dragonlady7

It's Lent. On Fridays in Lent, Catholics aren't supposed to eat meat.
Because of an incident with rampant bribery and a pope, seafood and fish are officially Not Meat.
This loophole has given rise to some fabulous dining.

Growing up in a mixed household, with a Dutch Reformed / Methodist mother, and a Brooklyn Catholic father, we didn't really experience this fabulous seafood dining.
But now I'm dating a boy from Buffalo. And, as I've mentioned before, though possibly not on this blog, in Buffalo they do many things right. They do a lot wrong; I mean, just look at the 33 and the local government. But, things they do right include Catholicism and food. When you combine the two, it's a masterpiece.

So, the first week of Lent we drove out to Buffalo for (a friend's mom's funeral and) a Fish Fry. This is an art form in Buffalo, and is fried food at its best-fried. We went to the Buffalo Tap Room at about 5 pm and it was mobbed, but you can go just about anywhere and get a really good fish fry, with a really long wait. Everyone goes out for fish fries on Fridays in Lent. It doesn't matter where you go. It'll be good, and everyone else will know that. (However, it will be cheap also. So...)

Last night was the second Friday of Lent, and instead of eating leftover spinach lasagna, Dave decided we needed oyster stew.
To make a long story short, you'd think we lived in the Midwest, and he couldn't find any oysters.
So he bought mussels.
In their shells.
...
It's not really very easy to pry a mussel out of its shell. It took him 20 minutes to realize that they were alive. He figured it out when he handed me one to help him with, and it closed while I was looking at it. Eeeeeewwww.

Yes, we slaughtered about two dozen little animals last night in the name of not eating meat. And in the process, Dave cut himself badly with a butter knife. Have I mentioned that mussels are difficult to shell?

So, there was a lot of death in our kitchen. My conscience was eased slightly when we discovered that Dave was better at breaking their little wills, and I was good at separating their corpses from their shells. So I actually killed few of them, but eviscerated most of them.

I found it a little traumatic, but really, in the end, it was a damn good stew. So they didn't die in vain. And, technically, they weren't meat, even though they're in the animal kingdom...
I don't know. But I do know that the bottle of wine and philosophical discussion on bivalve consciousness was most enjoyable.

So, here's to wholesale slaughter in the name of penitence.