beXnlog

Sea Fleas

This afternoon, pre-accidental nap, we ate an Easter lunch at be's parents' house. The main events were lobster, crab and shrimp so i watched his entire family cracking shells and squirting juices all over the table, while eating my yellow rice, eggplant, curtido, potato and grilled zucchini. be woke up early this morning to marinate and grill our two zucchini and they turned out very good.

His dad gave us two tamarind pods from Thailand. I'm not sure how he acquired them but they sure were tasty! I love tamarind candies, which are essentially nuggets of pulp mixed with sugar and salt and sometimes chile powder. The fruit from the pods was less intense than the candies but tasted clearer, if that makes any sense.

A big part of the lunch conversation was the retelling of free seafood stories. When be's family lived in Miami they used to chase and pick up crabs off some particular stretch of highway during a specific time of the year/tide. Apparently they also once collected a bunch of roly-poly type insects on Rockaway Beach and ate them as well. I'm not sure what they were (his mom called them "sea fleas") but it seemed like they weren't supposed to eat them.

I never liked seafood growing up. My mom is a huge seafood fan so we ate it much more often than we liked. She would scare us with stories about bad men getting fish bones caught in their throats as they told lies during dinner (or whatever bad thing they did), so being that we were bad kids, eating fish meant chewing each bite a hundred times before swallowing. Growing up near the Chesapeake Bay meant wooden crate buckets full of crabs, poking them with chopsticks and watching the grown ups gorge on them over a newspaper-covered table. To this day, i hate the smell of Old Bay Seasoning. Overall, i think lobster is gross; i hate watching people cracking/squirting/dribbling. I hated the taste of oysters. Octopus and squid were like rubber. That black vein in shrimp is poo! Yeah, let's just say i never liked seafood.*

Many people are surprised that i don't eat it. Common knowledge about "vegetarians" is that they will eat seafood since it's not "meat." When i tell them i don't eat it, i usually get a look of pity - poor me, missing out on the good stuff. Well, to me it never was good stuff, and yeah ... it's meat.

*One exception: canned tuna. I loved tuna fish sandwiches, but i think it was mostly the mayonnaise. I used to eat mayo by the spoonful!

posted by beXn @ 10:58 PM