (a daily challenge), while planning for the future. 

Point Byron

I glean the details of my Oz-life for little story bubbles to leave on my life’s beach and relish the people we hold dear.  That doesn’t mean I don’t obsess over election trends, fingers tapping and scrolling and feeding on shifts and feints and obfuscations.  And I am clearing a path of retreat, just in case freezing in place proves to be a less-than-useful strategy.  

I’ve felt like sand bubbler crab lately.  I’ll bet you have too.  

* * *

For more on the amazing sand bubbler crabs, check out this video:  http://videos.howstuffworks.com/animal-planet/29027-fooled-by-nature-sand-bubbler-crabs-video.htm

Wishing Rocks

favorite rocks

 

Wishing Rocks

Long ago, a friend of mine gave me a wonderful gift – one that I’ve held close and yet given away many times.  She told me that beach stones with a line all the way around them are wishing rocks.  It doesn’t matter if the line is quartz in granite or the fusion of two different types of rock altogether or a crease of the same rock.  All that matters is that the line goes all the way around to meet itself without end.

Wishing rocks don’t have rules.   

Does it matter how many wishes you make?  Do you have to use one rock for one wish and another for one more?  Can you remake the same wish?  Can you pick up the rock next time and make more wishes?  Does it have to be held in hand?  If a wishing rock has more than one line, can you make more than one wish at a time?  Wish as much as you like.  There are no rules on wishes.

Wishing rocks have power.  A universal, elemental power.

I slip wishing rocks in my pocket when I walk the beach.  Not every wishing rock, mind you, as I’d never make it home under the load, but special, beautiful ones — smooth ones, or translucent ones, or exquisitely formed ones.  Grey or white or red or ochre ones — any of the above, or all. 

Size doesn’t matter.  In fact, some of the most satisfying wishing rocks are tiny bits of endurance with all the rough edges smoothed away over time, water over rock — the inexorable force.

I don’t always wish on the ones I find right away, but save them for times when wishes are especially important or when wishing is the only clear path through the wildness.  

Sometimes I give wishing rocks away — that’s the best, because not everyone knows about wishing rocks.  They seem like something people should know about.  Everybody could use a wishing rock at some point, couldn’t they?  Just about everybody, I reckon.  

Wishing rocks are compelling, an alluring gift of benevolence and beauty, of universal possibility and transformation with no rules on wishes.

Over time, I’ve accumulated a small mound of wishing rocks that encircle a plant on my patio.  I turn each over and hold them, sort them by color, and rearrange the leaves and

Beach rocks

debris a little spider who lives in the pile has accumulated.  Friends and family add their own to the pile when the spirit moves them.

My favorites — and this is a changing group — I put on the table on the wooden table on my back deck to handle and rub when we sit with a bottle of wine on a warm tropical evening or over a lunch of warm ripe tomatoes with pungent local olive oil and goat’s cheese.  

I never fail to pick the wishing rocks up and examine them in turn, finding deep satisfaction in the hand-feel once again. And in the connection with that universal power that wishing rocks have — with no rules on wishes.

 

You Say Potato

You Say Potato

Some potatoes are not meant to be mashed.  So says Australian chef and restauranteur Stephanie Alexander in her seminal cookbook, The Cooks Companion.  I’d never really considered various uses of potatoes beyond the 4 types you find in US supermarkets — red, white, yellow, and sweet.  

I’ve grown some in my garden over the years (including blue potatoes) and loved the sweet taste of a potato freshly dug — the taste that has already disappeared by the time a potato reaches the supermarket. 

Potatoes - Byron Farmers Market

Potatoes turn to starch, and for most of my life, I’ve been trying to avoid starch with varying degrees of success.  Occasionally I’ll add boiled potatoes at the end of a pot roast so they don’t soak up all the good flavors, tuck some quartered reds into a slow roast or boil some small new reds to treat my husband.  

