No, I didn’t convert our ponds to catfish farming. Or the funniest story I ever heard, a guy who converted to prawns. Some sort of Australian tiger prawns or something. Supposed to be big, according to the ad he saw in a magazine. They followed the instructions, threw food out in the water, and waited. When the time came, they drained the pond and had the biggest shrimp they’d ever seen. Like something out of a horror movie, wriggling and squirming in the mud. The owner, who was telling the story, looked over at his right hand man and said, “Ok, go down and collect them.”
“Uh uh, boss. You want ‘dem things. You go get ’em.”
This is the PG version of the story. I assure you, standing at the counter, having this 6’4″, 280 lb man act out the story along with the voices and and mannerisms was funny. I nearly peed my pants.
That is why I’m smart enough to instead find someone who brings the seafood in already ready for the pot. We (by we, I mean Jeanette) have worked hard to find the best seafood we could get and last week I made the first pickup. Just a small order to get started. Just peeled and ready to eat shrimp and lump crab meat.
But why seafood do you ask? I live on a beef and pork farm. We are lucky enough to have a wonderful chicken farmer (Hi Christy!) so we have beef, pork, and chicken. My life looks like this.
Monday – Chicken
Tuesday – Beef
Wednesday – Pork
Thursday – Chicken with different sauce
Friday – Beef, but this time with lettuce
Saturday – Pork, but the cuts that didn’t seal properly and were freezer burnt (you know we eat all those right?)
Sunday – Chicken, we were out of thighs? Ugh, ok, I guess breasts are sorta the same.
Monday – Beef, didn’t we have this yesterday, or the day before?
Tuesday – you get the idea.
When we go out to eat, I almost always get seafood because it is the one thing we don’t have here on the farm. Now we can mix it up and have some fresh NC caught seafood in our (and by our, I mean SWMBO’s) rotation. Our fish monger is the same supplier to NC Seafoods at the NC State Farmer’s Market so if you’ve had their seafood, you’ve had ours.
You regulars may have noticed we added a new freezer. This is technically the “seafood” freezer although it will likely house steaks, pork chops, and seafood. Basically the prime items. We are still sorting (and by we, I mean Jeanette, are you sensing a theme here?) out what will be where.
Of course, step one when we got our first shipment in was to have SWMBO take a crack at making something. All of her recipes are for anything but seafood so she started off easy and made shrimp tacos.
I don’t know if you folks like seafood, but I’m keeping some around. Those shrimp tacos were AWESOME!
Jeanette has been busy bringing in some other products as well. More about that stuff later. For now, know that if you want surf and turf, we can finally fulfill that need.