I was digging through the ice box, hoping to find a little something to stick in my mouth, just sort of a late afternoon snack attack. I was hungry, cleared some good miles on the trail, had a cold cup of coffee, sipping on some afternoon ice tea, and while I was digging through Frigidaire – and what did I find?
The ice box can be a pretty scary place, to start with. There’s more bait than anything else in the freezer. Some live worms in the fruit cooler. And then? There was this half bag of “frozen, pre-cooked, tail-off” shrimp. Sealed bag. I opened it. Nasty. Kind of gone bad. Okay, really bad. I was about to toss it out, the first sacrifice to Mercury for the season, when I stopped. It was originally a two- pound bag, and there was just about two fingers of shrimp left. Thawed, frozen, thawed, and frozen a second time, then thawed, cold, smelly, starting to ripen a little, and good for the feral cats at the dumpster, or….
Perfect for bait.
Take something smelly, useless, not healthy for human consumption, and make use of it. Recycle, reuse, re-purpose? Perfect Mercury mix.
Mercury didn’t make the shrimp go bad, I think they went bad after I ate the first pound and half, and let the rest sit in the ice box for a couple of weeks, so no, the planets didn’t make them go bad. That’s a fallacy. Although, dig around, I’m sure at least one astrologer can support a theory that the shrimp went bad because Mercury is retrograde. I can’t recall, maybe it was a few weeks ago, wait, before the last El Paso trip, yeah, I think that was the last the shrimp and salad combo dinners.
As a side bar item, Rudy’s BBQ Sauce makes an excellent cocktail sauce for shrimp in a bag. The frozen kind from the warehouse store. Frozen shrimp, not frozen cocktail sauce, who would freeze cocktail sauce?
So when I discovered the formerly good shrimp now bad, as I was thinking about how happy some alley cats would be, I looked in my own freezer. There, next to the sorbet (it’s a fruit group, right?) there was a bag of coastal bait shrimp, packaged up last time, for next time.
I got out another plastic bag, drained the smelly shrimp, added rock salt, and sometime, maybe in a few weeks or months, that will be ready again.
Planetary retrogrades, there are useful ways to put this energy to use.
Two Meat Tuesday (the book)
(cure for the common horoscope)
Bexar County Line