Uncle!

I never thought I’d cry uncle about one of my favorite foods, but I have had enough. If you see me in the next week or so, please don’t attempt to feed me any shrimp.

We spent the weekend at our house in the south. Our neighbors across the street, who coincidentally used to live in South County, wanted to know if we’d like to learn how to catch shrimp.

Sure, why not? The weather was beautiful, and it sounded like a great opportunity to spend some time with friends doing something fun outdoors.

Shrimping is done with cast nets – an item you can purchase at any hardware store in the south. Sometimes, you even find them cheap at yard sales, as our neighbors did. The nets, which are round, resemble long, lacy petticoats with a ruffle of weights around the bottom.

Neil demonstrated the correct procedure to cast the net – the goal being to get the thing to open out into a complete circle on the surface of the water. He held up the petticoat, swept it backward and then gently toward the water. It looked like he was doing a waltz. A perfect circle appeared and then sunk to the bottom.

At that point, you’re supposed to grab the line, which is attached to your wrist so the whole thing won’t end up in the drink. Then, you pull in the net, which will have closed up around anything that was sitting on the bottom of the river.

The first few casts turned up nothing, but then, as if the shrimp wanted to be caught, each cast brought up anywhere from a pair to a dozen or so. When the net is hauled up, the shrimp plop onto the docks, where it’s a bit of a challenge to pick up the slippery, wriggling things and get them into a bucket of ice. After an hour of the four of us taking turns casting the three nets we brought, we had more than five pounds of shrimp!

When our shoulders and backs said it was time to stop, Sue and I sat on the dock and proceeded to pull the heads off all the shrimp. I was a bit squeamish about the first one, but once you get the hang of it, you can plow through a hundred shrimp in just a few minutes.

Shrimping is very addictive. It’s hard to stop throwing that net when you know that there are still more shrimp out there just dying to be turned into scampi, or shrimp salad, or something delicious. So even though we had officially stopped catching and had started wrapping up, my husband decided he had to throw the net “one more time.”

Just one problem: He forgot to put on the wrist strap, so the whole darn thing ended up on the bottom of the river.

He and Neil made an attempt at a rescue – he jumped into a nearby kayak and splashed around in the general area where the net made its last gasp, while Neil searched for a long, forked stick. But the water was deep, and the currents strong. The net was gone.

The next morning, at low tide, the guys went back to the spot where the net was last seen. There it was, sitting up pretty in the mud, so they picked it up, dusted it off, got out the buckets and caught another two-and-a-half pounds of shrimp.

You do the math: four averagesized, middle-aged adults, plus seven-and-a-half pounds of shrimp in 24 hours equals – we ate an awful lot of shrimp.

Dinner was peel-and-eat shrimp with cold beer, followed by a classic southern dish of shrimp and grits. The next day, we had shrimp salad sandwiches overflowing the buns, with some iced tea.

We ate it all!

To make shrimp and grits for four people, which some folks eat for breakfast in the south, peel one pound of shrimp and sauté them for about three minutes with a minced shallot or clove of garlic in about two tablespoons each of butter and olive oil. Add a dash of lemon juice and a pinch of red pepper flakes. Meanwhile, make four servings of grits according to the package directions. When the grits are just about done, toss in about one cup of grated cheddar cheese and stir well. Serve the grits topped with the shrimp and enjoy!

Every southern cookbook offers slight variations on this basic recipe. Some sauté a couple of strips of bacon first and then cook the shrimp in the bacon fat, while others add more hot sauce. Some leave out the cheese. Once you get the hang of the basic recipe, it’s fun to come up with your own signature way of making this delicious dish.