Since we’ve been eating leftover and/or recycled Turkey (since Thanksgiving) or leftover or recycled Mexican food for the past couple of weeks, I decided to get us takeout on Friday night. There’s a new place that, despite COVID, has just opened nearby. It serves, among other things, Asian Fusion, which is definitely a change of pace. I opted for the stir-fry ribs*, and Pepper Mill got the (spicy) Singapore Noodles.
There was a LOT of stuff in her container. She ate until she was full, and still had about 3/4 of it left. She sealed it up in the container for later. she’d probably get three or four meals out of it.
That night she had a dream that flies were coming out of her mouth, and it woke her up. She couldn’t sleep, and spent a lot of time in the middle of the night looking things up on the computer. I found her asleep on the couch.
I let her sleep. Usually when she’s on the couch it’s because I was snoring. She finally got up after 10 AM.
“You know the shrimp that was in my Singapore Noodles?” she asked me.
“Yeah,” I replied. She loved shrimp, but I’ve been avoiding shellfish for years because of my gout.
“I think they’re really maggots.”
“What!?!”
Then she told me about her dream, and how she’d looked up pictures of fried maggots on the internet the night before.
It’s a mark of her sang-froid that she wasn’t massively freaked out about this. She knew that people ate insects, and that they are considered a delicacy in parts of the world, and that even maggots, properly raised and cooked, were not dangerous. We’d discussed insect eating many times. One of my prized possessions is David G. Gordon’s Eat A Bug Cookbook, which is filled with exotic recipes on how to cook bugs. Pepper Mill wasn’t having a fit about having possibly eaten the spawn of flies. She was annoyed that she felt she hadn’t gotten the arthropods that she’d ordered.
I inspected the container of noodles. There were a few smallish shrimp which were undoubtedly shrimp. There were also several much smaller things which didn’t quite look like shrimp, colored reddish-orange by the spices in the mix. They might have been stir-fried maggots. They didn’t look like shrimp that I was familiar with.
She wanted to call the local Board of Health to report them. Failing that (since it was a Saturday) she wanted to call the local councilperson she knew. I suggested she also call the restaurant and tell them. They’d surely want to know. But she wanted to get the Board of Health first. She didn’t get them, but she did get the councilwoman. She put the dish back in the refrigerator. For evidence. With a sticky note on it warning our daughter MilliCal, should she return home, not to eat anything from the container.
Later in the day she started having second thoughts, especially after she dug through and found something in the container that was intermediate in size between the undoubted shrimp and the possible maggots. These were undoubtedly teeny shrimp, and they caused her second thoughts. She sent off copies of the pictures to her sister, a graduate of Franklin and Wales college and a culinary supervisor. She swore that the unidentified thingees in the noodles were, indeed, really small shrimp. I told Pepper Mill that she ought to call the councilwoman back and let her know.
The rest of the noodles and now-confirmed teeny weenie shrimp is still sitting in the refrigerator, and I assume Pepper mill will be finishing them up. I got her permission to relate this story on the Board.
Maybe now I’ll make up one of the recipes from Gordon’s book.
*I had to ask them before I placed the order – how do you do “stir fry ribs”? Ribs are things you pick up in your hands and gnaw on. Stir fry is stuff cut up into little bits and quickly fried in a little oil and spices in a wok. Did they cut the meat off the ribs and throw it in the wok? or did they just throw the ribs right in the wok, bones and all?
It turns out that they do neither. As they told it, they serve traditionally prepared ribs over a bed of stir fried vegetables. Only that wasn’t really accurate. It’s more like they rolled the ribs in the stir fry coating them with vegetable bits.weird but good.