From Water to Fire: Preparing Local Seafood

We have amazing access to world-class seafood, so you should know how to prepare it at home for your family and friends. Local fisherman and urchin-diver Stephanie Mutz, along with hook-and-line fisherman Travis Meyer from Santa Ynez, will teach you how to perfectly filet a fish, shuck local oysters, and open a sea urchin. And then we'll prepare all the seafood in a rustic style over open flames.

Of course, we get to eat it all too! All participants can invite one person to share in the dinner that evening once it is prepared.

What You Will Learn:

• How to filet a fish—probably a rock fish, depending on that day's catch—to minimize pin bones, and what to do with the rest of the fish
• How to open ("shuck") fresh oysters
• How to open a sea urchin and remove the "tongue"
• How to cook (or not cook) them all for dinner

What You Take Home

• Handouts and recipes for preparing these delicacies
• A full belly and happy heart

Recommended for Folkies ages 16 and up (youth with adults only). Have younger children you want to bring? Kindly email us before you register to talk and make arrangements.

Head Folkie for the Day

Stephanie Mutz came to Santa Barbara over twenty years ago to study marine biology at UCSB and has worked as a marine biologist counting damsel fish in Tahiti, invertebrates from Oregon to Mexico, and studying otoliths (you know, the ear bones in fish). During the great recession, she shifted from counting fish to catching them and started work as a deck hand on a local boat. She got interested in the politics and policies of commercial fishing, and committed herself to promoting sustainable approaches to catching and selling local seafood. Today, she's the only woman with a permit to dive for sea urchin in the state of California (that is, when she's not teaching marine biology and environmental policy at the local colleges).