Dissecting Dinner

It started when the doctor told me that I am a bit anemic and need to eat more iron.  He suggested leafy greens.  I thought about a juicy steak. Except that beef in Thailand leaves a lot to be desired.

A typical Thai cow... doesn't really moooove you to want to eat beef.

 Green leafy things are a nice thought, but hard to get around here since I order my veggies online and have them delivered, and the site doesn't carry much green and leafy. At least, no spinach.  So I did a little search on foods high in iron and I found two that looked interesting: shrimp and dark chocolate.  Deciding that eating dark chocolate for dinner might not be the best choice, I added shrimp to my weekly order from the market.  And broccoli. 

Except I forgot. I forgot that I live in Thailand.  So I guess I wasn't all that surprised that my shrimp came with heads and tails and legs.  I could live with that. But they also came with veins.  In the US, I remember reading "deveined" on all the shrimp packages, but I didn't think much of it.  Now I do. 

I don't like blood or anatomy. I don't really even like thinking about my meat as living muscle tissue.  So I came home from the gym, figured I'd marinate the shrimp and then take a shower before cooking them.  There I stood, a pile of shrimp in front of me and not one, but two little veins needing to be painstakingly ripped out of every individual bite of my dinner.  Have you ever done it? It's gross. By the time I finished the sweat was dry, my fingers were prunes, the house smelled like shrimp, I had a crick in my neck, and little bits of vein were embedded under my finger nails.  VEIN! 

Needless to say, I think I'll aim to eat more shrimp when I'm eating out, and stick with chicken and pork at home. They tasted good in the end, but I don't know if they were worth it. 

My dinner- beheaded, detailed, deshelled, and deveined.