Shrimp

Cranky and the Bride belong to one (more than one, actually) of these local places like a CSA -- a farm that you buy shares in, and then get a share of the produce.  I say "like a CSA" because in the case I'm discussing today, it's not kale and celeriac, but fish and seafood shares.  Today I drove up to a truck parked in the driveway of a nearby farm (by arrangement) and picked up about 10 lbs of fresh-caught shrimp.

Fresh-caught.  Not, thank the lord, alive still, but only just-dead. Very fresh. But also very straight-from-the-sea.  Cranky jokingly commanded me over the phone from England that they expected the shrimp cleaned, deveined, shelled, and frozen in single use packets -- funny, except that is what I had intended to do before the command anyway.

Per shrimp, it wasn't that much work, but 10 lbs is a lot of shrimp.  Cleaning them required twisting the heads off, and then removing the eggs from under their legs and tail shell.  The eggs were the surprise, and the hard part.

I didn't know shrimp had eggs. I mean, yeah, I kinda knew, but I've never seen it before. Until the guy at the shrimp truck referred to them, I just thought the shrimp were dirty.  If you look in the photo (whole shrimp on the left, tails in the "basket" on top -- eggs still intact, and heads on the right) you can see the darkening in the tail area.  Not the vein, but eggs -- thousands and thousands of shrimp roe, a quite beautiful silvery teal blue.  On the very last pound I finally figured how to clean them out -- squeeze the shrimp as if you were rolling a cigar, and then rinse (rinsing straight just separates the eggs and drives them into the corners and under the shell).  (And later I wondered if shrimp roe isn't a great delicacy and I just flushed a ton of it down the drain? If so, oops, sorry, Cranky and Bride.)

98% of these shrimp were females, judged by the presence of eggs. (I don't know shrimp anatomy or sexual characteristics, so I'm taking the layman's view: eggs = female.) A brother-in-law of mine was once studying Buddhism, and he told me that in Buddhist theory, if you have to eat meat, it is better to eat something like a cow, than something like shrimp. This is because in the former case, merely one life (the cow's) is taken to feed many people; whereas in the latter case, to feed one person, many shrimp's lives must be taken.

As I flushed out the thousands and thousands of eggs today, I thought about that, and wondered if maybe these shrimp were caught in the midst of breeding season? Are we massacring a whole generation of shrimp (it wasn't just me picking up 10 lbs. of little beings)?  I assume not. I assume that this is a sustainable fisherman, hence the selling by shares and truckloads rather than just to the local grocer.  But such a lot of lives.

I packed the shrimp into freezer bags of 1.5 lbs each, and saved a gallon of shrimp heads because one of the cookbooks recommended using them for fish stock.  I saved a serving out for myself, but after an afternoon of twisting heads off and metaphysical thoughts, I decided upon cheese pizza instead.

To end on a surreal note, here's the official music video of the song running through my mind all afternoon, Fish Heads, by Barnes & Barnes (1979).