Eric's market adventure(s)

Greetings! Fellow TONMOers, I bring you a update to what I've been up to.

So, after a 3 year or so hiatus from the market, I went back again some time last week. Surprisingly, most of the stalls still remember me and nothing has really changed at all, the nice stalls were still nice, the mean stalls were still...as obnoxious as usual. But enough about that, I snapped some photographs with my fancy snazzy camera:

The first picture, we have a rather large gastropod of some sort, usually used in soups in Chinese cuisine, it's fairly common and the size is pretty uniform, so I think there's some way of farming these things rather than being an odd catch while trawling.

Second picture, is of a local bigfin squid that's quite dead. The chromataphores were already not very responsive and I guessed it stressed itself to death. Still, a rather rare thing to find in a market since they don't usually get into the territories which the trawlers operate. We do get them near the coastline when jigging though, there's a nice stretch of coast near my school where they seem to congregate.

Third pic is a tub of your local common octos, kind of depressing coming to think of it. But it beats being thrown overboard as by catch, right?

Fourth pic is of a skate..ray? I don't know, all I know is that they taste quite awful.
 

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Some more photos, most of them are pretty much self explanatory.

The last one is pretty fine though, it's few crabs sitting inside a soup pot chilling (Yes, that's tap water mixed with enough salt to make it to at least brackish water salinity), they ended up as dinner shortly afterwards.
 

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The octos are alive, but they exhibited the arm curling at the end, which might indicate that they're not going to live very long anyway. I believe they're the by-catch of shrimping nets or crabbing pots/cages, they might've crawled in to munch on a few crabs and never managed to find their way out. There's no real big market for octos as food, as squid and cuttles are much more tastier, so any large scale commercial catching of local octos are rather unlikely.

And Re: How I can manage to eat something that I know has been alive? Ever wonder where frozen chicken, beef and fish fillet comes from? They were also alive at some point too, just that your food has been frozen for god knows how long.
 
What kind of crabs are in the pot? They are far more colorful than the ones we catch and eat here. The octos look like vulgaris to my learning but untrained eyes.
 
Well, I don't know, we just call them as Patterned Crabs, to differentiate them from the 3-spotted crab and green crabs we get. Much more meatier and hence more desired/expensive than green crabs though although not much crab butter.

Heh, I remember a time when a child I befriended in primary school cried when she learned that meat came from live animals.
 

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