cooking @ home

Archive for the ‘Seafood’ Category

©2008 Harry Kenney

Funny how there are some dishes I’ve created and made for a long time, yet, seven months into this cooking site, realize there are still one’s I haven’t included here. This is one of them (til now). I stumbled into this one of those times when I had salsa left over from a party. You see, I do enjoy tortilla chips and salsa as a nice alternate to the usual potato chip and dip. Thing is, in the days after the party I just don’t feel like eating salsa and chips solo. So I need to come up with something to do with that jar. Several years ago after one party I also found I had forgotten to serve the second half of the shrimp I’d bought. (There was still plenty of food and no one at the party knew or missed it though.) … In short. Boom. Came this recipe.

I know the name seems a tad corny coming from me. No, I swear I’m not turning “Rachel” on you. I promise never to call things in between soup and stew “stoop”. And no, I don’t think any male, no matter how brimming with nor how deficient of testosterone should ever have the word “Yum-o!” come from his lips either. So that’s not happening. So the choice was, call this was I call it around the house as my shorthand “Sorta Jambalaya” or name it something more long-winded like “Chicken and Shrimp in Spicy Tomato Spanich Rice”. The latter is accurate but doesn’t roll off the tounge as well. The first is reluctantly a tad cutsy, but it does convey the concept quickly.

Ok, now you’re asking, where am I going. I’m gourmet one minute, regular the next and now straight out of home ec class. Nope, they’re all me. Have you forgotten my Steak Quesadilla or my Pizza Burger Mac recipes? Shame on you! Remember this is “cooking at home”. And I’ve said it before, you can cook gourmet or home ec and/or anything in between at home. You can use all expensive and fresh ingredients and some exotic ones, or you can take a few boxes of off the shelf stuff and make a meal too. Obviously you (and I) don’t always want to make a many ingredient meal. And there’s always something about doing it fast. Provided (big if here) the taste goes with it. And here it does.

What? You want to try me on one more item? You say I’m big on trying to do things authentic and this isn’t very authentic a recipe, that is in the traditional sense of being true to a region and it’s history. That’s correct it is not. And it is also correct that I am big into history and traditional things. But again, I’m not limited to them nor bound by them. Look at my tropical fruit salsa I made just the other day; it’s somewhat fusion even though there is a true Mexican dish that’s equivalent. But, here’s the thing — I always point that out to you. How about my Pancetta-Wrapped Margarita Shrimp? The bacon is from Italy, the liquor from Mexico. Definie fusion. Notice I never once called it an Italian nor a Mexican dish because it isn’t either one.

Matter of fact, the aforementioned steak quesadilla recipe I have here. It’s 100% American. And it’s 50% Mexican. Ok, what do I mean by that? In the US that is a quesadilla. And in many parts of Mexico that is also a quesadilla. But in the southern parts of Mexico they actually make quesadillas the same way Italians make calzones, they fold over the tortilla with the filling inside, crimp it and overlap the dough on the one side to close it, and then deep fry it. So my way is not wrong, but there is another way too.

Finally about tradition. What gets my goat, annoys me to no end is when a recipe passes something off as traditional and it isn’t. When you read my artilces and these “forwards” to each recipe, I say to you, this is how it’s done, or this is one way how it’s done in such-and-such land. Or I will say, they would put this in to be authentic, but I’m leaving it out. I tell you, this recipe or that recipe is or is not traditional. As I’ve said before I’m neither traditionalist nor fusionist, I am what I am at the moment. Most importantly I tell you what that dish is. And here I tell you this is not real jambalaya, it’s “sorta”. And now you know another reason why I called this dish by that name.

Wait? Aren’t I going to give you a history lesson on jambalaya? Naw. I’ll wait until I do the traditional recipe for that. It will be more germane then. Meanwhile, enjoy this simple, and compartively quick dish which will remind you a lot of jambalaya. Oh, there is one Rachel Ray thing about this dish besides the nomenclature — You can make this in 30 minutes or less!

Sorta Jambalaya
©2008 Harry Kenney

1 box Spanish Rice (I like Goya’s) that makes 2.5 cups rice at final
15.5 oz jar spicy tomato salsa with jalapenos (pick your heat level, I used to do “mild”, now I do “medium”)
1 pound of chicken (I use boneless chicken breast)
1/2 pound 31-40 count shrimp, uncooked, devaned, shell totally off, ends included

You can start with precooked chicken, which I already had on hand. Alternately you can also use a rotisserie chicken from the market. Or you can easily cook the chicken right now.

Begin rice preparation as on box, boiling water in a large stock pot or dutch oven.

