Shrimply Irresistible!

We keep seeing those Buitoni pasta commercials, advertising an easy date night dinner of shrimp scampi.  The guy rips open the bag of pasta and shrimp and dumps it into a pan, and voila!  "Homemade" date night dinner, lit candles and all.  After much joking about having Buitoni shrimp scampi for dinner, we decided to make our version of date night shrimp pasta.  Shrimp primavera was definitely our inspiration here, despite it being Fall.

The most time consuming part is cleaning the shrimp, and even then, you can just buy shrimp that are already shelled and cleaned.  But if you're like us and buy the shell-on shrimp, you'll need to peel and devein your shrimp.  At the very least, take out the main vein on the back side.    Just run a paring knife down the back, run it under some water, and you're done.  No one wants to eat shrimp poop!

While Justin was cleaning the shrimp, I got to chopping up some onion, garlic, and tomatoes for our sauce.  We had a couple small beefsteak tomatoes and some yellow romas from our share, but you can use whatever you have on hand.  We just let them cook down and release their juices.  If you have grape or cherry tomatoes on hand, as an alternative, throw them on a backing sheet and pop them in the oven to roast.  Once they start to pop, pull them out, and then just smash them with a potato masher for a nice, roasted tomato sauce.

But back to our sauce.  We poured a little white wine, Italian sauvignon blanc to be exact, into the pan to deglaze it, and get all those tasty bits off the bottom of the pan.  Don't forget to cook your pasta while your sauce is cooking.  The shrimp don't take long to cook up, so toss them into your sauce when your pasta is almost al dente.  Since we still wanted some bit to our asparagus, we threw them in with the shrimp.

When your pasta is done, reserve some of the starchy cooking liquid.  Justin wanted to be absolutely sure the pasta was done, so he threw some on the cabinet...it was done!

Once your shrimps are nice and pink, add in a bit of the pasta water and give it a good stir, before tossing in your pasta.

Give it a good toss so all of the pasta is coated in your sauce.  We topped ours with some fresh chopped parsley and basil, and some parmesan cheese.  And to accompany our pasta, we threw together a Fall salad of mixed greens, apple, toasted walnuts, blue cheese, and a cranberry balsamic vinaigrette.

Date night dinners can still be easy without coming from a bag!

Soup & Salad Snowquester

For those of you living outside the District, the meteorologists/media dubbed today's storm, "Snowquester".  To our dismay, snowquester was more of a rain-quester, but Justin had the day off, and I was able to work from home, so it wasn't all a loss.  But with the cold, windy rain, it was a perfect day for a big bowl of soup and a nice fresh salad.

Since we picked up a ginormous butternut squash from yesterday's share, we turned him into soup, using the recipe we posted about here.  Rather than crumble bacon on top, we seared up a couple pieces of pork terrine.  These went on the bottom of each bowl, and we ladeled the soup over it.  That way, when you dug in for a spoonful, you'd get a bit of the terrine.

The real star of tonight's meal though was the salad with a strawberry balsamic reduction.  We started by toasting up some walnuts and pecans, and by crisping up some pancetta.

 Then we chopped up a granny smith apple, and some radishes we had on hand.

Then it was time to make the dressing.  We chopped up about 6 strawberries and threw them into a saucepan with enough balsamic vinegar to cover them.

As the vinegar reduced, and the strawberries broke down from the heat, it started to thicken, and the sweetness of the strawberries started to come through.  It developed a smell, much like strawberry jam, but still had a bit of a tang from the vinegar.  Once it had reduced down to a thick syrup consistency, we whisked in a bit of olive oil.

Then it was time to build the salad.  We used the bibb lettuce from the share as our base.  Then layered in the apple and radishes.  The panchetta and nuts were sprinkled on top, along with some crumbled goat cheese.  Then we drizzled the dressing on.

All of the components worked really well together.  The apple was tart and crunchy, while the radishes added a bit of peppery spice.  The nuts also added a nice crunch, and the panchetta added some saltiness.  There was the nice tang and creaminess of the goat cheese, balanced out by the sweetness of the strawberries and reduced balsamic.

