Hello Dear Followers,
Turning 36 for both of us is about trying new things. For the past year we’ve both said, “We need to make a shrimp dish,” but neither of us has ever made shrimp until now! This was a process indeed!
We made shrimp scampi over a bed of spaghetti. Also as part of tonight’s dish, we made a cake to celebrate both of our birthdays this week with these little helpers in the picture below!
Before we give you the full recipe, we have to talk about cleaning shrimp for a minute. It is not easy, especially for two people who have never done this before. Daniela had thought she found thoroughly cleaned shrimp at the grocery store, only to arrive at Anna’s house and realize that was certainly not the case.
She spent about a half-hour cleaning a pound worth of shrimp hoping Anna would take the reigns to relieve her of this duty as Lady Gaga played loudly in the background and her daughter Victoria sat behind her mixing the cake batter for our birthday cake.
Once that was done, we felt we ready to get this started.
Here is the recipe:
Ingredients:
2 Tbsp of olive oil
6 tbsp of butter, divided
8 cloves of garlic, minced or thinly sliced
1.5 pounds of shrimp, peeled with the tails on. Salt and pepper to season. (We used about 1 pound and it was more than enough, use your own discretion.)
1/4 cup of white wine – (We used Holland House White Cooking Wine, but if we had more time, we would have picked up a white wine at the liquor store, a dry white wine should do).
1 tsp of crushed red pepper
1/2 lemon, juiced.
Instructions:
Heat a large skillet on high heat and add olive oil and two tablespoons of butter. Once the butter is melted, swirl to coast the bottom of your skillet.
Add the garlic and sauté until golden and fragrant. Make sure you watch the garlic, the skillet could burn the garlic easily, reduce the heat so it doesn’t.
Continuously stir your garlic for approximately 30 seconds.
Add the shrimp to the skillet adding salt and pepper. This version isn’t your traditional scampi, where you cook the shrimp separately, all the shrimp was put into the same skillet as the sauce.
(We might have done this incorrectly to what the recipe calls for, we put the shrimp in the same skillet as the sauce and luckily for us the garlic never burned. Keep stirring.)
With the skillet still hot, pour in the wine and sprinkle with crushed red pepper (if using). Simmer for 1-2 minutes, stirring occasionally, until shrimp are fully cooked.
DO NOT OVERCOOK THE SHRIMP!
Stir the remaining butter, lemon juice and fresh parsley and remove from heat immediately.
What did we serve with the shrimp scampi? We put it over a bed of spaghetti. We also had fresh french bread for dipping into the sauce, it was delicious!
We finished the night by singing Happy Birthday with Anna’s kids and eating birthday cake! Happy 36th Birthday to us!
Until next week!
Shrimp Scampi recipe by: The Forked Spoon
Tuesday Night Suppers 