If cooking chicken with the meal, cut into chunks, toss into largest frying pan you have (12-13″ preferred) with cooking oil on medium-high heat. Brown slightly on all sides, don’t overcook. Take out of pan.

Into same pan, add more oil and cook shrimp, roughly two minutes or less per side. Reserve and let cool. Cut each shrimp into thirds. Add back to pan with chicken, warm up and stir. Add in jar of salsa to frying pan on medium heat, let cook together about 5-10 minutes with lid on. At this point rice should be done.

Add rice to frying pan (if frying pan is too small, then, instead add contents of pan to stock pot or dutch oven, whichever works best). Mix together on low heat for about three or four minutes with lid on. Serve. Makes roughly 8 servings.

©2008 Harry Kenney

Have you ever gone to the market, brought something home and said now what am going to do with this? I’m sure we’ve all done that. I certainly have. I’d love to say I always shop with a plan. I would have to say I partly do. I often buy food with some recipe or some idea at least vaguely in my mind. But not for the entire shopping experience; the rest of the shopping goes by what I see, what’s on sale, what looks fresh, what looks not so fresh, and what just generally grabs my attention. And this time it was the on-sale bag of frozen bay scallops.

And then I got home and thought “now what?” You see, I know what to do with the larger scallops. You know the one’s I mean that are the size and shape of big marshmellows. Pretty much you sear them on one side, then the other, bang, they’re done. Well, you’re certainly not going to do the same with what amounts to 60 or 70 miniature marshmellow-sized scallops. We’re talking just slightly larger than pencil erasers after all. So, what to do?

Eventually I recalled a dish I had served in a restaurant awhile back. Funny thing, can’t recall where I was. Could have been here in Center City Philly, but my recollection is that it was somewhere while traveling, either on business or a vacation. But I can’t put my finger on where. In any case, it was scallops in pasta with a fresh pesto sauce and some veggies. Which I began to reconstruct here and eventually got so far and did my usual, namely used that as the basis or the spring board and then went on my own from there. And what I ended up with was very delicious. (Or you wouldn’t be reading it now.)

You know I like to know about what I’m eating. And since I’m thinking you’re thinking the same way, here’s some things you should know about scallops when it comes to cooking. It’s a shellfish. Technically a marine bivalve mollusc. It’s found in cuisine everywhere, that is in Eastern and in Western cooking. You’ll find it on plates in Nagasaki to New York, from Dover to Buenos Aries, you name it. In the United States only the adductor muscles is used; elsewhere the entire scallop is often used. As to size, those large ones mentioned before, the one’s I know I’m most used to are called sea scallops and you can often get those as 20-40 per pound and are often an inch-and-a-half in diameter. Sea scallops are available fresh year-round, peaking from late spring to early fall.

Then there’s the one’s used in this particular dish, the bay scallop, which as the name implies they reside in bays. Historically these tended to come from New England. Nowadays much of the bay scallops consumed in the US are farmed in China. Bay scallops are often in the 50-90 of them in a single pound; these are usually half-an-inch in diameter. The one’s I got at the market (bad me for not looking) said on the bag, 150-200 per pound and were slightly less than a half inch in diameter, so I definitely got the super minis. In terms of season, bay scallops are available frozen purchased year-round.

Nutrition info: Scallops contain a variety of nutrients that can promote your cardiovascular health, plus provide protection against colon cancer. Scallops are actually a very good source of a very important nutrient for cardiovascular health, vitamin B12. Four ounces of scallops contains 33.3% of the daily value for vitamin B12. As with fish, scallops are a rich source of healthy omega-3 fatty acids. A four-ounce of serving of scallops alone contains roughly 24 grams of protein and about 152 calories.

Healthy and delicious. What more do you want? Use the recipe I put up just the other day for Classic Basil Pesto Sauce. Enjoy.

Bay Scallops in Linguine with Pesto
©2008 Harry Kenney

8 oz bay scallops
1/2 red bell pepper, julliene then cut in half
3 oz portobellos (or other mushrooms), cut into chunks
1/2 zucchini, diced
1/2 box linguine
1 clove garlic, slightly crushed and sliced
olive oil
homemade pesto sauce

Put linguine in pot of boiling water and cook until al dente. Reserve.

Olive oil into large, deep pan at medium heat. Add garlic. After a minute add red pepper, zucchini, mushrooms. Sweat well, do not brown. After several minutes, take out of pan into bowl and hold.

Place well-drained bay scallops into pan. Add little oil, turn up heat as needed. These will start extruding water. You want the water out but you don’t want to burn or even brown much the scallops at all. Toss constantly. Empty water out in sink as necessary. Add oil as necessary.

