Free Food Is The Best Food

Our friend Jon, whose house were stayed at on the coast this weekend, loves living on the water for so many reasons, but I think the biggest is the free food. His wife Lane was instructed to pick up a bag of free fish heads from the fish market on Friday, which we did.  

The fish heads were not the free food I am referring to. Those fish heads were the bait that Jon puts in his crab traps he throws off his dock. The first morning after throwing the trap out not only did Jon get some blue crabs, but also stone crabs and a flounder. Jon, being a good coastal citizen measured the blue crabs and only kept the ones of legal size. The stone crabs he took just one of the claws and threw back the animal to grow another. The flounder was big enough to keep. No filet and release here.

This morning Jon pulled up another crab pot and this one had at least a dozen blue crabs and two stone crabs. I watched as Jon threw back to small ones, wondering how many times he caught the same ones over and over again.

At lunch today, Jon not only ate what he he caught, but also some of the four dozen clams given to him by his neighbor who had collected over 500 clams yesterday. Not only was it the freshest seafood, but the sweetest since it was free.  
When my parents lived at South Litchfield my mother liked free food more than anything else too. She never complained of time my father spent fishing as long as he brought back dinner. Of course we used to joke that every fish actually cost $600 if you amortized the cost of his boat over all the fish he ever caught. But then it makes the fish less tasty so we tried not to do that.
I wish my garden had been more productive this year. The amount of “free” food I got from it was not as satisfying. What I really wish is that I had a wild neighborhood goat who would just stop by r house and drop off a log or two of already made fresh goat cheese. That would be my idea of good free food.