Do y'all remember half-birthday-parties? They were an invention of elementary-school teachers for all of us poor suckers who had summer birthdays. And how grateful we were. Do you know how upset this little girl would have been if I hadn't had my birthday marked each year? The trauma may have made me a different person. So then, it's good that those teachers were such sharp-thinkers.
It's February 25, and the temperature is currently 73 degrees. And thank goodness. I hate the cold. I really really hate the cold. Especially that awful whistle of Arctic wind that comes through my bedroom window to blast on my face. Like one of those high-pressured compressed-air keyboard cleaners. On my face. So yeah, that's awesome. Even better? WARMTH!
Lucinda, our house cat, peed right in front of me this morning, while I was making toast. About the rudest thing that's ever happened to me. Only ruder was that couple on the airplane from Seattle to Denver (Seriously. How do they sleep at night?) I think I was about as upset with her as I would have been about not getting my birthday recognized in elementary school.
Oh, and I bet you're all wondering about how the murderous cuisine turned out last night. Well: to my IMMENSE relief, they were already cooked when I bought them. That, though, didn't save me from the horror of having to dismember them. Like I said, I've had crawfish before. But in the South. I think there must be something to that when-in-Rome philosophy. (I mean, I was persuaded to eat something that resembled pink mayonnaise in a foreign country once. And that's about as bad as it gets, right?) So, the last time I had crawfish it was sitting at a newspaper-covered picnic table surrounded by locals, shell and guts everywhere; there was something just right about that whole scene. It wasn't hard to snap critters in half and suck their brains out. So then, it was another thing entirely to be standing in my kitchen in the Midwest, still in my office-attire, manhandling crustaceans; something very different indeed. The whole ordeal was pretty bad. I won't go into too many of the gruesome details, but I will tell you that at one point I started screaming "Oh no! Oh NO! That's brains! Yellow-brains! Brain-smears! On my hand!" And I was so on-edge about the whole thing that when Dane knocked I thought the bits had reassembled and come back to life to have their vengeance. It was bad, babies, pretty bad.
The food, however, turned out AWESOME. Crawfish and Shrimp Etouffee? SUCCESS! Crabcakes? DUH! I think I may just go to Jazz in the future, but I think I met the challenge head-on.
The finished product:
1 comment:
1. way to go on the crawfish.
2. in elementary school my birthday fell at the very end of the school year, so kinda okay. College, however, I got screwed on. Birthday during "summer", half-birthday during Thanksgiving break. That's right - screwed.
3. word verification is - "fetcho" - let's make that the "word" of the week.
Post a Comment