Toss veggies back from bowl into pan and mix. Remove from heat. Toss pasta into pan and mix. Add pesto sauce and mix well. Serve. Makes about 4 servings.

I really do get annoyed when my market doesn’t have exactly what I want. Which happens too often actually, but what can you do? You play with the cards your dealt with or you fold or you find another game. I did what I’m often (grrr) having to do, the first. This time it was uncooked shrimp and I wanted them larrrrrrge. Big-butt. Jumbo. Prawn-like. I had to suffer with 31-40s, the only size they had at the moment, and the only ones in the store, and they didn’t even have enough to make a full pound. Sheesh.

What kind of rookie-league outfit were they running here? Why don’t I have a fish monger near me? So you take what you can get. What’s the saying? When life gives you a lemon make lemonade.. Or, with me, it turned out make margaritas!

The dish is so out-of-this world, I think I’m in a mood to do my Emeril impersonation. Bacon-wrapped shrimp? Nice, oh yeah. Let’s take it up a notch. Pancetta-wrapped shrimp. Mmm. Delicious. What? Still another notch, you say? Fine. Let’s get it drunk. Let’s give it margaritas. That’s right, tequila and lime marinated pancetta-wrapped shrimp. Bam!!

Not sure how much I’ve talked about marinades before. If I have, I’ve probably only glanced at it. To be brief, I love what I call quick marinades. Yeah, yeah, I know. A lot of cooks seem to start out by saying “… and place this in the refrigerator for at least eight hours … better yet, overnight”. I dunno about you, but I have nether their kind of patience nor their kind of planning skills. If I’m going to do a pork loin sometime tomorrow evening, the last thing on mind is, let me go defrost it and marinade it right now. Then let me do all that, put it away and still I have to make dinner. Nope, just doesn’t work for me.

And their version of short of 8 or 10 hours? That’s worse! Let me go marinade some chicken while I’m trying to figure out what I want for breakfast. Sorry Charlie, I want a cup of coffee and a danish or an egg, I am not in the mood with playing with frozen-butt raw chicken at nine in the morning. Uh-uh. Ain’t happening!

What does work for me? You guessed it — quick marinades. But Harry, that doesn’t give it enough time, one might say. Fine. It does give it a lot more flavor than if I hadn’t done a thing at all, is my reply and I’m sticking with it. But, says the “purist marinader” (is there such a thing?), you’re breaking all the rules. And I say: hell, yeah. I do what I want to do. And I’ve told you there reading this before: do what works for you. Do what tastes good for you. You don’t want to marinade, don’t. You want to marinade your buns off, hey, stick it in there a month (ok don’t). But do what you think works for you. You don’t always have to listen to whatever one else tells you. And that even goes for me. Ignore what I said. I’ll try not to loose too much sleep over it.

Next: indoor “grilling”. Natch if the weather is great, do this on an outdoor charcoal grill by all means. As this was December in the Northeast, I did it inside on my stove top grill. If you don’t have one, use your grill frying pan (a frying pan with grill lines). If not that, a “stick” frying pan. Huh? You know, the opposite of non-stick, a non-non-stick pan. Cast iron preferably, if not, stainless steel. You will never never never (did I mention never?) get any “grill” action from a coated pan that makes juices in the pan instead of evaporating them. If you’re brave you could use the broiler. But I don’t like the chances of burning up a pound of shrimp, especially wrapped in pancetta. If you want to take the chance though, more power to you.

Another thing I want to touch on …. In a way this particular recipe seems very high-end and gourmet, simply because “shrimp ain’t cheap” and pancetta is even more costly. But think about it a moment. Ok, a pound of 31-40 shrimp was six bucks a pound. The pancetta was five dollars for four ounces. I used some of it in another recipe, leaving me with 12 slices which were halved and used on the shrimp here, about two dozen of them. The left over shrimp we had unwrapped. And this fed two people lunch. (You didn’t really think that was my usual hands and arm in the photos did you?)

Now, tell me outside of McDonalds where can you fed two people lunch for USD $11? So we had an upscale “gourmet” lunch for the price of fast food. Upscale? In one sense, definitely. And yet, if you look at it the other way, pricey? Heck, it’s almost a budget meal when you break it down. Look at it another way, how much would this have cost at a restaurant? I’ve seen six jumbo shrimp wrapped in American bacon go for $12. Pancetta would probably bump that to, what, $18? Now times by two, don’t forget drinks and tips, and we’ll forget about transportation. Anyways, as you see, money well-spent. And this is why you should be cooking at home!

