Treasure from the Gulf

Shrimp is my favorite thing.  I've often said if I had a last meal request, it would be fried shrimp, hushpuppies, seasoned french fries and onion rings, macaroni and cheese, a slice or two of homemade pie (pecan, coconut cream, and chocolate meringue), and wash it all down with a root beer float.

We were talking about needing to buy some shrimp and put them in the freezer.  Well, last Saturday afternoon, we were sitting on the back patio relaxing after doing the chores and I received a text from a young man who attends our church.  He said, "Kyle, would you like some fresh shrimp?"  Now, what kind of a question is that?  Yes, I'd love some shrimp!  He told me that he had bought too much and has 50 pounds that he didn't know what to do with.  

In 20 minutes he was at the house unloading some beautiful head-on shrimp that were caught the night before in Vermilion Bay.  We often lament the fact that there is so much imported shrimp in all the restaurants when we have the best fresh shrimp not 40 miles from our doorstep.  I don't understand why you would purchase or eat imported shrimp.  We always ask when we order shrimp where it came from.  If it's imported, we'll have a burger.

Back to the shrimp.  The best part of the deal was the price.  The young man would not accept a penny for them.  He said, "They're yours for free."  Fifty pounds of shrimp is worth a lot of money.  We begged and pleaded to pay him.  Finally, he said, "I want to bless you with them.  If you want to pay something, put some money in the little church."

At our church we put together Samaritan's Purse Operation Christmas Child Boxes.  We work on them all year long.  They are shipped to children all over the world.  We have a little church up in the front near the podium that people put money into.  The little church is emptied and the proceeds are used to pay the postage for the Operation Christmas Child boxes.  We'll be putting a nice donation into the little church for these wonderful shrimp!

I stood by the sink that night "heading" the shrimp.  I'd pull the heads off of the shrimp and toss the tails in a colander and the heads in another bag.  When we were done we had 16 quart bags filled full.  You couldn't fit another shrimp in them.  They all were stacked in the freezer.  Our cat, Ginger, got a special treat, too.  There was a pogey (little trash fish) in with the shrimp.  Tricia pan sautéed it in butter and fed it to the cat.   

The shrimp heads are ALMOST as good as the tails.  We save the heads and put them in a big gumbo pot and cook them down with water, making a good shrimp stock.  That shrimp stock will be the base for seafood gumbos, etouffee, shrimp stew, etc.  We love head-on shrimp for that reason.

Just this Sunday, Tricia cooked down a skillet of fresh picked tomatoes, garlic, onions, and peppers.  She added a bunch of fresh heavy cream from our cow, LuLu, and let it all simmer and reduce.  At the last minute, she added a quart of the shrimp!

In another pot, she had some bow tie pasta going.  Now I'd like to be able to share a finished photo of the meal all plated up, but I was so looking forward to eating it, I didn't get around to taking the photo until my plate was clean.  Fresh Gulf Shrimp.  What a blessing to receive!  We are so thankful.

A Few (Odd) Recollections

This weekend we went out to eat at a restaurant in a neighboring town.  It was a classic Louisiana fried seafood restaurant.  The food was good.  Russ and Benjamin were with us.  We started with seafood stuffed fried mushrooms.  For the main course, I had a fried shrimp platter and so did Tricia.  Russ got the Fried Shrimp & Catfish Platter and Benjamin got the 1/2 and 1/2 platter (Half fried Shrimp/Half Shrimp Etouffe).  The meals all came with a salad and a side.  I opted for onion rings.  We all split a Triple chocolate cheesecake for dessert.  We wobbled back to the car, stuffed and satisfied.

It was a nice family time.  As we waited for our meal, we talked and planned, laughed and teased one another playfully as families are apt to do.  As I sat there, it reminded me of meals like this eaten as a kid.  The fried shrimp platter was my favorite even back then.  It always came on an oval white plate with a heaping side of fries, maybe a couple of hushpuppies too.  We always poured way too much ketchup on the plate.  Sometimes, if lucky, there were small dishes of cocktail sauce.  The platters had a couple of lemon wedges to squeeze over the shrimp and a clump of parsley to add some color to the plate, I guess.  We were not allowed to have straws with our drinks as we often spilled our root beer all over the table, trying to pull the straw to our mouths.  A coordinated bunch, we were not.

