Chapter 252 - 113: Poison Testing and Fried Prawns
Despite complaining about the small shrimps on the nearby beach, Chen Zhou obediently picked out some of the longer, bigger ones and put them into a plastic bag.
To prevent the shrimps from dying of thirst, he poured a shallow layer of seawater into the bag.
The semi-transparent shrimps were about 8mm long, making them tricky to catch.
The shrimps Chen Zhou caught were primarily 5—10 cm long, with yellow, black, white, and brown stripes.
The larger ones of this kind were about three ounces, looked fairly familiar, lacking the big claws of a lobster but possessing two long whiskers, with a thin, smooth shell on their back.
Although ordinary in appearance, they had plenty of meat, making them potentially good food if they weren't poisonous.
However, these shrimps had a downside—they couldn't survive long in a waterless environment and were quite fragile.
As Chen Zhou walked along the coast, he had barely caught over thirty shrimps and put them into a plastic bag when he saw that those at the top, unable to reach the seawater, had lost their vitality, their whiskers had stopped moving, and their little legs had stopped kicking, looking like they were about to die.
Unable to last even ten minutes, by the time he finished beachcombing, these shrimps would likely be no longer fresh.
He had no choice but to return to the wooden stone wall, grab a homemade clay pot, fill it halfway with seawater, and pour the shrimps into it.
He didn't expect the shrimps to last until he returned home with his harvest, just hoped they wouldn't die too early, as that would make them taste bad.
In fact, Chen Zhou had another target in mind for this beachcombing trip regarding shrimp.
It was a huge red lobster, over 30 cm in body length, clad in a thick shell, appearing majestic and intimidating, with an abundance of meat.
However, these shrimps typically did not live in the shallows most of the time.
Around January this year, he had seen several corpses of these red lobsters on the beach, some seemingly freshly dead, still very fresh, attracting a scramble among sea birds.
By February, sightings of these lobsters on the beach had become increasingly rare.
Come March and April, they were nowhere to be seen at all, not even their corpses appeared.
Previously, Chen Zhou didn't have a brave tester like "Brave Mouse" to try them out, so although immensely curious when he saw the red lobsters, he didn't dare to pick them up or taste them.
Now with "Brave Mouse" helping to test, he couldn't find those red lobsters anymore, which truly disappointed him.
He estimated that their next encounter with red lobsters would likely not come until January or February next year.
Of course, if he truly wanted to eat them, he could theoretically catch lobsters by heading out to sea on a calm day and diving into the shallow seabed, or gather other high-end seafood like large clams, conches, sea cucumbers, or sea horses.
But he lacked the skills and courage to do so.
...
Besides shrimps, there was also a decent variety and quantity of crabs on the beach, although their sizes were typically small, with the most "robust" ones only about half the size of a palm.
Like lobsters, truly gigantic crabs presumably inhabited the shallow seabeds and wouldn't come ashore unless during breeding seasons or due to storm impacts.
Wanting to eat them required a stroke of good luck.
Crabs had limited edible portions as seafood, and these small crabs, once shelled, didn't have even an ounce of meat, so Chen Zhou only picked out a few large yellow-shelled crabs.
After getting home, he would boil these crabs and feed them to the test mouse first to ensure they're non-toxic before tasting one or two himself.
The small crabs weren't meant to fill him up; merely to add a bit of special flavor to the table.
...
The best shrimps and crabs are in the water, while the truly abundant seafood on the beach is the shellfish and echinoderms.
The small shellfish clinging to the rocks, comparable to a thumbnail in size with ink-wash patterns on the surface, were Chen Zhou's focal point.
To deal with these stubborn little things, he specifically pulled out Dagger, squatting by the rocks to pry them off little by little.
These small shellfish were numerous on the pitch-black reefs, densely packed from bottom to top, making collecting them highly efficient, filling half a bag in mere minutes.
Though these shellfish might have a unique taste and tender meat, they could only be enjoyed slowly like "sunflower seeds" as a snack.
For someone eager like Chen Zhou, seafood, besides its basic taste, had another standard—quantity.
To find full and plump shellfish, hoping for those stuck to the rocks was impractical; digging in the sands was necessary.
When watching beachcombing videos, Chen Zhou often fantasized about what the "cat's eye snails," "moon shells," and razor clams or king razor clams unearthed by beachcombers would taste like when cooked.
But those people only cared about digging, not cooking, and there were thousands of beachcombing videos.
Videos about how to cook, how to eat, or what the food tasted like were nonexistent, leaving him itching inside.
Now finally having the opportunity to personally beachcomb, even in the absence of familiar shellfish like cat's eye snails, Chen Zhou's heart was still filled with anticipation.
He unearthed each bump or hole on the beach one by one, gradually adding to the weight of the plastic bag.
In about two hours, the clay pot and plastic bag Chen Zhou brought were packed full, making this beachcombing trip a rare and bountiful harvest.
After taking stock of the haul, besides shrimps and crabs, there were small and large shellfish and unidentified razor clams.
Chen Zhou also found two relatively fresh sea fish, four spiny sea urchins, and even a somewhat sticky sea cucumber, which was probably no longer edible.
The entire collection weighed nearly twenty pounds, far exceeding the capacity of the containers Chen Zhou brought.
Thus, during the beachcombing, he also took some time to return to the camp and grabbed a wooden barrel.