UPDATE, May 7
Someone sent me Bonnie Tsui’s e-mail address, and I was able to contact her to ask for her recipe for seafood paella.
“This is most definitely not my recipe — I am not that skilled,” she said it a note to me. “But I like Ruth Reichl’s Easy Seafood Paella (from her recent Diary of a Foodie show on Andalucian cooking, on PBS). This one is delicious and easy to make at home.”
I’ve not made paella before, but I’m looking forward to it. If anyone beats me to it, please share your thoughts and observations.
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Freelance writer Bonnie Tsui wrote a nice travel piece for yesterday’s New York Times about picking oysters at Potlatch State Park on Hood Canal.
Tsui came to visit our region with her mother-in-law. Both live in Northern California.
“After three minutes of digging on a muddy and shell-strewn beach along the shores of the Hood Canal in Washington State, I had gathered enough shellfish for a pretty mean paella,” she wrote.
“I don’t mean to brag — it sure wasn’t through any skill of my own. The Hood Canal is a glitteringly beautiful 60-mile-long fjord and the western waterway of Puget Sound, and it sits about an hour and a half outside Seattle.”
Tsui quickly identified one of the great things about Hood Canal: Oysters set naturally in portions of the canal — unlike many other places, including San Francisco Bay and much of Puget Sound.
How many of the oysters that she picked were from a natural set is probably not important. Potlatch State Park, which she visited, has been planted with oyster seed, according to the Department of Natural Resources. For details about when and where to harvest shellfish and which beaches have been enhanced, download state shellfish rules (PDF 2 mb).
Oh, by the way, I was hoping Tsui would share her recipe for seafood paella (a rice dish) with us, but I couldn’t locate her e-mail address to ask her.
