June 3, 2018 — Everybody has a food thing, right? Everybody has that one item that you wouldn’t eat unless you were stranded on a deserted island or someone had a shotgun pressed securely to your lumbar region. Or both. And maybe not even then.
For us, it’s eggs. Oeuf, there it is.
No fried eggs. No omelets. No scrambles. No frittatas. Soft boiled, hard boiled, you can keep them. We’d rather stay dirty than submit to an egg wash. We can’t even watch other people eat eggs, especially when they start jamming their toast into the yokes and creating all sorts of Jackson Pollard-looking stuff on their plates. Our little phobia probably goes a long way toward explaining why we tend to be solitary breakfasters.
Needless to say, we’re not exactly down with caviar (thank God we’re poor). But we have to admit we were intrigued by a New York Times story out of Montana about a program to harvest the roe of giant freshwater paddlefish — which can run anywhere from 50 to 100 pounds — and sell it as caviar.
“It winds up on cruise ships, it winds up in restaurants, it winds up everywhere,” Dennis Scarnecchia, a fisheries professor at the University of Idaho, told the Times.
Scarnecchia (any relation to Pats line coach Dante, we wonder?) oversees paddlefish caviar programs in Montana, North Dakota and Oklahoma, from whence profits are funneled into research and monitoring of the massive fish.