Day 15 - Smokey Saturday

Weight 181.8

Spring is finally here and today I had to continue a long overdue project in the garden.  I promised Debbie that I would construct some type of hydration system for the garden boxes and I got halfway through it last season but never finished.  With an idea in my head, I went to Lowes to get supplies.  This was a good distraction from food today.

I worked very hard in the garden and got a lot done today (to be continued tomorrow and beyond).  I worked very closely to the asparagus patch and a couple times I accidentally stepped on a few new stalks coming out of the ground.  These were 'instant eats' and although I'm not a big fan of raw asparagus, they were fine - just a little dirty.  A few times during my project I completely ran out of energy.  It came back quickly but it's a strange feeling when all of a sudden your body just feels totally wiped out and you need to take a rest.

garden hydro-project

During the same time I got the smoker going again to finish up the new batch of trout I caught this week.  It's a tedious process to meticulously clean and de-bone the fish, then brine the fillets and finally dry and smoke them.  They had been sitting in the brine overnight and today they were ready for drying. I used a much smaller amount of salt with this batch and it made a big difference.  However, these fish are quite small and the fillets are thin so when I go through this process they get even smaller and thinner.  This leaves me with a final product that is more like jerky than smoked fish.  When the bluefish arrive (which should be very soon) I will be able to repeat the process with some thicker pieces.  The dehydrator really takes a lot of the moisture out of anything so the longer it's in there, the thinner and tougher and more jerky like the final product will be.

happy smoker

smoked trout fillets

I don't mind so much with the trout because I chop it up into little bite sized pieces and nibble on it as a snack throughout the day.  It's nice to have a go to snack that's salty and sweet.

Today marks the end of the second week and beginning of the third and my Weekly Reward for surviving this week is supposed to be a jar of popcorn and a jar of trail mix (granola, nuts, chocolate).  Both of these will be nice intermediate snack food to have between meals.  I'll have to make a market run to see what blend of trail mix I can put together.  I usually make my own with ingredients I like - rather than getting a pre-made package.

Oh Bee-hive, baby.