Holy crap! Gluttony is a sin right? Man-o-man. So my friend Kevin and I have a regular movie night and currently we are working through a list of 60 or so flicks that strike our collective nostalgia bone. While tackling this list we are also trying to hit food items that we haven’t had in years to sort of round out the experience. Last night everything was just a tad too much.
We started off the evening with a visit to our local Red Lobster, which was sort of the special occassion dining experience of our childhood. I know there were many times when my mother and I would meet my dad there after he got off work. That’s were I started my Shirley Temple drink ordering habit and also where I had my first experiences eating crustaceans and cheddar biscuits.
So last night Kevin, the fiancee and I ploped ourselves down and decided to order up an uncanny feast. Both Kevin and I ordered the most expensive item on the menu to sort of mark the occassion, the 1.5 lb King Crab Dinner, while Carrie ordered the more sensible and classic shrimp trio. To warm ourselves up there were stuffed mushrooms and Chedar Bay biscuits aplenty, not to mention a round of Shirley Temples for all.
When the dinner portion of our feast arrived I was about to burst with anticipation. I haven’t had crab legs in like 18 years and I was all ready to don a bib, grab the cracker and go to town.
The meal did not live up to my expectations. First off, I wasn’t offered a bib, and I was not about to be the messy slob that asked for one. Second, the crab legs were kind of, well not really crackable. I don’t think they were bad or anything, just a bit rubbery and that sort of took some of the wind out of my sails. Lastly, and this is totally my fault not Red Lobster’s, I sort of got stuck in a “freeing the food from the shell rut” where I wasn’t eating any of the booty I was scraping out of the shells with my tiny fork. I just kept piling the crab meat on a small plate while I worked double time at freeing it. I couldn’t stop myself, it was addictive and with each leg I learned a better technique.
Was it worth the expense? Probably, considering Kevin and Carrie had a laugh riot at my expense while I dug out crab meat like a nautical junkie getting his daily fishy fix, and the meal ended up lasting right around two hours, so we got our table time’s worth. But all in all it was far from the best meal I’ve ever had. By the time I got to eating the sweet leg meat, it was cold and no amount of melted butter or lemon juice was going to save it. I managed to eat all of it except two joint/knuckle’s worth, that Kevin refused to leave (so he ate it.)
We asked the waitress how popular the King Crab dinner was, and she said that she doesn’t get that many people ordering it, probably only dorks like us. I will say that it did bring back a lot of memories of eating at that establishment, though I did my crab cracking in Florida not Georgia like Kevin, so it was probably a little more successful for him in that department.
On the flick front, we watched Teen Wolf (as a part of a proposed Teen Wolf/Midnight Madness Michael J. Fox double feature that didn’t pan out due to Netflix being stingy with their copies of Midnight Madness) and Harry and the Hendersons. We made it an utterly furry night with cheesy werewolf basketball and loveable sasquatch hunting. The flicks were cool, just as I remembered them (though I never realised just how bad the music was in Teen Wolf), but after 1.5 lbs of King Crab and more butter than I ever need to eat in a lifetime, I was suffering from sensory overload.
Next week, Midnight Madness (hopefully) and a buttload of 80’s snackfood including Babybel cheese, Easy Cheese and crackers, string cheese, Handi Snacks crackers and cheese (oh my god that’s a lot of cheese), Slim Jims, Mr. Salty Pretzels, and most likely Hi-C Ecto Cooler juice boxes (well actually not exactly, it actually Screamin’ Orange Tangergreen, but it’s the same damn thing.)
