Venus not in Blue Jeans
11 February 2025 | St. Marys, GA
Cap'n Chef Andy | 15 Above Normal

I went ahead and made the lobster bisque with pasta, a variation on the recipe from Trader Joe’s, the one that is “viral”. I don’t want my food to be viral.
.
I didn’t make the pasta, but it is easy to make, 1 egg to 1 cup of flour, roll it out and cut it up.
.
Here are the ingredients, what I shopped for:
Thaw langostinos and set aside.
Cook pasta, drain, reserve liquid, and set pasta aside.
Prep shallots and garlic, saute in butter, add flour and tomato paste, add sherry, after about 3 minutes start adding liquid to roux, keep it smooth, add half and half. When sauce has thickened add pasta and allow to come up to temperature and simmer for a few minutes. Add langostinos, garnish with hard cheese.
.
Sorry, those are cooking notes. I got one shallot, a good sized one, a tube of Cento tomato paste, a bottle of generic sherry, the frozen Langostino tails, the package of 5 bucks per pound of papperadelle from Italy.
.
I hate to say it, but this is a one pot meal. You could cook it almost anywhere. A pot of cold fresh water thawed out the langostinos which were set aside. It was brought to a boil and the pasta was cooked for 1 minute less than what they said on the package. The boiling liquid was drained off the pasta into insulated glasses, to be used later. The pasta was set aside. The pot was cleaned out, roughly, with a paper towel.
.
In went ¾ stick of Irish butter, the shallot that was sliced like onion rings, along with 3 thinly sliced garlic cloves. A splash of sherry was added. The paprika and some parsley flakes were added. A little bit of Italian herb mix. Time to add some of the pasta water. The mush was mixed with a spatula with a wide flat end. Make sure nothing starts burning on the bottom. Keep adding liquid including the half and half making sure the half and half won’t curdle. The butter and paprika make a yellow orange streak that is an accent on the creamy pasta and langostinos. It is done, take a scoop and taste. We haven’t salted this, but we did add thinly sliced parmesan and that adds salt. Mixing the concoction is an exercise to get all the components more homogenous. But there is so much flavor there, each little pocket of flavor exists, the dish is fresh and in a way raw, the flavors have not totally combined. I stopped after having 3rds.
.
The old Honda CRV has a problem with its driver window. Automatic, up and down, but it has a little wiggle that causes it to get snagged on the way up, then it stops and cycles down about halfway. I have my right hand on the glass to try to prevent this from happening, but this causes the car to drift to the right, toward the ditch. My bud Tom is riding with me and adjusts the steering wheel so that we don’t contact objects on the right side of the road.
.
I suppose he will be another that accuses me of being a bad driver, I wouldn’t do that if I were you, Tom, you know what happens to people who criticize my driving, they perish in car accidents. Yes, they are accidents, I have nothing to do with it, except to set a bad example.
.
Why would you dismantle the public health agency, the one that announced the pandemic and scientific based techniques to avoid it? Now we have bird flu doing its damage. Yes, democratic, nay, leftist, under Biden’s watch about 150 million fowl were euthanized. Mostly ducks and chickens.
.
This is the Balkanization of the USA. Let the states figure it out, why do you need a big inflated federal government, the locals and the states can get things the way they want. Don’t like it? Move to another state.
.
Cap’n Webb Chiles had sailed off to Culebra from Hilton Head Island and curiously turned around and sailed back. I thought of a million reasons he might have come back, boat damage, including encounter with a floating object, illness, maybe some news from shore, although he doesn’t stay in touch when he is out at sea. I waited to see what he had to say after his return.
.
In the mean time the Super Bowl happened and although the Kansas City Chiefs were slight favorites, they couldn’t handle the Philadelphia Eagles lines. They couldn’t protect Patrick Mahomes who was sacked at least a half dozen times, and on the other side of the ball the Eagles were able to run even though the Chiefs were focusing on stopping the run, ie Saquon Barkley. Their quarterback had a good day throwing the ball downfield. The game was a rout.
.
I found a cache of pennies, about 4 dollars worth. The news is that the USA will stop minting pennies and I wondered if their value would increase or drop. I tried out an app called Coinsnap that uses the phone’s camera to take photos of coins, identify them, and also assign a value, although on line reviews say the valuations are unreliable. It took quite a while to sort through the pennies. I was spurred on by the thought of maybe one of the 400 or so pennies might be rare, you never know. Well, now I do know. About half the pennies are worth more than a penny. The highest valued pair are worth $9.26, according to the app.
.
Cap’n Webb says he grew impatient after about 3 days of no wind, so he sailed back to Hilton Head. No mystery, but he hasn’t posted his log of the voyage yet.
.
The image is the photo of Venus that I took after a flurry of activity, watching this light in the heavens that looked like the landing lights of an aircraft or a very bright anchor light atop a sailboat mast, but there was no boat below it and it didn’t move like an airplane. When I figured out the night sky had Venus near its brightest and aligned the star map with the sky overhead, I took the photo with my phone and 30X zoom.