Shrimp and Spinach

Well, my friend and I made a trip to the great Chinatown Food Market in the Rivermarket shopping district. The biggest and best in KC. It reminds me of a miniature Uwajimaya from my days in Seattle. The fresh and frozen seafood and meat department will blow the average Americans mind. They will cringe in horror when they see all that, to me, yummy edibles common to Asian society.
We decided on fresh shrimp for dinner. The kind that need shelling. Oh yeah, I shelled and deveined them all before cooking. They were a nice morbid gray color, it amazed myself to see them curl up pink and delicious before my eyes in that pan when cooked.
The side course was to be fried spinach with garlic. We purchased a huge bag of fresh spinach from the market. It seemed to be some variety of Asian spinach? Maybe I just haven't seen enough spinach on the stalk enough times to see that it was the standard variety.
I prepared the spinach first. Cut them off the stalks. Rinsed them very well to clean off the dirt. Spinach is notoriously tainted with dirt. Chopped up some cloves of peeled garlic. Chopped up even finer some Thai hot chiles we also purchased that day. They had the thickness of half my pinky finger and just as long, some being orange, some being jalepeno green in color. The spinach takes only a few minutes in the pan to wilt so they were put aside until after the shrimp got deshelled and deveined. Originally I was going to cook the shrimp in shell, but to make it easier for my friend to chow down on them, I deshelled them before cooking. We bought a few pounds so there were maybe 30 or so to clean. It seemed to take forever to do, but I persisted. My hands seemed to be burning. My friend came into the kitchen, I mentioned about my hand burning and she stated that was probably why people don't like to deshell shrimp because of the little cuts you get on your hands and the discomfort it causes. My hands were on fire. On fire! She finished the shrimp so I could start the spinach. Fried nicely with the garlic and chiles, it looked very good, restaurant quality. She tasted a little of the finished product. Her eyes literally "bugged out" as she stated that they were too hot. I tried them, they were definitely too hot. She couldn'y believe how many chopped chiles I put in the dish.
My hands continued to burn.
I finished most of the spinach dish, but it was just too hot. I made the shrimp. I intended to steam them. I looked up how to steam them, it stated to put them in a large boiling pan, add a little water to the bottom and poor in the shrimp and a few minutes later your shrimp would be done. Well, they finished within seconds and I ended up overcooking those poor shrimp. I had labored over 30 minutes deshelling them.
Failed on the shrimp, failed on the spinach.
She thought we were gonna top some pasta with the shrimp. I said dinner had originally intended to be just steamed shrimp and fried spinach, light & healthy. She made some pasta and "garnished" it with my overcooked shrimp. The shrimp was just a little chewy, similar to squid. She then made another batch of spinach, sigh.
My hands continued to burn.
Her pasta and shrimp, mixed with butter and some concoction of spices we had purchased from the middle eastern grocery we had visited recently, turned out very well. I enjoyed a hearty plateful. She ate the spinach alone, my mouth was still on fire from the spinach dish I had prepared over 25 minutes earlier.
She later found out that those Thai chiles were not meant to be cut up. They got fried in whatever dish you were preparing and removed before eating, like bay leaves.
My hands continued to burn.

The Greatest Phở outside of Vietnam

I love phở. I can eat it everyday. I wish I could make it, but the broth takes over 4 hours to prepare. The rest of the ingredients are simple but need to be fresh. My mouth just waters thinking about it. In fact, only when I have finished a super-large bowl of phở am I satisfied and not craving it. You drink water everyday, I can eat phở everyday. I will master the recipe someday. Go find me the best boneless beef sirloin steak, the absolute freshest flat rice noodles. Thai basil that was picked that day. No more than a day old bean sprouts. White onions, oh so thinly sliced. I love tripe, so in my soup I would add a hearty amount of it, the texture is amazing! Jalepeno peppers. Scallions and cilantro. Those meatballs!! What is in those meatballs? Okay, enough about the ingredients. I haven't had Phở today so I can't stand listing the ingredients any longer. When I lived down south, I used to drive for nearly an hour to come to the restaurant, located in downtown Kansas City.
The friendly staff, speaking mostly in Vietnamese, are wonderfully friendly. I have been there so many times they don't even bring me a menu. I just take a seat, and he brings out my large combo phở. By the time I take off my jacket and get a white gourd drink from the fridge, he is on his way out with my soup. Did I mention I love phở? Additionally, they have all the other traditional Vietnamese soups on the menu, perhaps up to 50 of 'em. Fried rice, and appetizers too. And that dessert I cannot describe because I have had it only one time, that one time I ordered a normal-sized soup so i could try their dessert. It looks multi-colored and is blended when ordered. Its maybe a fruit and jello mixture? It was delicious, but overstuffed my poor little belly.
The place is Phở KC, located on Cherry street.