Summertime Starts

This weekend:

Friday night at Belvedere (not pictured because I was having too much fun) with
orange crushes from Crush and excellent pork barbecue from Neopol
(they had about five different sauces - I chose Carolina).

Saturday afternoon sitting on the grass at Prigel Family Creamery:

That ice cream is good. We brought home some scrapple, too.
Can't wait to dig into that.

Saturday afternoon celebrating our friend Laurie's birthday with
super heavy, delicious crabs from Ocean Pride (also not pictured)...
where we learned an incredible trick. Did you know that if you cook corn in
half water, half milk, it's amazing? How cool is that?

Sunday morning, Cooper went fishing in the Bay with three other guys.
They limited out before 11 - we have got a lot of rockfish in the refrigerator right now.
This is Cooper's foot - he caught the really big one.
It's the second biggest rockfish he's ever caught:

Photo credit: Tommy Sheldon Photography

Dixon and I drove down to Annapolis to meet the boys when they got off the boat.

We all had lunch at Cantler's - rockfish bites and a crab cake sandwich for me.

 The blackened rockfish bites are just amazing.

Then we all took a little ride on the boat - just from Mill Creek, near Cantler's,

out to the Bay and back. It was fun...especially for Dixon.

Photo credit: Tommy Sheldon Photography

He's been out on boats before, but this was his first time this year.
In the past, he's been a little timid. This year, not so much.

As if that wasn't enough, we headed home for more crabs - this time from Conrad's.
We got to use the big long table for crabs for the first time ever:

It's pretty much perfect. It also happened to be the first real-deal crab feast our friends
Jen and Mark ever attended! They moved to Maryland from Boston a couple of years ago,
and they've had crab, but not crabs. This was a legitimate crab feast, too,
with all the usual suspects - hush puppies, corn, fried chicken
(thank you, Royal Farms) and, of course, excellent crabs.

A couple hours in, this is how things looked:

And just after that, things looked like this:

Berger cookie ice cream sandwiches...more on that to follow later this week.

For now, let's just say Alicia regretted dressing Maggie in a new shirt and white shorts.

Between the crab (which she nearly inhaled), the cookie and the rolling around in our yard,

she was a little on the dingey side by the time she went home.

Dirty, full of crab and chocolate - that's how summer weekends should end.