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You should come to California or Oregon, where the two largest American shad runs in the world are. There are so many in the Sacramento you can keep 25 a day...

...and it should be said that while certain species of shad do occur worldwide, the American shad is only native to the East Coast from Florida to Labrador. It was planted in California in 1871 and spread to the West Coast after that.

Our season has just started now, and will run into July. I will be sharpening my knives to fillet the fish, which takes some doing. Once filleted, you can do all kinds of things with shad, which earns its Latin name sapidissima.

As for the roe, I flour it, cook it in bacon fat, and serve with chervil and a wedge of lemon.

The East Coast. Maryland or the Cheasapeake side of Virginia. As for a specific place, take your pick.

If anyone knows where to get high-quality soft-shells out West, I am all ears.

And does anyone know if they freeze well?

Sigh. I hate the whole jihad against plastic bags. Unless I am at a farmer's market, I always get plastic -- and they always get several uses after I bring them home: Cat poop containers, lunch bags during the week, bags for marinating meats, bags to hold the produce I bought at the farmer's market. I've used some bags to carry my lunches in for weeks.

And I know I am not the only person who does this.

Another vote for Penzeys here.

Wow. While I do like roasted asparagus with cheese, consider me stridently disagreeing with you on the tender-crisp thing. I detest modern Italian "hammer" cookery; the only foul part of an otherwise excellent meal at Batali's Esca a year ago was the destroyed veggie sidedish. It was inedible, almost Southern in its olive-drab destruction.

I would rather take my cues from the Italians' ancestors -- the ancient Romans had an expression for "lickety-split" that literally translated into "as quick as cooking asparagus." Hurumph.

Sounds like there is no shortage of shad there, HunterAnglerGardenerCook! Fantastic. What is the method used to fish them?

I can't imagine filleting shad. You have great patience. I haven't really enjoyed cleaning fish since the night in the Florida Keys when I caught an octopus which I was thrilled about till it kept slithering away and even when I cut off the tentacles they were walking around by themselves and then there was the skate the same night which was a PITA to clean (for a very small amount of meat) then topped off by the ugliest lizard-fish man or woman ever set eyes on. Somehow it all just got to be too much. :)

Hmmm...I don't know. I'm down with caviar;
but you'd have to pay me a lot to taste those beetle eggs.

p.s. I'm itchy now too!

BALTIMORE and absolutely no place else! And in Baltimore the only place to get a good, basic, real down to earth soft shell crab is Faidley's at the Lexington Market.
So there.

Or you could cook and eat them. Mmmm, protein.

CookiePie, on corn plastics (also called PLA) it's not as good as the propaganda. Sure, they are compostable but it requires a special process that no backyard will approximate and few towns or cities have in place. So, it's a contaminate to composting but also one to plastics as it can't be recycled and indeed ruins recycling efforts of plastic.

According to a biodegradability standard that Mojo helped develop, PLA is said to decompose into carbon dioxide and water in a “controlled composting environment” in fewer than 90 days. What’s a controlled composting environment? Not your backyard bin, pit or tumbling barrel. It’s a large facility where compost—essentially, plant scraps being digested by microbes into fertilizer—reaches 140 degrees for ten consecutive days. So, yes, as PLA advocates say, corn plastic is “biodegradable.” But in reality very few consumers have access to the sort of composting facilities that can make that happen. NatureWorks has identified 113 such facilities nationwide—some handle industrial food-processing waste or yard trimmings, others are college or prison operations—but only about a quarter of them accept residential foodscraps collected by municipalities.

Then there's the issue that more and more people are allergic to corn (which some tie to the genetically engineered strains that have appeared just in the last decade or so) and these plastics are literally deadly to them (which can be ironically unfortunate if they go to the hospital for ingesting food that wasn't supposed to contain it and end up worse because of all the corn derivitive contaminated equipment and medicines there.

The GE corn also requires intensive chemical inputs just to grow which are leaching into our groundwaters and oceans creating other issues such as dead zones which are destroying marine life (including seafood).