Blessed with an abundance of fresh dill from Blue Heron Farm and huge prawns from the local fish market, I finally gave in and made Ina Garten’s shrimp salad. I used the excuse that I was making it for a food photo contest, but I wasn’t all that happy with my photos of the finished dish. Nevertheless, we cheerfully ate it all (to hide the evidence, don’t you know).
Before our current spate of wet, blustery weather descended upon us, we had some really nice days. We made the most of them by grilling.
One day we did shrimp. Jon did them his favorite way, grilled with a bit of sugar and tossed with warm lemon-garlic butter over the coals. We had some leftover asparagus from the previous day’s cooking class, so I warmed it up and stirred it into instant couscous, which made a perfect bed for the shrimp in its buttery sauce. Mint juleps accompanied this dinner. It felt like summer.
I don’t know if we make this dish mainly because it’s tasty, or because it’s so much fun to set fire to a panful of shrimp. Probably both.
Shrimp fra diavolo (“Brother Devil”) is a traditional dish, the main idea being a spicy tomato sauce with shrimp, saucing long skinny pasta. The version we make comes from an old issue of Cook’s Illustrated. It adds an extra step or two to the typical recipe, but it’s well worth the effort. If you’ve never flambéed before, give it a try – it’s gratifyingly easy. Just make sure there’s nothing flammable right above your stove burners. You can skip the flambéing step, but the shrimp won’t have as deep and rich a flavor.
I had assumed that we would be eating all kinds of leftovers for days after our end-of-summer party. We did have huevos rancheros for breakfast (with drunken pinto beans and cotija cheese), and chips and guacamole for lunch, but then I realized there wasn’t really much else left except for a large pile of poblano and jalapeño chiles that somehow never got used, plus some leftover grilled corn. I really didn’t want to go to the store again, so I needed to think of something for dinner based on what was on hand. In a fit of fusiony madness, I came up with a sort of Tex-Mex risotto.
I chopped two poblanos and sauteed them in salted butter (I should have added onions, which would have given even more sweetness and depth), then added Arborio rice, followed by a glassful of white wine. I brought a quart of garlic-scented chicken stock to a boil and began adding it to the rice.
The weather has been amazing (apart from the fun little storm that whipped through on Saturday), and the asparagus has been gorgeous. How many reasons do you need to fire up the grill? This was a fabulous dinner that Jon cooked up last week: an entire bunch of grilled asparagus, grilled shrimp bathed in a lemon and garlic butter sauce, and good local bread. It’s very fast to prepare, apart from getting the coals going, and really, really good.
When I decided to make two new recipes for dinner out of a brand new Malouf & Malouf cookbook (Saha
The most exciting part was cutting a pita bread into thin strips and frying it in olive oil and butter until golden and crispy. That was really, really fun. The resulting croutons were almost like buttery potato chips.
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Surely we will run out of new shrimp curry recipes any time now. I mean, the shrimp section in our favorite curry cookbook isn’t that big. However, in the meantime, we’ve been keeping a bag of prawns in the freezer – few things make a better quick weeknight dinner – so we’re always up for a new recipe to try.
This curry uses yet another of those ingredients that you pick up in a store, thinking you’ve been seeing references to it everywhere – then once you bring it home you can’t find a single mention of it. This is what happened to us with sumac, although we’re beginning to have a bit more luck on that front. In this case it was fenugreek leaves – we bought a box at a short-lived Indian grocery that ill-advisedly opened in the back of an outbuilding in Burlington, behind the Outlet Mall. Of course, they turned out to be chopped and dried, when our recipes call for fresh or frozen. Sigh. Click to continue »
Back during the summer we had been steadily working our way through the stunning book 660 Curries
This week we ended up needing to cook one more dinner at home than we had planned, so I went looking for a recipe that could be made from just what was in the freezer and pantry. This shrimp curry was just the ticket, since we had the last of a bag of frozen shrimp needing to be used, there was a bag of dried grated coconut in the cupboard, fresh cilantro left over from a Thai stirfry, and everything else is a standard pantry item for us. We scaled the recipe down to match the amount of shrimp we had.
We threw our End of Summer party this weekend, and boy did we luck out – after weeks of rain and ridiculously cold dreary weather, the clouds parted and we had a perfect, mild, sunny evening. Guests could sit in the sun and not be too hot, or in the shade on the patio and not be too cold. I made Indonesian yellow rice, sesame noodle salad, peanut sauce and chopped cucumber salad, and Jon grilled pork satay, Japanese eggpant and fresh corn. I’m fairly sure nobody starved to death.
You never know what’s going to be left over from these parties. We ended up with a half gallon of my favorite IPA in the world, small quantities of rice and eggplant, and a large tub of sesame noodles. There was also a bag of thawed shrimp in the fridge which I had intended to put out at the party and, well, just decided not to. I got tired. But that meant we had some good lunch fixings today – I poached the shrimp in salted water and mixed them into the noodle salad with a good squirt of Sriracha sauce, all of which was excellent washed down with a glass of IPA.
I really like noodles – all kinds of noodles. And when the recipe involves pan-searing the noodles over high heat with savory, spicy seasonings, shrimp and scallions, I’m all over it. Especially when I can get my husband to toast the shrimp paste for me.
