Family Experiment

Not the greatest sleep for those keeping track at home but a very smooth morning. I’ve never felt so smooth while making my breakfast samidges, it was like no wasted movements. I was able to recognize this and savour the moment. I had a bit of thinking to do before starting work. I needed to meet a colleague at a field and I had a call scheduled for part of that time. The figuring was on when to leave to start the forty five minute drive to the site but also be on the call. I decided to leave at the start of the call and be thirty minutes early for the field walk. I have done an awful job explaining this all and I did an awful job planning it out at the time. I’m generally good at logisitics and timing but for some reason I’m unable to sort that one out. Either way, the call ended about the time he arrived so we started walking the soybean plots. It rained on and off like it does. I’d marked down two and half hours to walk through the site but in the end it took me nearly four. There was extra experiment that I didn’t realize was there and two of them were much larger than anticipated. That and I was slowed down a couple of times but getting other things sorted out. I made a stop at the Dirty Bird on the way home and got their fancy chicken sandwich that the Chef had been talking about. I had to fudge the recipe to avoid pickles but it was decent at best. That is two chicken sandwiches that have fallen below expectations. I guess since I can’t do the spicy McChicken challenge, the next one up would be the infamous Popeye’s sandwich that caused riots in the US last year. I’ll have to wrap my lips around it at some point and see what all the hoopla is about. Another reason I brought up the Dirty Bird is to mention that instead of ordering and leaving, I took a call in the parking lot and ended up sitting talking business for the next forty minutes. I managed to shovel some food into my gob since it was well after lunch but didn’t get much in during the call. Afterwards I took a few moments to cram some food into my face before heading out. It started to pour at one point so I pulled into a parking lot and decided to eat the poutine that came with my meal. The song Drift Away by Uncle Kracker came on and with the heat going in the truck and my big, thick sweater on I’m not sure that I’ve ever been in a moment more dedicated to comfort. Crushing a warm, melty poutine while being embraced by comfort itself and listening to the familiar, dulcent tones of a singalong song was something I won’t soon forget. I might have almost felt happy in that moment. The rain died down and I navigated around a closed road through some side streets and made it home in time to clean up my inbox. I talked to a colleague in Quebec on his way moose hunting to share any lingering items from the last week and to make sure I had things covered for the upcoming week that he’d be enjoying in the woods with his buddies. That call lasted right up almost six bells. The pre-arranged time that my siblings, parents and I were going to try something new. We all have the same air fryer and the same cookbook now so we were told a page number and had two weeks to obtain the requisite ingredients.

At six o’clock Eastern time (5pm CDT) we started making coconut crusted shrimp together but apart. Everyone had their own methods and tools that they used and most had a helper to make the process go faster, despite it not being a race. It was all good natured fun. My sister in St Louis who organized the effort took a few screen captures during the process and I’ve shared one below.

There was also a sharing of photos of our finished products. My youngest sister wasn’t able to get a photo of her dish because she was busy at the time of cooking. She had some contractors still working on the boiler system of their new house. They were upgrading some equipment and the job was going longer than anticipated. On the left, my parents used their blue plate to facilitate their shrimp with some white rice and soya sauce. They opted to dump the dipping sauce across the top of the shrimp rather than dip them. On the right with the white plate, my middle sister displayed her shrimp with some instant chicken rice and a salad. Below I put my shrimp in a bowl with other shrimp. I dipped mine in a sriracha mayo dip that I made instead of the proper sauce. I also had a nice Patina irish red ale from Storm Saved Brewing Co. It was not a good pairing for the meal but good in its own right. I did nothing the rest of the evening and went to bed at a decent hour.