Christmas Feast

For Christmas this year, unlike with Thanksgiving, I did try not go overboard. Not sure if I succeeded, but either way, we ate very well. After a few nibbles of chocolate from our stockings, we had brunch with my Mom's Famous Christmas Bread (aka stollen), scrambled eggs, fresh berry salad, cheese, oven-baked bacon, and grapefruit.


For dinner we had shrimp scampi, roasted potato stacks, green beans, roasted butternut squash, and challah rolls.








And the vegetarians had roast beast:


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Fierce Shrimp Fra Diavolo

Fra diavolo, or brother devil, refers to a spicy, garlicky sauce that's often paired with seafood. I had some big shrimp just lounging in the freezer, so I pulled them out. Once defrosted, I tossed the shrimp with red pepper flakes and salt and then sautéed the shrimp til just cooked, only couple of minutes. I set the shrimp aside and sautéed sliced onions in the pan, later adding fire-roasted tomatoes, garlic, oregano and white wine. After this cooked down a bit, the shrimp were added back in, with basil and parsley, just to blend the flavors. I served this over linguine.

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Grilled Shrimp Lollipops

Between vacation, a fierce cold, and then losing power for several days, I have some catching up to do here. However, I do have a recipe I made tonight, and it was both different and tasty. The basis for this came from watching Ming Tsai last night, when he made a deep-fried version of these shrimp skewers as an appetizer. The two ingredients he highlighted were kaffir lime leaves, which I always have in the freezer, and shallots, my favorite member of the onion family. He made a paste of the shallots, lime leaves, Thai bird chilis, unsweetened coconut, and shrimp and then molded the shrimp around a skewer and rolled it in rice flour. For me, since I wasn't frying these, I brushed the shrimp lightly with oil just before grilling and then cooked them for just a few minutes on each side. I served the shrimp over jasmine rice with a ginger-lime sauce and Bibb lettuce salad. You could also wrap the dumplings in the lettuce leaves if you want to skip the rice. - Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Spicy Banana Curry with Lobster and Shrimp

It's a rough world when you're looking to make a quick and tasty meal after a long week and you just happen to have lobster and shrimp waiting to be eaten. This dish is a further variation on a recipe from Fine Cooking: I used shrimp and lobster instead of halibut, twice as much curry paste plus a healthy dose of sriracha, and peanut butter in place of half the peanuts. Curry is super flexible, and there are endless variations. This one was delicious, and it was done by the time the rice was cooked.


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Shrimp with Banana Curry

This recipe is based on one in Fine Cooking. We didn't have the halibut called for, but shrimp worked perfectly. This is deceptively easy to make--and very impressive, too.

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Pasta with Shrimp, Mascarpone and Spinach

The original recipe is for bruschetta, but in the days after Thanksgiving, when we all needed something different for dinner, pasta seemed like a good idea.  I also used spinach instead of arugula and a can of fire-roasted tomatoes instead of fresh plum tomatoes, as that's what I had on hand.

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Orzo Salad with Feta, Tomatoes and Spicy Shrimp

When the temperature soars above the 90 degree mark, it gets really hard to think about cooking. We eat a lot of salad--which are both cooling and easy to throw together. Orzo, a rice-like pasta, adds a little more substance to a salad, without the heaviness of regular pasta and without the longer cooking times for rice. For this salad, I mixed the orzo, cubes of feta, and halved grape tomatoes with a lemon-shallot vinaigrette. This was placed on a bed of arugula and other lettuces and then topped with some quickly sauteed shrimp. The shrimp were marinated in garlic, shallots, lemon zest, olive oil, salt and pepper, and hot and smokey Spanish paprika. - Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Friday Food: Seafood Nachos

At the end of a long, busy week, you want something easy but also satisfying to eat. I went to dinner at my friends' house last night and brought with me all the fixings for nachos. These included chips, a blend of cheeses, grilled corn salad, guacamole, sour cream, spicy salsa, pickled jalapenos, and cooked shrimp. To keep things easy, I put the pan directly on the grill--which also gave the nachos a smoky, flame-broiled flavor. I didn't make the sangria, but it was dark and rich and very tasty.


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Bruschetta with Shrimp, Tarragon and Spinach

This recipe is based on one from Giada de Laurentis. It's bruschetta but with shrimp and wine and creamy mascarpone. The combination is pretty amazing on top of the slightly garlicky toasted ciabatta, but it would also be good with pasta, rice, or just a spoon. - Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Happy Valentine's Day

Show your love with pizza? Why not? -- who doesn't like pizza, and homemade pizza is just that much better. Tonight we had shrimp scampi pizza and also plain, topped with a mixture of Parmesan and mozzerella cheeses. - Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Polenta-Crusted Shrimp

This recipe is a nice change from the usual shrimp stirfries and cocktails. The shrimp was dusted in seasoned flour, then egg, and then dredged in polenta and baked. The final product was crunchy and juicy, and the mustard-tarragon dipping sauce worked particularly well. This is also one of the few times that I'd leave shrimp tails on--usually they just get in the way, but they made a good handle in this case.

And a Partridge in a Pear Tree: Honey-Garlic Shrimp

Taking a break from the tasty butter and sugar overload of the holidays, we had a spicy stir-fry of shrimp in a honey-garlic sauce. The shrimp were marinated in honey, garlic, ginger, dark soy, and sherry, and then quickly pan fried with chili flakes, slivered carrots, yellow peppers, and scallions. The marinade became the sauce, which was then all spooned over hot basmati rice.

