Messy Food

Why is messy food, or even hands-on-food, always so good?

My mindset was all about the messy food today. Probably because yesterday was a day deprived of water flow, as the ENTIRE day was consumed with what has become known as The Great Water Heater Replacement of 2009.

Yeah, a month ago, the hubby was supposed to tackle this project. Every weekend since then, there has been an excuse to not do it. This weekend, he finally got around to it.



What.... that's not the bling that every housewife dreams of??

The water heater that replaced was the original that was put it when this house was built... it was 20 years old. I'm surprised it was still working at all.

The father-in-law came over and I knew enough to get out of the house (I was also still waiting for the second cup of coffee to totally kick in... if you get my meaning... and wanted to at least be somewhere that had a working toilet) so I went to Costco.

While I was coming back, the hubby and father in law were already headed out to Home Depot Trip Number Two.

They did get the old water heater uninstalled with no problems, but there were "issues" since the new water heater is a different size (not capacity, just different height) then the old water heater. Whatever. I headed out and picked up sandwiches for lunch, and waited.

Aaaaaand then it all went badly.

When you buy anything other than a new house, you should expect to run into some problems. When you buy a place that is 20 years old, you should expect that every renovation or replacement will mean at least 5 more problems than you imagined. The problem this time was the pipes that lead to the water heater started leaking. It was 2pm by that point. We called Roto-Rooter. They said it'd be two hours.

At 4pm, the called and said they were running really behind (apparently a lot of plumbing problems must have happened yesterday) and they'd be another two hours.

At six, they said it'd be another hour.

He did finally show up about 7pm. It took about an hour for him to get it all fixed. But $350 later, the problem was no longer a problem.

Yay!

Then was the fun of me frantically switching out the batteries in the carbon monoxide detectors before the hubby turned the gas to the water heater back on, and the LONG process of trying to get the thing lit. It took like 20 minutes.

I also learned that I need to let my technical writer self relax a bit when reading off the manual instructions for things that involve fire + gas... when I was reading a particular badly worded sentence and made a face and said "WOW... that's bad" I kinda panicked the hubby. Sorry, hubby! You look at and judge the workmanship of signs all the time, I make faces at bad instructions.

I was smart enough to take a shower in the morning but the hubby hadn't, so he took a long, hot, well-deserved shower before we settled down for the night.

So, today was just all about the thoughts of messy food, the stuff where you need to wash your hands, your face, your clothes and the surfaces below where you are off.

The original thought was chicken wings. But, then I saw the produce/deli place actually had head-on shrimp on sale for four bucks a pound.

Oh yeah. Sigh me up for some Barbecue Shrimp, please!

The mixed up sauce....



I doubled the sauce recipe, since I wanted plenty for dunking some bread. I also omitted the rosemary... the hubby is not a rosemary fan. I'm not too big on it either.

Two pounds of shrimp go into the simmering sauce...



Aaaand this is the point where I realized I really, really messed up in forgetting to de-vwin the shrimp.



It sure looks pretty though....



Dinner was a spinach salad, some baked potatoes, steamed broccoli, and bread, with a big dish-of-love sitting between us to pick out shrimp and dunk slices of bread....




Very, very good.

Only a couple shrimp really suffered from my lack of de-veining, and overall dinner was a largely silent event while we picked out shrimp, cleaned them off, and occasionally stopped for a sip of beverage (leftover glass of white wine for me, a Dixie Beer for the hubby.

When I was done, my hands were sticky up to the wrists. But it was worth it.