Monday, January 24, 2005
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Everything Else
One thing Lisa and David intentionally left behind was Prima's Chili Crab Mix. Coincidentally, Live Dungeness Crab was on sale at T&T (Chinese Supermarket) for less than half the usual price last weekend. The best thing about my particular T&T is that you get to pick your own crabs out of a tankful of other crabs. This is great for two reasons. 1. You get to make sure that your crab is not missing anything. There are a great many crabs with missing legs and/or claws. I'm not making any guesses as to the reason for this, all I know is that I want a crab with all its appendages. 2. You get to make sure that your crab feels heavy for its size. True, you are buying the crab by weight but according to
Alton Brown crabs that are light for their weight are most likely to have just moulted. This means that (a)they are comparatively less healthy than their counterparts and (b)since they are skinnier, proportionally more of the money spent on that crab will have been spent on the weight of the shell and not the weight of the meat. Shell, unless you are some circus sideshow performer, is inedible (the last time I checked, anyway) so you really want to give your crab a good feel.
Actually, there is a third reason for choosing your own crabs. Everyone knows that the point to live crabs is that they are alive and not half dead. If you are allowed to pick the crabs up out of the tank yourself, you will find that some are alot livelier than others. Those are the ones you want to eat. So while I was picking out my dinner, one of the damn crabs got hold of my left index finger. Picture this scene. Half of Hong Kong turned up to swarm the crab tanks because the incredible sale ends the next day. There are people
everywhere picking up and examining crabs and I'm the one who gets bit. I didn't even feel any pain in my finger because the embarassment stung too much. If you want details: the damn crab grabbed ahold right at the base and wouldn't let go. I looked up and called to one of the seafood counter guys for help but they ignored me and started yelling for the next customer. I know at least one of them heard me because he looked like he was trying not to laugh. The only reason the crab is no longer
on my finger is that his pincer was slowly slipping off my wet finger, which resulted in him holding on to progressively less and less finger, which also means that toward the end he was just pinching a bit of my skin, which was really, really uncomfortable
Joke's on the crab though. He might've given me a swollen finger (and I know it's a
he because it is illegal to harvest female Dungies) but I ATE him and he tasted damn fine. So there.
Jim and I left with four fat, feisty Dungies which together weighed more than 7lbs (just under 4kg). You had better believe there are leftovers. Just barely though. I had to excercise all the self-control I posssessed to leave some for Jim and not finish the lot when I came home for lunch today. In doing so, I have officially used up my self-control for the day, which explains why I'm blogging instead of tackling (a)the obscene amount of homework which has arrived in conjunction with mid-term season (yes, it's already mid-term season, can you believe it?) and (b)the requisite amount of housework.
If you were paying attention to
Lisa's and my blog over the past month or so, you could probably make a good guess at the size of my bottle recycling pile. All that on top of our existing recycling meant that Jim and I were forced to do recycling on the weekend for fear that the bottles would rise up and take over the world. Don't laugh, it's entirely possible. We left the bottle return depot with enough money for a night out. Notice that I'm being deliberately vague here: a night out could mean dinner at a fast food joint and a rental movie after or a night about town with dinner at a four-star restaurant followed by prime seats at an opera. I think some things are better left to the imagination.
I've made an appointment for this Wednesday with a lady from my local
Curves. I'm rather excited about it because now that I've made some changes to my medication (heh, another deliberately vague comment) I've stopped steadily gaining weight and am actually spontaneously shedding weight. I figure that this is the best time to start an excercise program. I mean, if I'm going to lose weight anyway I might as well add some muscle tone. I've never had muscle tone before. I wonder what that would be like. Still though, regardless of how strong I get, I'm still going to pretend that I can't lift heavy objects. Not that I need to
pretend right now, per se, but you get the general idea.
Now that I've run out of things to write about, I've also run out of excuses to avoid either of the two tasks I have to tackle. With regrets, I'm going to go measure the pitches in Cantonese tones so that I am able to put them on a graph and say "hey! look at the pretty picture Joie drew!".
posted by Joie! at
8:01 p.m.
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