Maybe it’s the butter that slithers and slides over the warm potato that I should avoid.  Mostly, it’s both. So, potatoes have mostly been under radar for me except for the occasional blip, taken for granted, and indulged in rarely.

In Australia, however, there is a daunting array available, and I’ve been tempted to try them out.  Serious Aussie cooks know which ones are for boiling, which are for baking, which hold their shape well for salads, and which to include in casseroles.  I, however, didn’t know where to begin.

Enter Stephanie Alexander.  I think of her as my guide to the vast array of foods available in Australia.  In The Cooks Companion, she discusses floury potatoes which can be baked, mashed and fried, and waxy ones which remain firm when boiled.  I refer to Stephanie as the last word:  Bintje (boil, don’t mash), Bison (boil, bake, mash), Coliban (bake, mash, steam but don’t boil), Desiree (boil, bake, makes great gnocchi), Kennebec (boil, bake, fry, mash), Kipfler (steam, use in salads), Patrone (boil, fry, bake, don’t mash), Purple Congo (boil), Red Pontiac (puree, grate, bake, boil), Sebago (boil, bake, mash, fry), Spunta (mash, fry), Tasmanian Pink-eye (boil, don’t mash), Toolangi Delight (boil, mash, don’t fry).*  You see? 

Not stopping while I’m ahead, I dig deeper and found are three varieties of sweet potatoes in

Sweet Potatoes at Byron Farmers Market

Australia, but often they aren’t specifically named when sold.  They vary, however, (of course).  The brown sweet potato with creamy flesh (bake), the buff-yellow sweet potato with orange flesh (puddings, candying, bakes drier than the brown) is also known by its Maori name “kumara,” and the purple sweet potato (all purpose, medium dry).** 

Some of my Aussie friends make absolutely wonderful baked chips from coin-thick slices of sweet potato placed on baking paper and placed in a medium oven for 20 minutes (watch carefully as the thinner ones cook quicker, of course.  Turn over for 5 more (watch for burning) or until cooked through, beginning to dry.  Cool, salt.  Serve as a starter or garnish.***  

On deli shelves and in restaurants on the lunch menu, one sees kumara used with white potatoes and red peppers in a quiche served on rocket   Sounds great, doesn’t it?  I’ve been seduced by the description several times.  A slice seems like it should look great, taste great, and offer sweet and savory, heft and crunch. But it rarely goes beyond bland disappointment.  Like some things in life, the visual and descriptive much more satisfying than the real thing.  

Instead of calling the whole thing off, though, tuck a few bits of the carb-laden morsels next to your greens at lunch to give your body fuel for the rest of the day, and enjoy each bite.  I say potato.  You?

~ ~ ~

*Stephanie Alexander, The Cook’s Companion, Viking Press.  p. 571.

** p. 694

***Thanks to AD for my first introduction to this fabulous use of sweet potato, and to WT for sharing her incredible imaginative approach to foods.

Note:  Stephanie Alexander’s The Cook’s Companion, published in 1996, is still so successful that it hasn’t yet been released in paperback.  Its $125 AUD price tag is a bit daunting, but the explanations, origins, research are invaluable if you’re interested in foods or confronted with the bewildering array of shapes, sizes, varieties, and exotics down under.  

For more information, go to www.stephaniealexander.com.au

~ ~ ~ 

Byron Bay’s Farmers Market is held each Thursday, 9 AM – 1 PM, at the market grounds behind the Police Station.

Country Fair

Country Fair

A scruffy old bear guarded the entrance of an Enchanted Forest ride at the country fair in Bangalow, a twenty minute drive up a winding road into the hills from my home base in Byron Bay.  The bear’s moth-eaten honey-brown paw was permanently raised in welcome.  This was no slick cartoon bear nor a fearsome menacing facsimile bear, but a huge old-fashioned well-loved teddy bear – 8 feet tall at least, angular with age, patches of fur rubbed off during its long journey through the rural country fairs of Australia. 

