Merlin and the Shrimp Creole

Disclaimer: No offense to Gimli but most of these posts will be about Merlin since he is the food obsessed, kitchen hanging out cat.

Both of my cats are stalkers. Gimli enjoys stalking cat toys, boxes, and any family member that is in sight- especially Merlin. Merlin, on the other hand, is more of a soup stalker. It is far from uncommon to sit down to your lunch and quickly have a large white paddy paw reaching for your bowl of chicken noodle. Tonight he has been stalking the Shrimp Creole.

I was planning on making shrimp creole for dinner last week but a lack of canned tomatoes vetoed that idea. It ended up being for the best since Adam had a 6:30pm meeting I'd forgotten about and wasn't going to be home for dinner. A minor bout of the flu over the weekend prevented us from feeling like cooking though I did get to the grocery store before feeling rotten. So shrimp creole got bumped to tonight's menu.

The prep work for shrimp creole mostly involves chopping vegetables- not something cats are overly interested in. However, it does also involve prepping shrimp. I just simply use pre-cooked frozen shrimp because it is a lot more convenient. Prep just involves thawing the shrimp and them removing the tails (if I feel like it). Of course, the smell of thawing shrimp can draw kitties to the kitchen. Now, I don't really know if shrimp thawing gives off an odor discernable to felines (I certainly don't smell anything) or if it is just the act of my doing things in the kitchen that draws a Mermer.

Luckily Merlin isn't a food snatcher. He'll beg at your side for what is on your plate but he'll leave the food left unwatched on the counter alone. So the shrimp in the sink has been ignored. However, shortly after I added the chicken broth and wine to the pot of veggies I had a Merlin watching closely. Merlin loves to sit on top of the refrigerator. It is one of his "petting spots"- places he has trained us to lather attention on him when he goes to. It also makes a great spot for eyeing the kitchen.

The only way to get to the top of the fridge is by jumping on the the spot of counter between the fridge and the stove. This takes some extreme feline dexterity, especially when there is a hot pot on the stove, but Merlin is an expert. So tonight he jumped to his spot, nicely depositing a few white flying hairs into the creole. Luckily I saw them before I stirred the pot. One was actually stuck on the spoon.

He then watched me work for awhile until he somehow managed to open the freezer door. I don't think this was on purpose but since the freezer is where we keep the kibble one never knows. Gimli happened to be nearby when the freezer was opened and subsequently thought it should be snack time. When Gimli decides he wants to be fed it is best to comply, unless you want to be continually harassed, bit, and bounced at with claws. So I handed out a small snack.

Of course, in order to eat the snack Merlin had to get off the fridge. This is more difficult when something is on the stove but he managed it. Though, being Merlin he paused for awhile by the simmering creole, torn between tasting that and eating his perennial favorite, kibble.

Kibble won out, of course, but I fully expect him to return to the scene of his stalking once the creole is ready to eat and in bowls.

And yeah, there's a good chance he'll get a bit of shrimp if he shows up and looks cute enough (and when does a cat NOT look cute enough?)

Re-tooling the Blog

As you may or may not know- I actually have a blog. I started it months ago as an inspiration to get myself to start writing ago. If you've read my blog at all you'll soon realize that this ploy failed rather miserably.

What it all boiled down to is that I'm rather paranoid. I discovered that I did not want rough drafts of my writing out in the public eye. It wasn't that I was fearing scrutiny but I was fearing plagiarism. My original plan was to use my blog to work on writing pieces that I would someday potentially consider submitting for publication. The thought that my potentially good ideas and hopefully above average writing would be out there where anyone could walk away with it prohibited me from posting much of anything. On some level this is a rational fear- blogs are not policed and I would be hard-spent trying to prove something was my original work. This is also a highly irrational fear because it makes the huge egocentric assumption that masses are reading my blog. But paranoia won and the blog has remained untouched for months.

I did think about it from time to time, however. But I couldn't quite think of what to do with it. Yes, I could've turned it into one of those generic "here's my life!" blogs but I find those so frequently self-centered I couldn't imagine attaching myself to such a thing. I do not believe for one nano-second that anyone other than my mom gives a damn about what happens in my daily life, and since she gets a phone call at least once a week providing those updates, why write about it? Blogging about your everyday life just seems like the lazy (and often self-absorbed) way of staying in touch with people. Personal life blogs often scream "I'm so important that you need to know what I ate for breakfast!" and "I'm too important to actually talk to you and learn about your life. We both know that knowing about me is SO much better!" Yes, this may be an exaggeration to some respect and yes, I have probably insulted a few people by stating my opinion but if the shoe fits...

I briefly contemplated turning this into a blog about being unemployed. However, I quickly dismissed this idea as well. I didn't want to write an electronic version of a prison diary: Day 97: Still unemployed. No interviews. Prospects look bleak. Frankly, being unemployed for six months is depressing enough without writing about it on a daily basis. And what was I going to write about in regards to months of unemployment? It would have just been a whine-ridden pity party.

Then it occurred to me: Food. I love food. I love cooking it. I love shopping for it. I love eating it. I love reading about it. I love watching about it on TV. I also enjoy writing about it though I don't do it very often. I wasn't sure I wanted to do a solely-food based blog- retyping recipes would get tedious. So what else am I obsessed with? My cats! Hence the blog name, "Cooking With Cat Hair" was born. No, I don't actually purposely cook with cat hair but when you have cats who go on the counters, tables, and the top of the fridge, cat hair in food just happens.

So here is the first entry to my re-tool blog. May it be used more often than my previous one!

Sidenote: I should've known I'd never have fully utilized a blog which used a play on Virginia Woolf as its title (I do still think "A Virtual Room of My Own" was one damn clever title though) since I have never managed to finish reading anything written by Virginia Woolf, even when I was supposed to.