Vacation meals should be fun to prepare and delightful to eat! In addition, leisure meals should be easy to prepare! I’m pretty sure that’s a law in most parts of the country, especially on the Gulf Coast. No one wants to spend their vacation time slaving over a hot stove. Dinner is even more difficult when you have to serve twenty or more people.
Each year our extended family gets together for a family reunion of sorts, sharing the costs of renting a couple of houses on a beach somewhere. It usually works out pretty good for everyone. Since there are at least five families involved, someone different fixes dinner each evening. It has turned into a contest as to who will have the best meal.
When it was our family’s time to feed the hungry relatives, we opted for a seafood dinner. I wanted to fix something that was fairly easy on the cooks. Just about anywhere on the gulf coast you can find a fish market that sells everything from shrimp to shark. The larger stores of course, sell a bigger variety. Often the seafood comes off their own boats and as a result their prices can be a little lower. I like the romance and aroma of a larger seafood market makes me see in my mind the fishing boats coming in with the sun rising behind them after a long night’s fishing.
I went grocery shopping in the early afternoon because I wanted to have time for the seafood to marinate before cooking. I found such a place in Carrabelle, Florida. Just off the main road to Apalachicola, Florida. This fish market reminds one of a long forgotten Florida; the one without tourists standing shoulder to shoulder on the road in front of the place. They even had a wharf where a well experienced shrimp boat was tied to the pier. This old fish market promised to have everything we wanted for the evening meal.
Dinner was going to be as good as I could make it! I wanted the rest of the clan to lay down their aprons in defeat even before they had a chance to heat up the stove. I was going to have seafood kabobs with a tossed salad of just about any kind of fresh vegetable we could find to throw into the mix. My kitchen is no place for wooses!
In the seafood market I found what I needed for the kabobs; shrimp, bay scallops and shark. They had some great cuts of swordfish which would have worked but I have my own personal boycott of swordfish going on because they are getting scarce due to over fishing.
