shrimp – The Kitchen Illiterate

Spicy Shrimp Causa Bites

I love potlucks. They give me an excuse to experiment with dishes that are time consuming or complicated or involve unusual ingredients, or all of the above. I love to feed people, and even better, I love it when I make something that makes everyone in the room excited. These spicy shrimp causa bites did the trick: I made these for a Fourth of July party (and yes, I’m aware that was over a month ago. I’m a bad blogger). People loved them: They’re unusual and full of flavor and are fun to eat. Sure they’re a little time consuming, but they’re totally worth it.
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Spicy Citrus Shrimp and Spinach

I don’t use a lot of citrus in the kitchen, though I have been eating clementines nearly every day this winter. I don’t actually use a lot of fruit in my cooking at all. Fruit is sweet and therefore my savory-loving self has a hard time intuitively understanding how it fits into dinner. But when I saw this recipe for Grilled Shrimp with Citrus-Sambal-Oelek dressing in April’s Food & Wine, I was intrigued. The idea of something bright and spicy is very appealing this time of year, when summer taunts at every turn. What I ended up with was slightly different from the original recipe, based on what I had in the kitchen, but holy moly, it was so good I think I’m going to try introducing citrus to my pots and pans more often.
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Spicy Shrimp with Buckwheat Soba Noodles

It’s always amusing for me to go back to the early archives of this site and realize how little I knew about cooking. And I posted everything, no matter how lackluster the final product. A lot of these early culinary endeavors, despite being executed poorly, do hold some promise, and I’ve been having fun re-creating them and trying to improve where I went wrong back in the day. One of these improvements turned out so much better, and was so easy, that I suspect I’ll be making it more often: The Spicy Shrimp and Red Onion Pasta of 2007 became the Spicy Shrimp with Buckwheat Soba Noodles you see here, and they were much more palatable this time around. It was all about the balance of ingredients, and using the right kind of noodles.
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