Culinary Idiocy

Two nights ago, for what I believe to be the first time in nearly 10 years of being part of the "Young" family, I made dinner for my mother-in-law.  As I may have mentioned on here a time or two before, cooking is not what you would call my forte but it is something I would really like to do better and over the past year have been making small gains in that area.  My husband suggested it, and I was doing a recipe that had already gone well for me just a few short weeks ago.  So here's my chance to impress the woman who grew up excelling in all things stereotypically feminine and has watched her son and grandchildren suffer through my fumblings.  

I must mention here, though, that my m-i-l and I have a great relationship.  She does not have an overbearing bone in her body and she is incredibly gracious when it comes to my domestic shortcomings to the point of never really even acknowledging them.  This was really more about me proving something to myself and making my husband proud.

So it's a shrimp dish.  We don't really eat seafood, but as it turned out, this recipe passed the Lenten test several weeks back which is why we even gave it a shot.  A fortunate thing since it's actually quite tasty.  I don't know why, but last time I had some prep time on my hands and thought to myself it might be nice to go ahead an remove the tails from the shrimp.  The only times I have ever eaten it have been fried and as shrimp cocktails in which cases the tails have always remained on.  But hey, I've got the time so what the heck.  This time around, however, there was a bit more pressure (from myself) to pull it together in a timely manner so I pulled off as many as I could without delaying the entire preparation of the meal and then just carried on thinking all would be fine and we could eat around or pull off the tails on an 'as needed' basis.  The recipe simply called for "peeled and deveined" which is what I had bought -- or so I thought.  It was as the little suckers were cooking that I noticed a sort of thin shell shriveling and pulling away from the meat on several of them.  I told myself quietly that it could be dealt with, but I think it was when I noticed some still had LEGS (!) that I started to panic just a little on the inside.  I did my best to continue my peeling efforts as they cooked, but I'm sure you can imagine how that went.  I quickly realized that I simply had to soldier on and hope for the best.  (Meanwhile, I discovered that - for reasons I have yet to figure out - the rice in the other pan was simply not going to cook all the way down.  Fabulous.)  In the end I sucked up my pride and served up the meal with a heaping side dish of "my apologies" and a pile of napkins.    True to her nature, my mother-in-law jumped in with a smile and peeled away and commented on how great the it tasted.  (Damn you Rachael Ray and your tasty flavor combinations that will draw me in yet again to give this recipe another shot at some point in the future.)

So, the lesson learned here?  Peel the freakin' shrimp, you idiot!