I can remember having very little patience waiting for the food to arrive.  But all was not lost.  There was always an oblong basket of individually wrapped Captain's Wafers on the table.  They were buttery and delicious.  A plate with little containers of whipped butter or little foil squares of butter accompanied them.  We destroyed the basket, smoothing creamy butter on the crackers with the butter knife until all that was left were the cellophane cracker wrappers which stuck to our wrists from either static electricity or butter.  When the Captain's Wafers were gone, then the Melba toasts in the basket were then wiped out.  The Wheat Captain's Wafers were the last thing left. Ha Ha.

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When the waitress brought out the food, she set the platter down on a fold-out stand and distributed our much-anticipated food.  First, she had to clear out all of our butter knives, cracker wrappers and plates.  We always enjoyed our meals.  On the way out the door, though, we always partook of the chocolate peppermint patties.  They were either free or cost a nickel.  They were creamy and cool - a perfect topper after a great meal.  We balled up the aluminum foil peppermint candy wrapper and deposited them between the seats.  Somewhere in a junk yard, there is an Oldsmobile Station Wagon with simulated wood grain siding with dozens of balled up aluminum foil wrappers behind the seat.

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Odd recollections, I know.  Isn't it strange how the littlest things can make an impression on a child's mind.  I guess I'm still a child at heart.  Do you remember the oddest little things, too?

 

The Scales of Justice

Proverbs 21:15 New American Standard Bible (NASB)

15 The exercise of justice is joy for the righteous,

But is terror to the workers of iniquity.

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The Lady of Justice is a depiction of our legal system.  Ideally, she represents fairness.  She is blindfolded because the law is supposed to be free of bias or corruption.  She's holding scales to show that she's weighing the evidence.  She's holding a sword to show that sometimes justice can be swift and final.  Let's be frank with one another and go ahead and say that, for the most part, there is no justice on earth, and we won't see it until Heaven.

I was thinking about scales after weighing in the Meat Birds last night using our kitchen scale.  I always have to adjust a little knob to zero it out so that I get an accurate reading.  It is important for the scale to be right.

Our kitchen scale borrowed from my Lady of Justice

We were eating a delicious bowl of Shrimp and Okra Gumbo tonight.  Tricia was digging in the deep freeze and pulled out the last quart bag of shrimp and decided to make a gumbo on maybe the last cool night in many months.  We began discussing the shrimp and it brought to mind a great story I'll tell you.

Several years ago we were outside working in the garden and a pickup truck came down the drive.  Often, people will drop in to purchase eggs or visit.  This person wanted neither.  She was selling fresh Gulf of Mexico shrimp.  She opened her ice chest to show us what she had.  They were beautiful, big, fat shrimp.  I forgot how much she was asking for her shrimp, but it wasn't unreasonable and we bought some.

As the lady selling shrimp was weighing them out, I don't know what prompted this, but my wife walked in the house and came back out with an unopened 5 lb. bag of flour.  She put that in the lady's scale and what do you know?  The scale was showing that the 5 lb bag of flour weighed 5 1/2 pounds.  We were getting cheated due to unjust scales.  I don't know if the lady was trying to cheat us intentionally or if it was just a mistake.

When caught, the lady apologized made our shrimp purchase amounts whole.  She repeatedly told us she felt so bad about everyone she had sold shrimp to earlier and shorted.  We got a good laugh while eating those same shrimp tonight, remembering that story.  My wife is a shrewd businesswoman!  I don't know how she thought of the bag of flour calibration method.  I would have never thought of that.

There is a moral to the story:  Don't try to cheat Tricia out of shrimp.  Her eyes aren't blindfolded.  They are wide open. She's watching your scale and she's carrying a sword!

A Bowl Full of Happiness

When I was just a boy I remember looking in the back of a comic book or maybe it was Boy's Life Magazine.  I became very interested in the ad you see below:

I mean, could this be real?  All you have to do is add water and these little creatures come to life right in front of your eyes.  They can be trained.  They like clowning around and doing tricks for you.  Why, they are like little people in a bowl that you keep in your room.  How cool is that?  I scraped up some money to buy some and...  I don't think they lived up to expectations.  I remember being disappointed in my purchase.  I think the ad embellished things a bit.  I don't remember anyone being pleased with their Sea Monkeys, but the marketer sure did well - a buck 25 at a time.

