We were talking as a group the other day and the topic of our first jobs ever came up. I regaled them with how at the age of 15 and a half, which was the earliest that one could legally work where I lived, I got a job at a long-since-then closed local seafood joint that was pretty popular with the mid-sized town that I lived in. I was a dishwasher by job title, but we would get put on other tasks as was deemed necessary. One of the weeks of every month was "shrimp feast" and people would turn up in droves to eat unlimited shrimp of a wide variety of styles and since this was America, nobody would tolerate having to peel their own shrimp. So me and the other dishwashers got the awesome job of peeling everyone's shrimp for them! This was done in the back in the kitchen of course so no one could see the state of the folks that were doing the peeling.
We didn't do anything bad to the shrimp and we certainly weren't trying to pull a funny by intentionally making someone eat something gross. We were not those kind of people. We just didn't have gloves or hairnets on or anything else that they probably require today and some people might see this and think it looked unsanitary. That wasn't the point of me bringing this up though, the point was that i must have peeled thousands of shrimp in that time and it made me think fondly of how this sort of activity can be so it was decided among my friends that we were going to buy a load of shrimp and have a steam of our own.
I had nothing to do with the process of cooking or prepping the food. My friend's Vietnamese wife is more than happy to do that for us because they own the bar and any number of people that turn up are going to drink and they make money. It's a fair tradeoff.
We didn't really have the sauces that I would have preferred. If you are American you probably know about what we consider to be "cocktail sauce" sort of tomato citrus dip that has a lot of horseradish in it. Well, we can't get horseradish here so that was not going to happen. My friend tried his best to replicate the sauce using wasabi since most wasabi is just horseradish anyway, but it just didn't really work.
I never ended up with much in the way of kitchen skills so one funny thing happened to me. That bowl to the right of the plate of prawns, i thought it was a dip. Turns out it is the runoff slop from the bottom of the giant boiling tub that the prawns were cooked in and it is disgusting. What a wonderful way to start the night out!
There was one particular face in attendance that you might recognize
I was very stern with everyone there that Nadi is not to be fed any prawns as she WILL throw them up in a couple of hours time. This is something I have a great deal of experience with. I don't know if she is medically allergic to them or if all dogs are, I never bothered to look into it. I just know that every single time that she has had prawns, even a tiny bit of prawns, that hours later she WILL throw up, normally after the shellfish have already been long digested.
That wont stop her from asking over and over again though. She is a beggar at heart and she followed everyone in attendance to the pot and to their seats hoping for some scraps to fall on the floor.
Even though I did instruct everyone about how she will puke them up and to not give her any, I don't think the message to through to everyone there because one time I turned around to see her chomping at something in the corner. Since there was only one food option on offer, I knew what it was. So then I put her on a high chair where she wouldn't have access to any floor nibbles as well.
I was awoken in the night to the sound of a good girl that knows to get off the bed and hoerk up on the floor and not the bed as she was making that "i'm about to throw up sound" that is the best alarm clock in the world for anyone that has ever had a dog. She made 3 little piles of stomach juice in the corners of my bedroom, just like I predicted she would.
I was 50% financially responsible for this feast last night and my part of the bill was 1 million VND or about $40. I don't mind paying for food for my friends because we kind of go in a round robin of sorts and next time, someone else will be paying for it. I just don't think it was successful enough to bother doing it again in the future. That's probably because of the fact that once you've scarfed down a dozen medium size prawns it just kind of starts to taste boring. We of course bought way too much of the stuff because we are the type of people that would rather have a ton of leftovers than not enough food. I reckon we had at least 3kg left over.
The owner of the place asked me if I wanted some for take away but if I had brought home prawns and then tried to eat them the next day, Nadi wouldn't be the only one throwing up.