California Outdoors Q&As: Serving Abalone at a Fundraiser?
Carrie Wilson is a marine biologist with the California
Department of Fish and Wildlife. She cannot personally answer
everyone's questions but will select a few to answer in this
column each week. Contact her at  Question: My husband and I are
residents of both Humboldt and Sutter counties. We occasionally
dive for abalone in Humboldt where we live. If we don’t consume
them right away, we freeze them whole in the shell as the local
game warden advised us years ago. I also work for a nonprofit
hospice in Sutter County and they are having a fundraiser in May
at a private house, where many of our staff will prepare
appetizers for 100 guests. I want to prepare abalone appetizers
from three abalone that we already have tagged and frozen from
last season. The event is being professionally catered for the
meal and dessert and so they are selling tickets, but no one is
paying for or making money from the abalone I want to cook. The
abalone is such a minuscul