Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Virtual bookshelf, pigeon soup, and BBQ shrimp
Headscratching pimp-job, mind-numbing stupidity, and mouthwatering shrimp, all below the fold.
Blue Gal is certain I will pimp this LibraryThing. Hate to disappoint you, BG, but I don’t get it. Why would anyone want to catalog their library online? Do you have any idea how many books I have in my bookshelf? (Answer: way too many. You should hear the movers bitch.)
I guess it’s kind of cool to browse through another person’s bookshelf; you learn a lot about someone that way. Once, when we were living in San Antonio, one of the other guys from my department noticed I owned a copy of Celine’s Journey to the End of the Night. He looked at me with new respect after that. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I hadn’t made it past the first chapter.
Back to LibraryThing. How many folks will build up unreal virtual bookshelves in order to impress others online? The books make the man, after all. In college, I knew a woman who forced her boyfriend to read The Women’s Room, and she forced me (forced me by virtue of her overwhelming cuteness) to listen to her read loooong passages from the book. Flash forward to the 21st Century: with LibraryThing, I could get props for reading The Women’s Room and never even crack the cover!
Face it. Blue Gal just wants to know what kind of manga porn I own.
***
That half pigeon head I mentioned in today’s Thirteen warrants further comment. During the pediatric ENT portion of my residency, I admitted an 18-month-old whose father had caught a pigeon in the park, made pigeon soup, and served it to his son, bones and all. The child choked on half a pigeon skull.
The kid came in stridorous and terrified. (Someday soon, I will write a post on airway noises — stridor, wheezing, stertor, agonal respirations. That way, you authors won’t commit the sin of writing, “Get away from me!” Alfonso wheezed.) I scoped him, saw something bony wedged between his vocal cords, and had a heart attack. If the half-head dislodged downward into his trachea, he could convert from a partial obstruction to a complete obstruction. One cough and he could die.
When I consented his parents for surgery, I made it very clear that their son could die. I may have laid it on a bit thick, but I was pissed off. I don’t think I’ve ever been that angry at a parent, before or since. What this father had done was unthinkable. It’s bad enough these parents who let their toddlers play with glittery beads — of course they’re going to shove ’em up their noses. Wouldn’t you? But to feed an 18-month-old a chunky soup, well, it still makes me growl.
Come to think of it, I don’t think I laid it on too thick. At that instant, I really didn’t know if the child would live or die, and that scared the hell out of me. Pediatric airway emergencies are intrinsically frightening, the most intense part of my business. My entrenched agnosticism vanishes and I become a believer once again.
We saved the boy, by the way.
***
My son Jake, finicky eater that he is, has long been uncommitted on the subject of shrimp, but tonight’s barbecue shrimp won him over. It’s a modification of Paul Prudhomme’s version, simpler, but just as tasty.
Chef Paul’s recipe calls for large shrimp (24 count) with the heads still on. When we lived in Los Angeles, we could get these at Ranch 99, a primo bitchun Chinese market. Yes, this dish is better if you can suck the fat out of the heads, but where I live, I can only buy headless shrimp.
For tonight’s version, I peeled the shrimp. This is better.
1 pound of peeled, fresh shrimp`
Seasoning mix:
1/2 teaspoon cayenne
1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon dried thyme
1/2 teaspoon dried rosemary
1/4 teaspoon dried oregano
1 tablespoon crushed garlic
1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
1 stick (1/4 pound) of butter
1/4 cup good quality beer (I used an amber ale) at room temperature
You can make this in a frying pan or a large sauce pot. Melt the butter over medium heat and add the seasonings, garlic, and Worcestershire sauce — everything except for the beer. Mix well, then add the shrimp. Saute over medium heat, turning the shrimp frequently, for two minutes. Add the beer and saute for another two minutes.
Take the pot or pan off the heat and cover. Tonight, I left it alone for fifteen minutes, reheated it, and it was delicious. Serve with a nice crusty French or sourdough loaf — the butter/beer sauce is heavenly on bread — and lots of cold beer.
I ground up my spices in a coffee grinder (dedicated to spice-grinding) in order to break up the rosemary. This is not strictly necessary. Also, feel free to modify the seasoning mixture. In Chef Paul’s version, he uses a full teaspoon of cayenne AND 1/2 teaspoon of red pepper flakes. Since he leaves the shells on, you could make an argument that this is necessary. Chef Paul also uses less Worcestershire sauce and less garlic than I do — go figure.
D.
