My seafood adventure for today
Today I have shown great bravery. In a time when safety comes in cans, I went to the local market and purchased creatures from the “ocean deep”, for consumption by those I love. You see, I’m a Maritimer that doesn’t get crustacean fever. I’ve never boiled a lobster, although I’ve caught them, chased them, raced them, listened to the song of the “claw chorus”. When you put hundreds of the beasties together in a fish shed, they’re noisy (and angry).
No, I didn’t buy any lobster today. They were on sale at about double what the fisherman received only days before, so the food industry knows how to ride the tails of the skipper. Instead, since there was an urge to provide a “surf ‘n turf” supper, I purchased a bag of frozen, raw, deveined, split shelled shrimp. An education for me, as I’d never really thought about how many ways the lowly shrimp could be marketed.
No biology lessons, but the lobster and the shrimp are cousins. Here’s the genealogy:
Lobster: Animalia/Arthropoda/Crustacea/Malacostraca/Decapoda/Astacidea/Nephropidae/Homarus americanus
Shrimp: Animalia/Arthropoda/Crustacea/Malacostraca/Decapoda/Pleocyemata/Caridea/Pandalus borealis
Basically, they have common great-grandparents, so they’re, umm… second cousins. There, now that the family thing is out of the way, we can carry on. It was a brave man that first attacked a decapod and ate it. After all, the bib and shell pliers had not yet been invented.
I prepared a good quantity of garlic butter. Then I unfroze my plastic package, spread them (and they are ugly) on a cookie sheet, lightly coated them with some fine Canadian canola oil (is that the vegetable part of the meal?), baked them at extremely high heat for about twelve minutes (to make sure there were none alive) and then we ate them. All. It was supposed to be a meal for two, but son #1 must have smelled the kitchen odours, because he longboarded home from work across the way to lend a helping palate. There were no leftovers.
And tonight I will go to bed, no longer a shellfish virgin. Next on the list: Lester. He’ll learn how to swim in boiling water.
