LOUISIAN A BARBECUE D SHRIMP is that sort of magical dish that’s intensely flavorful, quick to cook, and perfect for sharing—all you need to do is spend a few minutes revving at the spice drawer first. Despite the name, the recipe isn’t cooked on a barbecue but simmered straight in a spicy-bright pan sauce. As Toni Tipton-Martin explains in her book Jubilee, drawn from her collection of nearly 400 African American cookbooks, “‘Barbecue shrimp’ is just the name Louisiana Creole cooks assigned to shrimp braised in wine, beer, or a garlic butter sauce.” This one is Toni’s favorite version, based on one from the late model/chef/restaurateur B. Smith.
Sometimes, Toni doesn’t even wait to get the shrimp out of the pan, serving it in the kitchen as an appetizer, right in the skillet it’s cooked in, with lots of hot crusty bread to get every bit of sauce. No more than 10 minutes have passed.
Cooking your fish in a parcel is a great way to keep it juicy and tender. It’s a fabulous method to apply to different fish and flavors. Try using curry leaves, tomatoes and garlic or soy, chili and a little Shaoxing wine as alternatives.
The brightness and color of this pasta with the meatiness of the scallop cannot be beat. You might want to add fresh greens or arugula to toss in the pasta to add texture and dimension. This can be made with tinned scallops or even sautéed ones that have been thawed from your freezer “pantry”!
When it comes to finding sustainable scallops, farmed scallops are basically sustainable, landing in the “Yellow-Green” range overall. Antibiotics and feeds are not used in scallop farming, there’s no affluence, and chemical use and ecosystem impacts are minimal. As with all tinned seafood, know your source and look into where the scallops come from and how impacted they are. I like using Ramon Pena‘s Small Scallops in Sauce!
Recipe from The Tinned Fish Cookbook: Easy-to-Make Meals from Ocean to Plate—Sustainably Canned, 100% Delicious
Shrimp boulettes, or fried shrimp balls, might remind you of Thai fish cakes or Vietnamese shrimp on sugarcane. The shrimp is ground up and fried without any flour or cornmeal (shrimp is sticky enough to bind the vegetables together, so you don’t need to add any filler). Eat the boulettes as a snack with hot sauce, or put some on a roll with bitter greens, cocktail sauce, or spicy mayo to turn them into a sandwich. Either way, they are a great way to eat small fresh shrimp.
Shrimp spaghetti is to bayou kids what spaghetti and meatballs is to kids in the rest of the United States. This was my son Lucien’s favorite meal, which he would eat for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. It’s a near perfect meal—simple, sweet, perfectly balanced—and it’ll feed a big family or a crowd of friends. The recipe draws from the Creole cooking technique of smothering tomatoes long and slow. This version is made with store-bought sauce, but you can certainly make your own tomato sauce and cook it down in the same manner. Homemade tomato sauce tends to be thinner, so you might have to thicken it a bit with tomato paste to get the right consistency.
Mixing smoked fish with sour cream and lemon is a simple way of making something seriously delicious to eat. Here I’ve combined it with one of my other favourite creamy foods – a remoulade made from celeriac, which loves a cold climate and grows very well in Baltic countries.
This is just the sort of salad I want to eat when I am coming out of the winter stodge phase and need something fresher – just in time for the end of the blood orange season. It is a good salad to prepare ahead and will keep well in the fridge as long as you follow the salting instructions below – if you skip this step, the vegetables will go soggy.
If you make salmon on a regular basis, you know how quickly it can come together. But if you make it on a regular basis, like us, you also stop getting excited for salmon night. When I ask my husband what we should make for dinner and he says “salmon,” it almost sounds like a sigh and a shrug. Get excited, my friends, because this is the salmon recipe that will bring back the love. And if you don’t normally make salmon at home, this is a great recipe to get you started. It’s pretty foolproof.
On our travels in Bali, Jeremy and I stayed at a little resort that offered great cooking classes. In addition to local curries and rice dishes, the chef taught us this citrusy, simple salad, which has since become a staple at home. The combination of poached shrimp, tart grapefruit, spicy chilies, and fresh mint is bright and clean. Crunchy bean sprouts add terrific texture.