recover from seaweed trauma

If “blocking out” counts as “recover”, I’m cured!

[When you’ve been a vegetarian for 20 years, you’d sooner think of gnawing on a chair than you would a chicken or a fish. So with that context in mind, and hearing that Greig piece they always play in the background when innocent bunnies are nibbling heather in a field just before a wolf lunges at them out of nowhere and tears them limb from limb, on to my story…]

So the other day, I found that my local health food shop now carries fresh seaweed. How thrilling! I thought. (Okay, it was a slow day.) So I tottered off home with a couple of packages.

Today, there was bugger all to have for lunch and I was in a hurry, so I thought: Why not fling some of that new seaweed on top of some rice and call it a day? Filled with a sense of purpose, I retrieved a package from the fridge.

Instructions said to rince a couple times in a bowl of cold water to get rid of the rock salt that’s used as a preservative. Pulled some seaweed out, flung it in a bowl, cold tap water on top, swish, swish, lift it out and what’s in the bottom of the bowl, but an entire @*x%x#! eco-system of small sea creatures: snails, teeny fish, and even shrimp the size of the first joint of your thumb.

Pause.

Frankly I couldn’t decide whether to throw up or have a guilt-attack. I’ve always thought of shrimp as giant silverfish, so you can imagine my calm joy. There were three of them in the bowl. Black ones. I think I may faint now. Or throw up. I still can’t decide. (I did have the guilt attack, though. Still having, in fact.)

(Not to mention: Isn’t wet, raw, dead marine life, with no preservates, that’s been sitting in a package for a few weeks a bit of a health risk?!? I may have to blow torch the whole apartment to disinfect it.)