Fresh Friday — The Tugboat

It was another frantic Friday from a work perspective. I was more than glad that I had done my shopping the night before when the book closed on the day. I was up before seven and at my desk before eight having taken a leisurely path through the morning routine. Showered and had my now classic breakfast. I was in meetings non-stop from half eight until after one thirty. I missed lunch again, which will factor into things later in the day. I had a couple more meetings then a few phone calls. My meeting free afternoon was shorter than planned but I made good use of the time. I cleaned up my email a lot and fired off some updates and shared information. It was very good use of time. I powered down at half five and started to gather all the ingredients for the Family feast meal. It was at this point that I remembered why I should have had a proper lunch. (I snacked on Doritos 3D Crunch in the early afternoon) I was supposed to take my shrimp, pork and spring roll pastry out of the freezer at lunch for them to defrost through the afternoon hours. So that didn’t happen. Instead, I spent the half hour leading up to the video call frantically trying to defrost them with the microwave. It worked well on the meat but it didn’t make the wraps great. The other little issue I discovered is that I bought the wrong shrimp. In my rush to get home from the grocer’s, with the haul from one store already warming in the truck, I had grabbed a sack of shrimp that said peel on it, believing it said Peeled and Deveined. But what it actually said was easy to peel. Meaning that it was peeled, which also implies that it was not deveined. True to form, they were easy to peel, as far as shrimp peeling goes. They were not easy to devein though. And since I’d already minced up about 6-7 shrimp before I noticed this issue, thinking that the resistance and sharpnel was residual ice from the hasty defrost, I had myself a debacle in the making. My family talked me into ignoring the “vein” aspect of it all and I tried to pick out the shrimp skin. I don’t know the proper term to use so I’m going with that. I think I got the most of it, only the smallest hunks would be left. I was planning to mince the entire sack, a pound, and use double for everything else since I had a lot of pastries but I was put off by the shrimp. It was also 26C in my house at that point so I wasn’t feeling very good, having not adjusted to this kind of heat yet. I was queasy on two fronts. I mixed the ingredients and started making my rolls. My pastry was ten inch by ten inch, the recipe was talking about five inch by five inch versions and I was worried that portioning and cook time were based on that so I tried to cut my sheets in quarters to approximate the size. That didn’t work either, the ten inches were more like eight so I ended up with too small wrappers and had trouble rolling. I threw caution to the wind again here and used the full sized ones and hoped for the best. Here are what they all looked like.

My Sudbury sister and parents couldn’t find spring roll pastry and used egg roll wrappers instead. I mentioned yesterday I had to travel to get mine. My STL sister accidently procured fresh spring roll wrappers, not realizing there was a difference. They did some experimenting before using leftover egg roll wrappers. You can see how red my face is in the group photo, I was not feeling well. The food was delicious but I am worried my larger wraps didn’t cook enough and I’m going to fear I got a parasite from the undercooked pork or shrimp, or from the shrimp poop. Another terrible part of the experience for me was that on the very last bite I took I got a small hunk of shrimp skin caught in the back of my throat. I started to gag a little and nearly puked. I was able to rid myself of that chunk but it left me feeling uneasy. We chatted on for extra time. Sudbury sister’s phone died first again. I played my MSC challenges as we chatted, sharing stories and memories. It was a really nice visit and I enjoyed it very much. We shut it down between half eight and nine. I marched around the house trying to shake loose the uneasiness in my guts but eventually started preparing for bed. I gave the kitchen another quick wipe down, brushed my teeth twice to make sure there wasn’t more shrimp skin hiding anywhere and settled into some YouTube before bed. I was able to get to sleep about ten or half ten, not sure.