Besides even were it a lot more expensive than it turned out, I’d have still done it and enjoyed it. Why? Harry’s rule: Every now and then you have to treat yourself. You deserve it. And if you can do it with company, all the better.

Pancetta-Wrapped Margarita Shrimp
©2007 Harry Kenney

1 lb uncooked shrimp, “large”, 31-40
4 oz pancetta
salt
pepper
vegetable oil

marinade:

1 cup tequila
2 tbsps fresh lime juice (1/2 lime)

Place shrimp in a ziplock bag or other container with the tequila and lime juice. Place in refrigerator for 30 minutes. Take out. Dump marinade. With paper towels, pat shrimp dry. Leave out to warm up to room temperature five minutes.

Season the dried shrimp. Take pancetta, cut in to even halves. Carefully wrap as many of the shrimp as possible; 4oz pancetta will wrap approximately two dozen shrimp. (No toothpicks to hold. Careful handling and heat will hold all but one or two on.) Preferably use the stove top grill or an uncoated iron or steel pan at medium-high heat. Use vegetable oil or butter-spray to coat surface. Place on grill or pan with plenty of space to turn. About three minutes on each side. Serve.

If this is the only food, it makes a nice lunch for two. Goes with red or white wine or beer or margaritas. Fresh cut loaf of bread on the side would be great. With other appetizers or sides etc, can serve more. Double or triple this recipe easily for upscale party snacks.

You can substitute bacon but if you do and with shrimp at this size, should be thin sliced. If larger shrimp you can use bacon at the normal thickness, cut it into thirds or quarters instead of halves, and figure one additional minute for each side in grilling time.

What’s to say about this meal? Other than it’s light and delicious? Dunno. It’s not that I’m in any way “tired” of writing openings — I have way too much to say, generally, for that ever to be the case. It’s just that sometimes, there is no back story, nothing that went wrong the first time to warn you about. Very little to inform you about.

Other than use fresh seasonal ingredients whenever you can and come up with something special. One can argue if this dish is a pasta primavera or not. I say it is as it’s mostly about the veggies (even though hey, who can ignore shrimp?). Other’s might debate that saying instead of blanched or raw I did a saute or pan roasting of my veggies. Still other’s say, this isn’t spring, certainly the use of a summer squash negates that. I say argue until the moon turns blue and take a chill pill. It’s all about the food, folks.

And, speaking of debates and such — yes I used cheese with seafood. And what IS the story about that? Should we? Shouldn’t we? And in actual fact that entire school of thought or debate has inspired me to write an article on the matter. But that’s for yet another day.

For today, this light and robust meal with make a great lunch, a romantic dinner or even a superb party bowl at your next get together. Buon appetito!

    

Shrimp with Sauteed Asparagus Pasta Alfredo
©2007 Harry Kenney

ingredients:

20 shrimp, medium (aka 35-41s) cut in half
1/2 lb asparagus, woody ends removed
1/2 box bow tie pasta
1 red bell pepper, diced finely
1 yellow squash, diced
1 cup frozen peas, defrosted
1/4 pt cherry tomatoes
14 oz jar Alfredo sauce (Classico makes four wonderful ones)

season to taste:

salt
pepper
oregano
basil
fresh parsley

grated parmagena (optional)

You can use precooked shrimp in this; it won’t hurt it at all, that said, uncooked is better as you can then impart even greater flavor. If the latter, take all the skin off, place the shrimp in a frying pan with olive oil, season as you like. Medium flame, about two minutes per side. Move on to plate to cool.

Meanwhile start pasta in rolling boil of water. And defrost peas (which don’t need a complete defrost) by straining and running warm water over them and place in bowl.

In same pan medium-high add oil and asparagus, salt and pepper and drizzle more oil on top. Pretend you are on a grill not a frying pan. You want to constantly move these around until you see some browning, and a lost of the stiff “rawness”, however you do not want to get them ovedone nor soggy. As some will get done before others, move them onto a plate individually until all are done.

In same pan, medium-high, add squash, season with salt, pepper, oregano, basil and garlic powder, and saute. In a few minutes add red peppers and cherry tomatoes and again add more seasoning.

In small pot warm up Alfredo sauce gently. Drain pasta and put back in large pot. Turn on to low heat.

Slice shrimps in half. Slice asparagus in half. Dump shrimp and all vegetables (peas included) into pasta. Dump in Alfredo sauce. Turn heat up to medium, season mixture, stir and let everything combine, add a touch of fresh parsley, about two minutes. Place in large bowls, optionally top with small amount grated parm.

Suggest serving with lightly buttered garlic bread and a nice Chianti. Serves 5 to 6.