This weekend Jeff and I headed out to Rockport, Texas to help his folks clean up and prepare the new home they bought out there - a two bedroom "beach house". It's in one of the older areas that has a man-made canal. We were able to fish right off the back porch.

You could see schools of mullet (some of them huge) swimming by. Since they're bottom-feeding vegetarians they ignored out bait. But one catfish and one redfish took my bait, and a lot of little perch were biting too. They were all too small to keep, but it was fun anyway.

I came across this today via National Geographic:

'Biggest Fish Ever Found' Unearthed in U.K
Discovered by two paleontology students in clay pits near Peterborough, the fossil is the largest known fish ever recorded. Identified by experts from the universities of Portsmouth and Glasgow, Leedsichthys problematicus swam the world's oceans some 155 million years ago.

Wow.

We also saw a couple of largish blue crabs that wandered right up to the edge of the water, near the carport. We tossed a bit of shrimp to one of 'em and it was quickly gobbled up. When that first crab skittered away, the second one tried to crawl up a rock and slapped both of it's front claws on a few times, as is to say, "You gave my buddy a piece. Now gimme one!" I've never seen a crab beg before.

We brought back some grouper and crab meat we bought from a local shop and I plan to make those tonight or tomorrow night. I'm also up to my ears in sweet potatoes since I stopped and bought a huge bucketful for a few bucks from a roadside stand. Luckily the cooked mash freezes well, so I'm quickly doing that. Then I'm going to experiment with sweet potato cake, sweet potato pie, sweet potato pudding and sweet potato casserole and maybe some sweet potato ice cream.

Sweet potatoes have an interesting history. Most people confuse them with yams, and they're not the same thing. True yams are a starchy tuber native to Africa that can grow as large as 100 pounds. Sweet potatoes actually began somewhere in Central America, and they were being cultivated by native group in North America as early as 1540. In the West Indies they were referred to as "batatas", which eventually gave us the word "potato".

Christopher Columbus brought sweet potatoes back to Spain on his first voyage to the Americas. They quickly spread in popularity and it was the English who gave us sweet potato pie. The Portuguese carried them to Asia and Africa where they are still a staple today.

There are actually two varieties of sweet potato, but it's the orangey moist-fleshed on that's the most popular here in the south.

That was probably more than you ever wanted to know about sweet potatoes.