The liquid only needs to be hot, not boiling, to cook the shrimp. Ask my wife about the time I called from the train and asked her to thaw some shrimp under running water. Yup, they were cooked by the time I got home, LOL! Second thought, don't ask her. She gets mad. I lean slightly to the cook ahead side, in particular if you want to be 100% stress free about doneness and timing. Just dump in no more than a minute or two before serving. But intuitively the suggestion for undercooking makes no sense to me. To get the center of the shrimp perfectly cooked the heat must travel through the outside. Why subject to the outside to that amount of heat twice? In that case I'm thinking you'd be better off using cookebook/Jo's method. Fully cooked ahead, all you need to do is ascertain it doesn't feel cold in the middle.

I grew up in Arizona, and we only knew of two kinds of shrimp. One came in cans, the other came from restaurants-via the freezer. Here are a couple of good uses for canned shrimp. Add it to potato soup. My mother made "chowder" using canned corn and shrimp. Her chowder was essentially, a thinner version of potato soupk. It had a milk-based broth flavored with fresh celery and onions. Everybody loved it, included my brother's vietnam buddy, who hated seafood. My mother also made a cold gazpacho-like soup that she called shrimp cocktail and served for a first course. It was tomato juice, a can of Veg-All, and canned shrimp seasoned with a little hot-sauce and served with fresh lemon. Canned shrimp added to a salad as suggested before, is wonderful. Serve it with fresh tomato wedges, saltine crackers and "Louie" style dressing. (Similar to Thousand Island, I'm sure you could find an easy version on the internet. We grew up with much less than people have today, but my mother was a great cook who always made the most of what we had. One last thing . . for those who would give undesirable cans to the food bank . . remember that when people are having hard times they don't suddenly start craving peculiar food from cans with faded labels--anymore than they desire stained clothes or ratty furniture. If you want to really feel good about the donations you make, remember that the people you are giving to, may be people just like you--trying to make it and take care of their families as best they can.

Okay, post mortem. The spanakopita was good. I ended up assembling them, then freezing, and baking them at her house, with plenty of melted butter and truffle salt sprinkled on. The filling was spinach, onion, egg, garlic, nutmeg, feta, ricotta. The main problem was that the filo shells were kind of tasteless, merely crunchy and flakey and buttery. Next time I will use an herb butter when assembling the filo triangles. But people loved them anyway. The meatballs had good flavor, but were kind of dry. They were pork, beef, lamb, spinach, couscous, onion, garlic, with a spicy bread crumb exterior. But meat today is too lean. Hence the balls weren't juicy enough. Next time I'll use the dim sum trick of incorporating some gelatinous stock. The wings were fine, that is a reliable recipe. Steam wings to render fat, then toss in oil and salt, roast until browned, then toss in melted butter with salt, garlic, cayenne. My friend also had salsa, chips, celery, blue cheese dressing. People brought beer and champagne. Her kitchen is hard to work in. Her cutting board is a 4" x 6" sheet of pebbly glass. Really. Her knives are as dull as spatulas. Ugh. I'm not sure what she normally eats. Sandwiches, maybe. This friend is a cyclist. She leads groups on 100 mile bicycle rides, routinely. We met on one of her rides. For her birthday, she hosted a breakfast at her house, then led fifteen friends on a 50 mile ride in the rain that turned out to be very hilly and tough. Just six finished the ride, and they got to her house just as I was arriving with the food. So I was finishing and plating my food with these ravenous, soaking, exhausted cyclists hovering. We had to bring the food out in shifts, so that the later arrivals, who hadn't gone in the ride, would actually have something to eat. I never did end up making the shrimp mushroom dish. Time got away from me. But I'll make it later maybe this weekend. It sounds promising. I left about 8 pm, just as things were getting going. Found a guy there who knew how to cook, put him in charge of monitoring and serving the remaining shifts of food. Good group of people, some I know pretty well from bike rides, but I wasn't really in the mood for a partay.

