Tuesday, April 3, 2012

I am not really cool with this....

Oh man.  Where to begin?
One of my favourtie past-times with Mike is to go to the farmer's market on a weekend, troll around with nothing in mind and come up with a dinner idea for that night.  This past Sunday was no exception.  Except that after the farmer's market, it lead us to the T&T Market.  For those not in Calgary, that's an Asian grocery store, smack dab in the middle of the "non-white" area of town.  In my head I have visions of a smelly, smelly store complete with butchers decapitating live animals, employees handing out samples of squirrel heads and other strange cultural differences.  Guess what? I was totally 100%...wrong.   This looked like a Safeway.  But a Safeway in China.

Until we rounded the corner into seafood land.  Oh, shit, those are all alive.  I'm freaking out.  There's men behind the counter chopping the heads of live fish, crabs just swimming about out in the open.  Eek.  Get me out of this store.  Not cool.

Imagine that, Mike isn't done shopping and I'm skeezed out.  We finally locate the seaweed stuff we came for, can't find the one sauce he needs to make this chicken dish that he loves, and god damnit, we're back in the live fish area.  Alright, I'll be brave, let's go look.  AH - the fish have head and eyeballs - AH!  *Tammy shuts her eyes and stumbles away from counter*  *Mike laughing out loud at me*

M: Hon, why don't we have lobster for dinner?
T: Ummmm...well how do we do that? How does it get to our house?  yes, I understand how stupid that seems
M: In the car.
T: BAH!  No. I can't ride in the car with a live lobster.
M: I know how to cook it, it'll be fine.
T: (pacing, sweating, biting nails) Uh, ok, I guess.

60 dollars for two lobsters!?!?  You've gotta be joking.  We'll get one and share it.  For 60 bucks, I'd rather go to Red Lobster.  Ya know the place- where your dinner shows up to you already dead.  Handy that process, handy.  We're at the checkout.  Lob, we'll call her, is in two bags.  The cashier puts her in a third bag.  I am leaning on the counter temporarily having forgotten about the crustation.  Mike says something about it that scares me, and I jump backwards screaming.   As if Lob is going to escape her three bags and undo her elasticized claws and attack me.  I tense up all through my back and shoulders.  This is not going well.  We haven't even left the store and I'm flipping out.  even typing this i'm a bit tense


Walking out of the mall, the bag brushes against my leg and I leap sideways.  Man, this will be a looong drive home.  Lob is in the backseat.  I am in the passenger seat.  Logically I know Lob cannot get out of the bag and attack my left ear.  But every single time the bag moves I clench all muscles.  I am looking directly forward so as not to give Lob any reason to attack.  Then I look at the speedometer to see if he's driving fast enough to get me out of this car.  He is.  Thank you Jesus.

Mike carries the bag in.  What, you thought I was going to offer to get the bags?  The tension is slowly releasing in my upper shoulders, because now Lob can hang out in the sink.  Oh! Let's tease Ramsay and Ray with this new friend!  Neither one of them gave a crap.  I was sad panda about that.  I really hoped that they would want to play with her, or at least be curious.  Each one sniffed Lob and walked away.  Well that was disappointing.  So Lob is in the sink and I am standing on tippy-toes about 5 feet back from the sink trying to peer in at her.

T: Mike, She's gotta have some water, or she'll die!
M: But is she fresh water or salt water?
T: What? What difference does it make.  She needs some water!
M: She'll die right away if it's the wrong kind of water.

*Mike pours less than an inch of water, just to placate me, and it works.  I'm happy and Lob isn't dead.*

I am in charge of all other things related to dinner, Mike's in charge of cooking Lob.  His family is from Nova Scotia, he and his mom made it growing up all the time, so I have no fear.  He knows what he's doing.  But at this point, I just want the damn thing in the water so I can relax.  Mike informs me a while later that Lob is slowly dying and we need to cook her.  I make sure that I watch what he's doing, for future reference of course.  Or is it that I want to hear her "scream" like the TV says they do.  One of the two.

While the fanfare has died down, dinner is just about ready and I've got the melted butter all ready to go.  Let's go back a few months and remember that I am very new to this seafood eating thing.  I can do crab legs, but I am not about to crack open a lobster.  Mike's a pro, so he's up to bat.  He hands out our portions and we eat!  Finally!  It's good. But's it's not great.  Not 30 dollars great.  As we eat we comment on how buying a lobster per pound is a stupid way to do it because you're paying for the shell.  We each only got 8 fork fulls of meat, including the legs.  Seems like a rip off to me.  Discussion turns to how we should have bought crab instead.  We both like the flavour way more, it's much cheaper, and I can crack those shells myself.  

It's funny when Mike asks me the standard question: "Would you eat it/here again?"  That's always been reserved for a new pub or restaurant.  But tonight it seems appropriate.  And my answer, not surprisingly is no.  Not for 30 bucks and all the stress it caused me.  For that much money I'd have rather gone to the place where my fish is dead when I order it.  It also has amazing cheese buns :)









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