Day ninety

An assortment of shrimps for today. The
first one with long legs is funny

Shrimps, are they safe to eat?

Today we had final for our management and seafood class.

Management started from the final quiz and then two more teams were giving their presentations. I was in the very last group to present. We had quite a serious issue within our group. One of the member hold all material and basically was making powerpoint as he would like to see it, all our efforts to do something were rejected. Yesterday evening we had no powerpoint and we made another one as a contingency plan. Today he brought the powerpoint, unfortunately not exactly what we were looking for. So it was 10 minutes of shame and it's over. Our instructor is aware about this and unfortunately, the trouble maker is a guy with learning issues. Will be waiting for the results.

For seafood class we had a shrimp day. To be more precise we had shrimps, scallops, and squid (they are all my favorite). Also we smoked salmon today, after four days of curing. In the beginning  of the class we watched a short documentary about shrimp farming in Bangladesh. The people (in the movie) were complaining
that big corporations acure the land in Bangladesh, and the poor people have no place to grow food and cattle. At the end of the movie they were asking us not to consume Bangladesh shrimps as they are not grown in a good way.

With shrimps there are really a lot of issues. How they are farmed, what chemicals were used, and so on. There are a lot of questions, and not so many answers (who tells you that they used an awful chemical or some kind of shit to feed shrimps?). What people are not aware is that 90% of all shrimps were previously frozen. So when you are buying fresh, never frozen shrimps there are a huge chances that this is not the case and you are just paying premium for nothing. Yes, shrimp are safe to eat, but as with all kind of seafood you should know where they are come from. If they were grown in the USA, they are absolutely safe.

Squid for today, really cmall

With scallops there are much less problems associated. They are not farmed, however, some bad fishing practice can affect the state of the sea bed after harvesting scallops. Unfortunately we did not get scallops in a shall.

Octopus is 'resting'

Also we had squid, small size. We cleaned them, cut them and then deep fried the pieces. It was good.

Ouch, almost forget about octopus. We had it as well. We simmered it for an hour and then cooled it off and left for tomorrow to cook further.


In the afternoon I worked for bootcamp for students from Brazil. They came here for one week to learn something from us. The difficult part is that many of them do not speak English, they speak only Portuguese. The Chef does speak Portuguese, but that does not help to understand what they are talking about. Chef made two wonderful dishes with mushrooms today, I was really excited and would like to replicate them at home.