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While in Friday Harbor, we got the chance to try out a lot of the local offerings that went beyond the favorite restaurants. On Saturday we went to the Farmer's Market, which was really quite perfect -- there was local honey, lavender, fruits, vegetables, and meats. We lugged home up a leg of Island Lamb -- it was boned, so no Roald Dahl murder weapons for us -- and set it in the fridge to thaw over the next few days. When the lamb was finally de-iced, I butterflied the little beast and pasted it with olive oil, rosemary, and garlic. To our intense chagrin, we don't have a grill at home, but we have one on the island, so we fired that up while the meat marinated. Earlier that day, we had paid a visit to Roche Harbor and, taking Gabe's fervent advice, bought some local Spotted Prawns from the guy on the dock. Okay, these things? Humungous.
When Gabe said "prawns," I was expecting little shrimps. When Gabe said that you could make a meal out of five or six, I was expecting Gulf-sized shrimps. What I was not expecting were mini-lobsters. Slightly scared, we got a bag of ten and put them on ice while I figured out what I was going to do with them. They were already boiled, so grilling was out. However, I did have some leftover mango and black bean salsa from my Test Night... Dr. Mathra and I experimented with one of the prawns to figure out which part held the most meat. We weren't surprised to find it was all in the tail, but we did a fair dissection to make sure juicy bits weren't hidden elsewhere. I marinated the prawn meat in lime juice and served a seafood salad as an appetizer to our lamb-fest.
The grilled lamb was perfect. It was full-flavored, tender, and smokily perfumed with the rosemary paste. I don't think I've ever eaten as locally as we did that night. Speaking of smokey, we tried an Asian pear wine from Windfall Winery. It was a wine Cole Porter could have written a song about. Perfect with any Asian take-out, but de-lovely with salmon. And with each glass you pour, you're drinking for a good cause -- a portion of the sales of each bottle of this pear wine goes toward building affordable housing in towns where the wine is sold.
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