Ripping Apart Shrimp again! - Carver

Back in Cape Town, we ate at a place called the Chapman’s Peak Hotel. We wrote a blog post about it. Here we ripped apart shrimp again. We had heard of a restaurant, well not exactly a restaurant. It was many tables with some stands, somewhat like the Jemaa El Fnaa jus d’orange sellers. They had big pots to cook the crevettes (shrimp), calamars (you can guess what that is), and poissons (fish, or what I call fish fish to point out that it is not shellfish). Then they brought out big platters. The first platter was full of crevettes. The second which came out a while later, had calamari and fish fish. The calamari was fried and breaded, how you would generally find calamari. I felt there was absolutely too little. I got one calamari. The fish fish was also breaded and fried. It was crunchy on the outside and had bones(at least the one I tried was) so I decided to be content with my crevettes and I like shellfish more anyway. The greatest thing there was the shrimp/prawns. The difference between shrimp and prawns are how many of its legs have claws. But in cooking, the terms can be used interchangeably. In South Africa, they were generally called prawns. In Morocco, they would be called crevettes or the Arabic spelling of what in English, would be written as alqaridus. I just looked it up on Google Translate. It had its exoskeleton on. It had its legs on, which I quickly learned that after the head, that was the next thing to come off or it would claw me. Some had heads. They all had tails which were even sharp. I know, so surprising! So you had to peel the shrimp. All through dinner, Syarra was pointing out that she was disgusted by this. I offered to peel her crevettes for $5 a piece. I wish I had a monopoly. But I didn’t. First $4 was offered. I lowered my price to $3. Eventually it got down to free. I didn't want to do that! So I stopped offering to do it. Right before we left, I wanted to know what the eye of a fried fish felt like. So I touched it. I called it a sticky bouncy  combination eye. And sang that the whole way back. Syarra was not impressed.

It was incredibly fun. Picking apart shrimp, prawns, crevettes, or alqaridus. Whatever you want to call it.