My great-grandmother’s recipe book has pigeon soup in it, but I’ve never had the urge to try to it – never will now!
I just think it’s a nice way to post a tbr. Or have read. BTW, another reader looked at my bookshelf and sent me a book he’s written and published on PDF file, for free. The first day.
I meant to say that the dime in daughter’s throat was fed to her by her older sister, who was only 19 months older or so. A warning, perhaps, to not have kids so close together!
Love the Library Thing idea, and I’ll bookmark it, but please god don’t let me try to actually use it. It’ll eat up all my time.
too late–I signed up & started adding the books on my desk. ARGH
LOL about the movers bitching. Yes, they do. And I brought less than half my books with me the last time we moved. The best bitching was from the ones delivering our stuff the second time we moved from Germany to Texas. The German movers hadn’t used book boxes for the books–they’d packed the books into those big flat boxes you use for clothes…. of course, when I opened them, I started bitching, too. Do you know what it does to books to pack them like that?
As for the shrimp–of course you have to have the shells & heads on–otherwise how can you have battles with the carcasses after dinner? (my sons like anything with eyes, shells, tentacles, etc.–from snails to squid. They do have standards, though–they turn up their noses at hamburgers. *sigh*)
Ooh, this looks good, Doug. Mind if I blog you on my recipes website some day with this one (giving you credit, of cours)???
I like that blend of herbs and butte, but Chef Paul’s amount of peppers might be too spicy for me, so I like your rendition better.
Still shaking my head over that idiot father feeding a baby pigeon soup. Glad the child lived.
And now you will tell us all what manga porn is. I’m at work again today and can’t look it up.
It’s fun sucking heads, Darla, but the shrimp pick up a lot more flavor if they’re peeled. It’s a moot point here, since I can’t get heads-on shrimp for love or money.
Lyn, be my guest. And note that most of my recipes are categorized under Food. I haven’t finished categorizing all of my posts — I still need to do July through September of ’05.
Blue Gal, I’ll try to find some sites to email you this evening.
That’s okay, I found a way to look for it without waking the net nanny dogs. I’m definitely going to have to write a post about how to do that, btw. But according to Technorati (oh I just gave you one of my secrets) You are the only blogger in their database writing about “Manga Porn.” I can just see the big eye drawings rolling in ecstasy….
DOUG! OT but Mrs. Giggles found a site you’ll like. Bad sex scenes site! http://community.livejournal.com/weepingcock/
Yeah, Kate, that was SPECIAL. Boy, some of the commenters sounded genuinely pissed off.
That passage outdid Clive Barker’s menstrual blood obsession in Weaveworld by, um, about 100-fold.
Man, that was a scary story. Glad to hear that the little guy pulled through, tho.
*sigh* I can’t wait until my kids develop some taste buds and I can actually start cooking again. I am in an endless cycle of spaghetti, chicken nuggets, pizza, and grilled cheese. I can’t even get creative with those things. If my daughter sees even a speck of black pepper in the tomato sauce on her spaghetti she says “Mommy, are those SPICES? You know I can’t eat SPICES.” And my son, If I try to use any cheese besides Kraft Singles on his grilled cheese sandwiches he accuses me of using “Fancy Cheese” and turns up his nose. It is like my house is a daycare center all day, except at meal times when it becomes a nursing home.
Oh, BTW, I was waxing nostalgic about cooking in response to the shrimp recipe (yum), not the pigeon soup (eewww.) Just had to clear that up.
Um, Karibelle, I figured 😉
My son is a Kraft American Cheese purist, too. Best I can do is get him to eat cheddar, but he prefers his American.
I know this is off-topic but you’ve gotta read this account of what amounts to the date from hell from a sister in Canada.
I enjoyed that story, JP, and it wasn’t all that off topic — I recently blogged on big balls and jelqing, after all!
[…] I think certain individuals are just plain mean-spirited. Cooking is an act of love. If I fix a four- or five-course meal for my guests, it means I like you. A lot. And yet, over the years, some of our guests have acted as though I had done this to show off, or to humiliate them because, I don’t know, they’re used to eating TV dinners and I’m just rubbing it in. How should I know why they start acting like dicks? One of the post-docs at my lab in grad school was like that. We had him, his wife, and his kids over for dinner. I can’t remember what I made — this was a jillion years ago — but back then, I usually made barbecued shrimp (Cajun style, not shrimp-on-the-barbie). Really not a big deal, but this couple had expected hamburgers, and they acted as though I had delivered the supreme insult. They never invited us to their house, and we never invited them back to ours. […]