My First (and Last) Time Cooking Shrimp

This week I decided to make shrimp tacos. The idea for this came from scrolling “easy” recipes on Pinterest. I wanted to find something simple to make after last week’s fiasco. I’ve made fish tacos before and I didn’t find them to be too difficult to make. However, I wanted to make something new so I went with a shrimp taco recipe that I found from the site. While shrimp isn’t my favourite food, I’ve always loved anything in taco form. I figured this would be a hit as well. Boy was I wrong.

Prior to this week, I had never cooked raw shrimp before. I had zero idea what I was getting myself into when I decided to cook up fish tacos. Following the recipe, I went to the grocery store and managed to find all of the ingredients I needed. Back at home, I decided that I would make it as easy for myself as possible by getting everything prepped fully before I turned on a single burner. I got the cilantro lime slaw ready to go before I moved onto the shrimp. This is where things went downhill fast.

While I am no vegetarian, I’ve never been the biggest fan of meat. Especially forms of meat that remind me that this was once a living thing. I usually try my best to avoid meat that comes with anything like bones, eyes, a tail, or skin. Basically anything that makes it more obviously a dead animal on your plate. This is why I’ve always enjoyed cooking chicken breast or ground beef. Knowing this about myself, I have no idea why I decided to cook raw shrimp.

Did you know that shrimp have legs? Because I somehow had never really thought about that. Having to shell and de-vein an entire package of raw jumbo shrimp was one of the grossest things I have had to do in a long time. I contemplated quitting so many times as I ripped the little legs off of each shrimp. My appetite entirely disappeared as I pushed through this horrible step. As I prepped the shrimp, I kept thinking about the scene from Shark Tale of the shrimp begging for its life. I knew that this was the first and last time that I would cook shrimp.

While having to prep the raw shrimp was by far the worst part of this week’s cooking endeavour, the second would easily be working with the online recipe I had found on Pinterest. The blog post was entirely too spread out and difficult to navigate on my phone as I cooked. The instructions and ingredients list were far too apart, which meant that I kept having to scroll back and forth between the two. There was way too much information on this recipe and I found it very difficult to follow. However, despite all of the excess details, it did not tell me how to prepare the shrimp. To learn how to do that, I quickly searched up a YouTube tutorial that was helpful.

After finally finishing the shrimp tacos, I was relieved to be done but was not at all eager to try them. As I said before, my appetite was gone. My husband scarfed three down and said that they were great. Unfortunately, I did not have the same reaction to the meal. After forcing down just two bites, my husband noticed the empty yoghurt container sitting on the counter and asked if I had used that for the tacos. Yes, yes I did. He then informed me that that yoghurt had expired almost a month ago. My appetite sunk into the negatives at that point. I scraped as much of the cilantro lime slaw off of my tacos as I could, but as I forced myself to finish them, all I could taste was rancid greek yoghurt.

I know this blog post has been rather negative, but on the bright side, I have learned several valuable lessons from this experience.

1. Don’t ever choose a recipe that forces me to prepare raw shrimp ever again.
2. Check the expiry date of the greek yoghurt in the back of the fridge. Even if your husband buys and eats several containers of yoghurt each week. Apparently he leaves the old stuff still in there.
3. If you’re gonna use a recipe from Pinterest, make sure that it is easy to navigate.

Well, thanks for reading! Hopefully I can make something edible next week.