Abalone, Live!

A most amusing conversation I had with Joe (my boss) this morning, about a memorable seafood dinner that he recently had in a hot springs resort on Izu peninsula in Japan:

Disclaimer: Having been injected with liters of epidural during labor pains, I can't be trusted to have documented Joe's exact words verbatim. Tried my best though. Anyway, moving on...

Joe: It being a peninsula, they served a lot of shellfish and that kind of stuff, which I'm not really a fan of, but it's there anyway. So, they served this abalone -- you know what an abalone looks like? (flattens out his palm then wriggles his fingers as if he's squeezing a big jelly blob) It's this shellfish that has this thin shell and there's this thing on it that's (more squeezing-the-imaginary-blob hand actions) throbbing, convoluting, as if it's... and abalone, when you take them out of seawater, they're in like a "Hey! What's going on here?" confused kind of mental state.

me: And suddenly they realize that they're gonna be murdered.

Joe: Exactly! They must be looking at us... and so this guy comes in, puts them on the grill, and I'm watching (face contorts to a "this is disgusting" expression)... it was not at all pleasant. What made it worse is it just didn't want to die. It took a long time to cook.

me: You should've have videoed it.

Joe: What?

me: Video.

Joe: Oh, video! My wife did! She videoed the first part of it, when the abalone was just brought in... hers cooked faster than mine did. My abalone just didn't want to give up. And I was, hurry along now, let's go.

me: Did you eat it?

Joe: Yeee-aaahhh... but I didn't really enjoy it that much, but you know, what the heck, I ate it out of respect... didn't want to make its dying meaningless. And it tasted pretty good. I mean, I've eaten abalone before, but that was pretty bizarre.

me: How often can you get to eat abalone cooked like that? I wonder why they do that... maybe they wanted to prove that it's really fresh?

Joe: Well, yeah maybe... I still prefer them old and frozen and dead.