Phat Me on the Back (Or, Don't Read This if You Have a Sensitive Stomach)

Well, it took me about three weeks, but I managed it. I made phat thai (or pad thai, as most of us call it) on Sunday.

I love Asian cooking. Doing it myself is a little scary – the ingredients lists in my Thai, Vietnamese, and Japanese cookbooks require their own glossaries. But you get to buy the neatest toys – clay pots, bamboo steamers, woks – and the coolest staples – star anise, dried chilies, fish sauce, shrimp paste, seaweed, jasmine rice, rice noodles – and it makes for an entertaining culinary experience.

I blame the lengthy time to accomplish the making of phat thai on shrimp.

There are some things that take some getting used to. The biggest is raw seafood. Lots of yummy-looking recipes call for clean-your-own whole fish that stare at you while you eat them. I am frustrated because, having scorned fishing as boring and gross in my adolescence, I am now at a loss when it comes to cleaning fish (can anyone teach me?). But I think I could handle it.

Shrimp, now, are another matter entirely.

I’ve only come across one other creature that I had some weird psychological problem with eating. Rabbit. The sauce for my Spanish rabbit stew was exquisite...but the bunny carcass was distressing. It was the same size and roughly the same shape as my cat. Wrong. I couldn’t eat the leftovers, and ended up throwing away the rest of the frozen (and NOT de-boned, might I add) meat.

So I’ve learned that I’m not immune to the occasional revulsion when it comes to food. But I learned that a hundred times over when I bought my own bag of whole ocean shrimp at the Asian market. I thumped them down on the kitchen counter and blithely read the recipe’s deceptively innocuous directions for shelling and cleaning them, then got to work.

It was horrible. The peeling wasn’t so bad, and their little legs come right off in sections with the shell. I could even deal with the eyes. But not the whiskers. You know cat whiskers, right? Long, kind of thick, have a fascinating springiness, but sort of repugnant all the same. Shrimp whiskers = so much worse. Really, really, really thick – the kind you’d expect your bristly aging Aunt Sally to pull out of her chin. Horsehair thick. Longer than your finger. And they stick to EVERYTHING.

So I was already disturbed shelling shrimp with shrimp whiskers clinging to my hands (because they apparently have a goal of detaching from their owners as quickly as possible, and I swear there were way more whiskers in that bag than the number of shrimp could account for). But the deveining and debraining done me in. You have to cut off their heads, and hope you don’t cut it off too close to the end, or this nasty brown semi-liquid the consistency of pus explodes all over the cutting board, and sometimes runs down the mud vein.

I did this sixteen times. Well, a few more than that, since I threw some of the shrimp away as I went, fearing to kill myself with shrimp poisoning from brain matter.

Then I looked at my accomplishment, the little fleshy curlicues of blue-gray rawness snuggled up in the mixing bowl, and covered them and put them away. I made do with chicken soup that night for dinner. My stomach hurt. Then I scraped all the shell and leg and whisker fragments, all the heads and eyes and fluids, into the trash can. I threw the rest of the whole shrimp on top, tied it off, and took it to the trash.

I wound up throwing away the peeled shrimp a few days later.

Once I got over the trauma, using plenty of good, traditional holiday food like cookies and coffee cake, I bought the lovely already-cooked, pink, deveined, headless, eyeless, whiskerless, legless, shell-less frozen cocktail shrimp that the amazing civilization of the West has made possible, and made phat thai with that.

The end result was less saucy then we get at restaurants, but still extremely tasty.

Now I’ve caught the make-lots-of-Asian-food bug.

Seriously. Can anyone teach me how to scale and clean a fish?