I think the inventor, Harold von Braunhut, made a bunch of money off of this idea.  Many young boys and girls sent their allowance off to Fifth Avenue, NY, NY.  Sea Monkeys came right on the heels of Ant Farms.  I had one of those, too.  I think that Sea Monkeys were more famous, though.  Sea Monkeys actually went into space in 1998 on Space Shuttle Discovery with John Glenn.  Sea Monkeys aren't really monkeys, though.  They are brine shrimp.  These shrimp go into a type of "hibernation" when water evaporates and are reinvigorated when water and other elements are added back.

So, I'd much rather shrimp that you can eat!  I absolutely LOVE shrimp!

A friend gave us a bunch of them fresh from the Gulf of Mexico, and Tricia headed them out and peeled them.  She saved the heads and shells to make a good shrimp stock that we'll use as a base for soups, gumbo, etc.

I butterflied them, removing the "poop string" and readied them for cooking.  The Sea Monkeys ad in the back of the comic book advertised them as 'a bowlful of happiness.  In fact, a bowlful of fresh butterflied shrimp is indeed a "bowlful of happiness!"  And they won't leave you disappointed.

I put them on skewers, sprinkled with fresh lime juice and Tony Chachere's Creole Seasoning and lit some charcoal in the BBQ pit.

Shrimp don't take long to cook and I think even though I was being careful, I left these on too long.

These shrimp were still delicious and far more appealing and satisfying than Sea Monkeys!  A bowlful of happiness indeed!

Outdoor Cookin' - Dutch Oven Jambalaya

Last weekend we made a homemade pizza in the dutch oven and Benjamin and I decided that we would try to cook outside as often as we could.  On Sunday afternoon Tricia went to Baton Rouge and left us at home.  We figured we would break out the Dutch Oven and get busy on a Shrimp, Sausage, and Chicken Jambalaya.  

The ingredients are:

• A splash of oil in the bottom of the pot
• 1 lb. Cormier's smoked sausage that we cut up
• 1 medium onion chopped up
• 1 cup bell pepper chopped up
• 1 cup celery chopped
• Emeril's Essence Cajun Seasoning
• 1 cup rice
• 3 cloves minced garlic
• 1 cup chicken broth
• 2 1/2 cups beef broth
• 4 bay leaves
• a sprinkle of thyme
• 12 oz. medium shrimp
• 1/2 cup cooked chicken

We got 36 charcoal briquettes burning (15 for the bottom and 21 for the top) and coated the bottom of the pot with oil.  When the pot was sizzling, we threw the sausage in the pot for 2 minutes.

We then added the onion, bell pepper and celery, along with the cajun seasoning and stirred.

After about 10 minutes the vegetables were starting to get translucent.  We stirred the dish up with a big wooden spoon.  

We then added all the other ingredients like rice, broth, garlic, bay leaves and thyme.  After it simmers, cook for 20 minutes.

After 20 minutes, add in the shrimp and cooked chicken.

With the lid off of the pot, cook for an additional 10 minutes and then it is time to eat!

A quick review of the meal: The flavor was phenomenal! I mean the seasoning was perfect.  The aroma coming out of the pot had me salivating like one of Pavlov's dogs.  It was delicious, but it could have been better.  Here's two areas where I messed up.  First, after adding the broth I cooked it for 20 minutes.  What I should've done was wait for it to simmer AND THEN start the timer for 20 minutes. Secondly, there was a strong wind blowing Sunday afternoon.  This accelerated the briquettes burning and by the last 10 minutes of the cook time, the briquettes were cooling off.  I had to light up some more charcoal in the chimney starter and place under the pot.  By this time, however, the briquettes were far too hot and the jambalaya began to stick a little bit to the bottom of the pot.  I kept stirring constantly to keep it from sticking, but in the end, I had to remove the pot from the fire to keep it from burning the meal.  Pulling it off the fire prematurely made the jambalaya a tad bit 'too liquidy.'  That's okay, though.  We ate a bunch of it.

While cooking outside, Benjamin saw something up in the tree and went and got his rifle.  One shot and he had a big fat squirrel on the ground.

He cleaned the squirrel and put it in a ziploc bag in the freezer alongside some previously killed squirrels.  I think Benjamin wants to cook a dessert like bread pudding with rum sauce next time we pull the dutch oven out, but maybe the time after that we can cook a pot of squirrel stew!