Dcarch, two out of three. Simplified: Fish have to have scales and can't be bottom feeders (no to catfish). Shellfish are not kosher, ever. I figure if I were meant to keep kosher I wouldn't have been made allergic to swimmy fish. To the best of my knowledge, all healthy beef on the hoof is potentially kosher (literally, fit to eat). It's the butchering that makes it kosher. Some of the highlights: A highly trained and certified kosher butcher says the proper blessings acknowledging taking a life and kills the beast with a special extremely sharp blade in one clean cut. I think it's to the jugular. In ancient times this was the most humane way they had. There has been some recent controversy about whether this is the most humane way now, and what it would take to change it. There are other conditions as well, such as the calf may not be slaughtered in front of it mother. If it's not a single clean cut, it's not a kosher death and the carcass cannot be made fit to eat by Jews. It can be sold to other people, however, rather than wasted. First they inspect the lungs for disease. If are no marks or scars at all, if the lungs are completely smooth, the meat can be sold as "glatt kosher" (Ashkenazi "smooth kosher"), which is prized by some. It's not any more kosher than the ones with minor blemishes that are not signs of disease. It's just a more special special super duper, if it costs more (scarcer) it must be better. The blood must also be drained. Then the carcass has to be cut up correctly, if the rear half is to be used, rather than sold off, the sciatic nerve (I think that's the one) has to be removed in a certain way. Few kosher butchers even learn how to do this. It's a mess and ends up with the meat so cut up it's not very attractive. With neighbors valuing the rear half, it doesn't make economic sense to bother. Then the meat has to be salted to draw out the rest of the blood. Housewives used to do this. Nowadays, the packers do it for value added. "Kosher Salt" is a misnomer as it is the salt used to draw the blood from the meat. Rightly, it should be called "kashering salt". All clean, unadulterated, pure salt is kosher by nature and doesn't require a rabbinic imprimature. When you see one, it's usually to say that the processing plant and packaging equipment were clean and appropriate. Salt, the mineral, is kosher by nature. So kosher salt is kosher, but so is all pure salt. In most things Jewish, the practice of an entire community over time has sway. The birds that are kosher (and also have to be correctly slaughtered and prepped) are the ones that a community has been eating from way back. I read that a couple of graduate students in Jerusalem went around to the different communities from around the world and compiled lists. The rules for meat and fish are more standardized, but there will always be different rulings in different places about minutiae. Before halal meat was widely available, muslims would buy from the kosher butchers. That's true. As I heard it, they also require blessings to be said on the taking of a life, and these are similar enough to be acceptable where their own people are not available. I don't know where the differences are in how the animal is handled after that, but muslims are more likely to accept kosher than Jews are to accept halal. If there's no other food, one is allowed to eat whatever one can find and do the best one can to keep it as kosher as possible. So, in that case, I'd think the halal butcher would be a better bet than the ConAgra case at the discount food store, but I don't know what the rabbis would say other than you have to eat to sustain yourself. I also don't know how the halal rules work for other meats and vegetables (yes, while by nature vegetables are fit to eat, you do have to inspect them for certain bugs, and have a care about "hot" veg and questionable cutlery). I do think they have similar fish rules. Way back when, in post-revolution Iran, sturgeons were out. They're smooth skinned. But there were the embargoes, and things were tough. The ayatollahs met and discussed the caviar trade which was so lucrative but forbidden. They inspected the sturgeons. Carefully. And found a sufficient number of scales that it would be okay for them to trade in caviar. (I don't know if they also ate the fish, sold the fish, or whatever.) I seem to remember that they had to have at least seven scales. Re the number of Jews who keep kosher, most Jews are not practicing, period. Like your average American who identifies as "Christian", but whose practice is a Christmas tree and an Easter egg hunt, with the occasional church event for a rite of passage. Among those are are actively engaged in Jewish religious participation, a much higher percentage keep kosher. A lot of it depends on location. There is a tradition, still practiced by some, of only accepting milk and dairy products that have been overseen by Jews the whole way. This is so they don't get adulterated, like the Chinese milk scandal where people were putting melamine in the milk because it would register when tested as having more protein. Even very strictly practicing American Jews believe that the USDA does a good enough job, along with American cultural values, to create confidence that the milk supply is unadulterated. Some still prefer to pay more for "Jewish milk". Similarly, for all the public scandals about this or that outbreak, the American food supply is reliably fine. It's not necessary to keep kosher to be sure of food that won't kill you. So American Jews keep kosher, or have abbreviated practices of kosher origin (e.g., don't combine meat and milk, but don't worry about the provenance of either), as a matter of religious conscience, solidarity with their heritage, or habit, rather than a belief that it's important for temporal reasons. This is all very condensed and simplified. Thousands of years old ritual and practice creates thousands and thousands of pages of discussion and ruling and codification and reinterpretation. If someone wants to learn to keep kosher, the rabbis send them to learn from a friend who keeps kosher, because learning it from the Law would take a lifetime of study.