Lessons Learned

A very nice specimen - quite unlike ours...

As Ken was sitting at the auto shop waiting for work on the car to get done, a guy walked by selling shrimp. That was nothing unusual since we live fairly close to the ocean and we also live in Brazil where people are always selling unusual things on the streets.

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Ken glanced at the mechanic in the shop and the guy gave him a look that said, "go for it." These shrimp where an incredible price...less than $1 a pound. "Cool...well, then I'll take 2 bags (a kilo each)," and then proceeded to give the vendor a R$10. At this, the vendor exclaimed that he could give Ken an even better deal...he would give him the change (a whoppin' R$ 7) in shrimp. Well, ok, why not?

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As Ken was telling me how he aquired so many kilos of shrimp (the refrigerator door was having trouble closing), I recalled how something very similar happened to me in Israel with figs which I will not go into right now. Since my story didn't turn out so well, I decided not to say anything in hopes that his experience would be better than mine.

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Ken proceeded to contract Alicia to pull off just the heads to prepare them for consumption. She is very industrious and always glad to make a little extra money, so went right to it. At this point we realized how little these crustacean were. After cooking up the first batch it was discovered that there was 3x more shell than shrimp. I was needing a little extra fiber in my diet, but this was a little more than I had bargained for. We unanimously concluded that they were hardly edible in this manner, so Alicia went to it again and decided to take off their transparent shells. After 2 hours of hard work, she literally had only a handful of shelled shrimp to show for it. Not worth it. Just out of curiosity, Ken asked her to count how many little pink guys were in the next kilo she beheaded. Only 636. Did I mention that these were very tiny shrimp?

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Now for some creativity. Ken got out a meat grinder...yes, for real. The shrimp now looked like pink hamburger. I started dreaming up shrimp pizza, shrimp spaghetti, shrimp lasagna, etc. It all sounded wonderful, but after the first culinary delight of "cheese sauce a lá shrimp" we discovered that the shells, even though ground up, were just only neatly concealed and still managed to ruined the whole dish.

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Tomorrow we are going to take all those little containers of ground shrimp that are tucked away neatly in the freezer and label them "dog food". At the price we got them for it actually comes out to about the same price as real dog food.

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So the lesson for the day is:

The next time a street vendor tries to give you your change in produce, take your money and run, or otherwise you may have to suffer the embarassment of 4452 little tiny shrimp staring back at you every time you open the refrigerator door...not something I would wish on just anyone!