Everything is Better with Shrimp

As I sit here enjoying my hastily thrown-together meal, I can't help but think that every meal I eat is better served with the delicious fishy morsels known as shrimp.

                                                           

Let me explain. I adore shrimp. How or why such an ugly sea-bug could become so full of uniquely awesome flavour is beyond me, but I honestly don't much care. Shrimp are awesome, and I love them. (Well, eating them.)

Unfortunately here in Newfoundland, the little pink caridea are expensive, and after starting school --again--, moving out to town with a desperate need to buy furniture and a great job that doesn't pay so "great", I thought I wouln't see shrimp for a long, long time. In Japan, where I had been living until very recently, shrimp were bountiful. I bought a bag every week. I snuck them into most of my dinners.

Recently, after being moved out for about a month, I decided that I had eaten one too many bowls of cereal for dinner, too many pre-ready pasta packets, and the food in my life had simply become bleak. I was eating to survive, and not to enjoy, and while there are a good many who must do this day to day, I not had not yet needed to reach that point. Far from it. But things had obviously changed  since I got back. I wasn't making the money I had gotten used to in Japan, my living conditions were again, different.

That's when I came into a package of shrimp. My boyfriend thought (as did I) that my eating habits were lacking nutrition, so he was generous enough to take me grocery shopping. I picked out a hefty bag of shrimp from Wal-Mart. He let me buy the shrimp :) . And then the shrimp sat in my freezer.

Has the word "shrimp" lost all meaning yet? shrimpshrimpshrimpshrimp

Anyway! I eyed the shrimp in the freezer for at least a week, thinking that I'd save it for a big meal someday, and continued eating my packets and cereal, bumming meals and groceries where I could. Until I finally (thankfully) snapped out of it -- the shrimp didn't need to be saved. I needed to be saved from my eating habits, from my poor, poor-student pity party I was throwing. I am a grown woman, with a good life in a great country. My living conditions are different, but they're as awesome as I could hope for! I'm not making all the money I was, but I did save a chunk of  it for just this point in my life. And, I had a bag of shrimp in my freezer.

That's how I came to the conclusion that everything is better with shrimp.