You might say the bear was a sad remnant of bygone days, like the tap dancer I saw step-toe-ing on a piece of plywood in a nightclub years ago, her enthusiasm making up for the shredded pink dress she wore.  She was compelling to watch, not just because tap dancers aren’t the usual fare in hotel night clubs, and not because her dress was open at the armpits and ripped at the hem, but because her blond enthusiasm overcame her tattered deficits.  

She was oddly good.  And so was the old bear.  

Never mind that there are no bears in Australia.  Never mind that the Enchanted Forest was like none on on the Australian continent.  Never mind that the children who rode in the rattle-y cars at $5 a head had no memory of Europe or even context for the myths of their immigrant fore-bearers — old-country Bavarian thrills where trolls and bears prowled caves and children screamed with excitement.  Suspension of disbelief was the key, openness to mystery and delight in adventure. 

Why was that old bear so compelling?  Why would people pay so much for a ride on a rattle-trap car on a worn-out track, guarded by a threadbare Teddy bear?  Perhaps he offered a ride into the past, guarding the entrance to a time-machine.  This was the door into rural Australia of the 1930’s, between the wars, when the county fair were a rare opportunity for people from remote stations to get together, to share stories and histories and visit with old friends.  Before the Internet, before paved roads, before telephones and electricity got to rural Australia.  Before this-time began.

Even the nostalgic old bear couldn’t make me leave without watching the cattle judging. This is the serious business of the country fair, where deals are made for this magnificent brown bull and that beautiful pied heifer, where prized calves paraded and Kelpie dogs waited and watched.  

Cattlemen stood hipshot, arms on the rails, just the Akubra hats and Blundstone boots different from their counterparts in the States, jeans and western snap-button shirts in common.  I’d been a part of their world at one time in my life, breeding Limousin-crosses up to purebreds.  The conversation was familiar too – feed and fertilizer prices, drought, crops, pasture, water rights, fire.  Who could get a loan to stay for another season and who had walked off the land. 

On the far side of the grounds, past the pony club girls and their horses, velvet covered hard-hats and fawn breeches, was the dog show – all breeds – and their handlers.  Country fair circuit professionals they were, plump and earnest, set up by their campers for the three-day gig.

Behind the children’s rides were post-World War II weatherboard buildings under the line of huge old figs – lumpy lime green paint over many other, older layers, and dimly lit rooms with concrete floors, windows covered with vines and moss.  Here the prize poultry strutted and fussed.  The cages were cleaned twice a day in a vain attempt to abate the decades of odor.  Hand-lettered lopsided signs described the birds — fancies most of them, bred to show.  Plumage and finery in old wire cage, new frill and lace sewn on an old prom dress, generations old.  

At the A&I Hall at the top of the show grounds, the Country Women’s Association judged cakes and veggies, photographs and art work.  White cakes with white icing were cut in half and measured for consistency and taste.  Crocheted kitchen towels, rouched baby dresses, and fine framed photographs.  Floral arrangements and perfectly formed vegetables.  Showy.  Sublime.  Touching.

Veggie wraps and sushi rolls vied with hot dogs and greasy beetroot hamburgers in the sun now turned hot — except in the Rotary booth.  There the women’s auxiliary sold egg salad sandwiches on dry white supermarket bread in wax paper wrapping.  Room temperature soda sat in small waxed paper cups.  Someone had forgotten the ice.   I liked the spirit of community and the enthusiasm of the ladies at the window, and that’s what I bought to eat, feeling by that time, somewhat akin to that sad bear on the Enchanted Forest ride – shabby, tired, and just slightly past my prime. 

But I was glad I’d been there, just the same, to see the remnants of rural Australia putting on a fine country show.  

***

Note:  Watch for this Country Fair in Bangalow on the 3rd weekend in November.  (Bangalow A&I Show).  PO Box 35, Bangalow NSW 2479.  Phone: 02-6687-1033.