Lemon Linguine with Roasted Shrimp

This recipe, from Nigella, is quick and easy, but it doesn't taste that way. There's a lot to be said for that--as well as that everyone here loves it. Hot linguine is tossed with a sauce made of lemon juice and zest, an egg yolk, a little cream, parmesan, and salt and pepper. I also roasted some shrimp with lemon zest, garlic, salt, pepper, and olive oil, while the vegetarians had cannellini beans instead.

Peanut Noodles with Shrimp

Mark Bittman's Minimalist column in the New York Times this week was all about uses for the seemingly much-maligned (elsewhere) peanut butter. In my opinion, peanut butter is good with pretty much everything, you know? Bread, jelly, chocolate, cookies, brownies, pancakes, pasta, chicken, chicken soup, sauces, green beans, and especially a big glass of milk. In any case, tonight I made Bittman's recipe for peanut noodles with shrimp--a quick treat after a long week. The list of ingredients is fairly simple: peanut butter, rice noodles, shrimp, lime zest and juice, nam pla (fish sauce), sugar, garlic, chili peppers, carrots, and scallions. The final product was really really good, though I did add another spoonful of peanut butter as well as some grated fresh ginger, which I'm sure he meant to include. I also made a vegetarian version, using soy sauce instead of nam pla and tofu instead of shrimp. Doing so eliminated the quick and easy aspect of this recipe, but we were all happy, and full, in the end.

Grilled Shrimp Tostadas

Summer is here in full force, and the thought of something hot for dinner was too much for me. So I quickly puffed some flour tortillas in a frying pan and grilled some shrimp that had been marinating in lime zest, cumin, sriracha, and a little oil. I also grilled the corn and then cut it off the cob. On top of the tortilla I piled romaine lettuce that had been tossed with a little lime juice and olive oil, tomatoes, red peppers, corn, queso fresco, avocado, and green onions, with a little dab of sour cream on the side. And now, even though it's so hot and because I'm a nice auntie, I'm going to go back some chocolate-coconut cookies that someone requested.

Happy Mother's Day!

Happy Mother's Day to my amazing Mom--and all the other great moms out there, too! For Mother's Day this year we went out to brunch--Cajun brunch, no less, and it was good. But with the fabulous weather we had today, I decided we needed to cook out. We had lime grilled shrimp and tofu, asparagus, warm roasted beet salad with feta and toasted walnuts, a green salad with tomatoes and yellow peppers in a lime vinaigrette, and warm homemade focaccia. For dessert, we had a billowy, soft pavlova topped with whipped cream, strawberries, raspberries, and toasted hazelnuts and then drizzled with bittersweet chocolate.

Grilled Shrimp with Pineapple-Avocado Salsa and Corn Soup

Dinner tonight was just going to be a quick affair, as it's suddenly very warm outside and no one felt like slaving over a hot stove. Somehow the simple grilling turned into a bit more, as I decided to make corn soup and then a fresh pineapple salsa with avocado, red onion, and red bell peppers. None of it was complicated, though, and the flavors were great. We ate the shrimp (or tofu, for the vegetarians) wrapped in small flour tortillas, accompanied by the salsa, grilled red and yellow peppers and onions, yellow grape tomatoes, grated cheese, and sour cream. Corn soup -- a surprise hit, esp. when decorated with a little cheese and sour cream

Hellfire Shrimp

I discovered this recipe for chipotle-lime glazed shrimp, taken from Cook's Illustrated, over at Ezrapoundcake, and I just had to try it out. Chipotles? Check. Limes? Love 'em ... check check. Shrimp? Absolutely. The reality, however, was a LOT more spicy than I'd expected--and I can handle a fair amount of heat. Around the house, these shrimp are now known as hellfire shrimp--tasty, but they'll knock your socks off, almost literally. In the interests of cooking science, and my love of tasty shrimp, I'm going to retry this soon, possibly with different chipotles and/or adobo sauce.

Comfort Food: Shrimp and Grits

Homemade mac and cheese is good, but shrimp and grits? Oh man, this is love. The recipe is from Tyler Florence, but I modified it a bit. I used 1% milk and chicken broth instead of milk and cream for the grits, and I added a bit of parmesan and garlic to them as well. For the saucy part of the recipe, I used chicken andouille instead of pork and using already peeled and deveined shrimp makes this recipe come together really quickly.

Vacation Food

(go on, click ... you know you want to) I think seafood is obligatory in New England, if'n you're not a vegetarian, that is. And I'm not. I just returned from a few days in Maine, where we had some of the best lobsta rolls evah. Go to Tubby's, avail yourself of New England's Best Ice Cream, and pick up a large, made-on-the-spot lobster roll that contains no added nothing, just the way it should be. It was so good we had to have another one the next night. Having more time and inclination, we had a little more to go with our dinner that night: lobster rolls, tomatoes with fresh feta, and local green beans. One night I even cooked: shrimp and huge sea scallops with fresh tomatoes, onions, and a little smoked mozzarella, with local green beans on the side. Theme and variation yes, but so good. Happy Birthday to my mom! A belated celebration with lots of yummy cupcakes and fresh raspberries. We ended up quartering them so we could all taste all of them. A quiet celebration on the actual night, with just the two of us but three of Tubby's fabulous flavors: peanut butter (which we both loved), coffee chip, and the requisite black raspberry.