BOOKS BY DON

I have finally been blessed with the ability to write. It did not come naturally. P.S. 46 and Theodore Roosevelt High School, in the Bronx, did not do a great deal to prepare any potential writer for the future. It was not really their fault. The Bronx, at that time, was a hodge-podge of often first generation kids whose parents had come from foreign lands, so the home-learned English skill levels were low. My classmates were Sicilian Italians, Irish, German-Jewish, Greek, with a smattering of middle-European (Bulgarian/Rumanian/Czech), so we were all in this together. I can only imagine the frustration the teachers must have felt. I think that in English class I found out what a noun, pronoun and verb was, but forget about punctuation and sentence structure or any of the more complicated grammatical terms, like adjectives or adverbs or past-plu-perfect (huh!).

Later on, with that background, it was tough going in the Navy when I had to prepare letters, memos and instructional guides. I thank God for these challenges and for the grouchy inner-self that told me to get off my butt and learn. As Beverly Sills, the opera singer once said, “There are no short-cuts to anything worthwhile.” How true! But keep working on it, fail, restart, a little bit better, there is hope, that looks pretty good, learn to rewrite AND finally you can grind out something that is understandable, well-written and hopefully interesting to others. I hope my books prove my point!

 

NEPTUNE’S TABLE:COOKING THE SEAFOOD EXOTICS

Neptune's Table Jpeg
NEPTUNE’S TABLE is the creative cook’s guide to innovative shell fish cookery. Between the covers of this book you will find recipes and preparation instructions dealing with unusual subjects such as:

  • Cooking and serving octopus
  • Extracting and preparing sea urchin roe
  • Preparing and cleaning calamari in unexpected ways
  • Using the shells of shrimp in cooking
  • Cleaning, cooking and dining on exotics like sea snails, abalone and limpets

In addition there are chapters dealing with scallops, oysters, crab, lobster, and mussels

And you will share the author’s interesting experiences as he discovered these exotic taste sensations roaming the world in the Navy, and leading scuba and adventure tours in the waters off California and down into Mexico’s Baja peninsula.

Finally, each chapter is introduced by a full color original gyotaku (nature print) of the subject specially created by the author.

In combination you have a book that is visually exciting, interesting to read and packed with seafood information not available elsewhere. This cookbook should be in every shellfish lovers library.