Various Happenstances of SethSeptember 42, 2006I don't know what it is about seafood, but somehow my wacky cooking stories always seem to involve seafood. Perhaps it's because seafood is considered by many to be a strange food. After all, if I had brought almonds to a friend's house to make pineapple-almond ice cream, nobody would be interested, unless they were going to get to eat some of the ice cream. It's because I brought crab to make pineapple crab ice cream* that it made for a better story. Still, there's no reason why Crunchy Crawfish Surprise(tm) couldn't be a disaster with some other genus of foodstuffs.** But the fact is that it happened with crawfish. I've been thinking about it, and I think the reason is that I tend to accumulate seafood and don't know what to do with it. Seriously, I don't know what to do with it. When I had an octopus that I was going to prepare for dinner, part of me really wanted to just drape it over my head and run around my block screaming that the aliens were attacking. Other foods I have tend to get used up fairly quickly. If I have pasta, I boil it and add sauce. If I have chicken and beans and tortillas, I make burritos. If I have eggs, I cook them with cheese and have them on toast. There are routines for most standard foods, so once I acquire them, they generally end up being used in the same ways. Not so with seafood. Seafood is a rarity for me, at least in comparison to all of the other aforementioned ingredients, so I don't really have a standard preparation method. I don't usually set out to buy seafood. I tend to get seafood one of two ways. Either it's on sale (imitation crab, frozen crawfish, &c), or it gets purchased by me or given to me because people (including me!) know that I like seafood and oddities (canned clams, octopus, dried squid chips). It's rarely the case that I acquire seafood because I plan to cook it that night. Consequently, seafood in my house tends to sit on my shelf or in my freezer until I'm out of other appealing food options and go poking around to see what random seafood I might have hanging around. Tonight, I decided to make clam cakes because I had a can of clams and a box of clam cake mix that my parents had given to me a year or two ago. I've never made them before in my life. And sadly for you (but happily for me), cooking them presented no difficulty and resulted in a reasonably tasty dinner with no story of pathetic failure. Sometimes that's okay, because I like seafood. In fact, I like seafood so much that my new auxilliary webpage is at a site called Squidoo. I like seafood so much that I tend to answer my phone with random seafoods instead of hello. I like seafood so much that while I was in Greece, I would shout out "Squid!" to passing sailors. Yes, I like seafood, and not every story of mine involving seafood has to end in disaster. But I have a sneaking suspicion that whenever I get around to cooking those dried squid chips, I'll have a story for you.
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*Or as I preferred to call it, "Pineapple
Surprise" **I like to consider myself a genius of
foodstuffs. This opinion is shared by very few people in terms of
producing food, but maybe I'm good at eating food. Of course, the
general consensus is that I'm not very good at that either, but
that's only because they're looking at quality instead of quantity. All work on these pages is copyright Seth Brown. If you are sharing it, please give attribution. If you want to reprint it, please contact me first. |