Indiana, Remington - Monday, June 16, 2014 - Touring more of NW Indiana

I started out this morning placing a phone call to the jury manager of the Minnehaha County Court.  When we received our mail on Friday it contained a summons for me to report for grand jury selection on July 8 in Sioux Falls, SD.  I placed a call on Friday, but got a voice message.  I was relieved somewhat that the voice message mentioned that if you were a full time RVr you just had to indicate such on the form you received.  However, the form I received wasn’t the one they mentioned so I still needed to talk to them.  South Dakota really does understand the lifestyle of full time RVrs.  The lady I spoke to today told me what I needed to fill out and send in so she could send me an exemption letter.  Thank goodness, because the summons mentioned that if you were selected for grand jury duty you had to be available for the next 18 months.  South Dakota was beautiful in August last year but I’m pretty sure it won’t be that way for the next 18 months.

We found a couple more places to explore today.  The first is Yesteryear’s Meats and Specialty Shoppe in Demotte.

This is an old fashioned meat market, grocery store and deli.

 

 

They have a small area where you can eat in.

I selected the sloppy joe special with 2 wings and a side.  Greg chose the barbequed pork sandwich and side.  Both of us chose County Cole Slaw for our side, it had a nice sweet and sour poppy seed dressing.

Their meat market had some fabulous looking meat.  We decided against buying any meat because our next stop was going to be a shrimp farm.  They make their own sausage and summer sausage – I was tempted by the summer sausage since we bought cheese and wine yesterday.

The next stop was JT Shrimp between Demotte and Wheatfield.  This is a family-owned saltwater shrimp farm.  We decided to take a tour of the facility which is $5 per person.  While we were waiting for the owner some ladies came in to purchase some shrimp.  The owner asked his wife if she wanted to conduct the tour or catch the shrimp.  It was at that moment that I realized if I wanted to take home shrimp I was taking them home live – oh, dear.

The temperature here is consistent between 84 and 85 degrees.  The water is filtered and recycled over and over.  Keeping the temperature and the nutrients at the right point is a full time job.  These farm raised shrimp are a lot more labor intensive than the ones in the ocean.  Each of these tanks starts out with 7,000 tiny baby shrimp brought in in tanks somewhat larger than a large picnic cooler.  I think he said it takes about 3 months for them to get to harvesting size.  And, when it comes time to harvest there are only about 2,200 of them left - some die and some are eaten by the other shrimp.

It was hard to take pictures because of all the bright lights.  They said it was necessary to leave the lights on because the shrimp jump out of the tanks if it gets dark or even if there are a lot of shadows.  Do the shrimp in the ocean live in bright lights?  The netting around the top helps keep them in.

The shrimp shed their shells from their head to tail every three days.  The ones with the darker shells are getting ready to shed.

We had brought a cooler so we decided to get a pound of shrimp to take home, it runs $18 a pound.  While they were catching our shrimp, I got a few cooking pointers from the owner’s wife.  Greg leaned down and whispered he wondered whether or not they screamed like lobsters when you put them in the boiling water – he wasn’t helping.  They packed the shrimp in ice which makes them pretty inactive.

We got the shrimp home and into the pot of boiling water, after three minutes we drained them and covered them with ice.

 

 

By the way, they don’t scream.  Thank goodness, I had enough trouble just giving them a stir in the water, all I could see was little eyes staring up at me.

After they had cooled Greg removed the heads and I peeled them.  Since there is no mud, they don’t have mud veins so they don’t have to be deveined.  They were great!  These shrimp don’t have the normal “shrimpy” smell and the taste is very mild.  We enjoyed them on top of a green salad along with some of the wine and cheese we bought yesterday.