All in all, it was a great, hearty meal to warm us up through the rain/snow-quester!

Gung Hay Fat Choy!

Happy New Year!  Chinese New Year, that is.  It kicked off last Sunday, celebrating the year of the snake, and festivities will extend for another week.  We were too busy to cook up a meal last weekend, so we treated ourselves to a very traditional dim sum at Oriental East.  But with no work today, we had the time to out a menu together, trek out to H Mart, and whip up something tasty.

Chinese tradition is steeped in symbolism, and the new year's feast is no exception.  There are lucky dishes, and lucky foods, thought to bring you wealth, good health, longevity, prosperity, luck, etc.  Since it is just the 2 of us, we couldn't make everything, but we tried to cover most of our bases.  And we ended up with quite a bit of food.

The whole fish (from our CSA nonetheless), ensures a good start and finish, and to avoid bad luck throughout the year.  The potstickers are said to bring prosperity.  The long beans wish a long life for parents.  Soup and oolong tea are thought to be keys to good health for me, a water pig, and more specifically for Justin, a water dog, sizzling rice soup.

We started with potstickers, so we could nosh on something while we cooked everything else.  We used some ground pork, and mixed in ginger, green onion, soy sauce, sesame oil, and a little Chinese cooking wine.  Once that was all mixed together, it was time to make the dumplings!  You just put a dollop of the meat mixture in the middle of the wrapper, and dab a bit of water around the edges to get it to stick together.  You want the bottom to be flat so the dumplings can stand up in the pant.

Once all of your potstickers are made, put a little oil in the pan, and let the bottoms of your potstickers pan fry for a minute or two.  Once they're golden brown on the bottom, pour some water in the pan, throw the lid on, and let them steam for a few more minutes so they cook through.  Then just serve them up with a dipping sauce of black vinegar with minced ginger, and enjoy!

Next up was the shrimp with candied walnuts.  This is a dish you would typically see at a Chinese banquet, but it's one of Justin's favorites, so we figured, why not?  He peeled and deveined the shrimp, then tossed them in a little cornstarch.  The walnuts were tossed in a simple syrup, then tossed into the fryer for a minute.

The sauce for the shrimp isn't the healthiest; sweetened condensed milk, a little mayonaise, lemon juice, and a bit of honey.  But it has a nice sweetness to it.  The shrimp were tossed into the fryer next, and only took a couple minutes to cook up.  Then you just toss it in the sauce, and enjoy!

For the whole fish, we used the trout we got in our last share.  He was the perfect size for our giant feast.  This is one of the simplest dishes you could ever make.  Just fill a pan with a few inches of water, and add some green onion and ginger.  Once the water heats up, slide in your fish, and cover so he can steam.  After about 5 minutes, you can flip him over and let him cook for another 5 minutes.  Then place the fish on a plate/platter and top with some sliced green onion, ginger, oil and soy sauce.

 

The kung pao chicken cake together easily.  Cube up your chicken, and toss with some cornstarch, sesame oil, and some soy sauce.  Once its browned, add the green onions and dried red chilies.  The sauce is pretty simple too...just some soy sauce, Chinese cooking wine, sesame oil, vinegar, water and a little cornstarch to thicken it.  Then toss in your peanuts and make sure everything is coated in the sauce.

The sizzling rice soup was also quite easy, and it sat on the stove while we cooked everything else.  The base consisted of some chicken broth, water, and some of the pork stock we had in the freezer from our pig head.  Then we added in some ground pork, shitake mushrooms, snow peas, and green onions.  We also threw in a couple shrimp, right before we were ready to eat, so they wouldn't get overcooked.  Once we ladled the soup into bowls, we added the crispy rice and let it sizzle!

And for our vegetable, we went with long beans.  They're similar to green beans, but longer and skinnier.  We just steamed those up in a pan with some onions, and a black bean garlic sauce.

We had quite a bit of food, but we wanted to try and get as many traditional/lucky foods into the mix as we could.  At least we have lunch for the rest of this week!

Tressed to Kill

Tonight's dinner is brought to you by the letter P, for pork and polenta!

Since we have apples from the CSA, and pork tenderloin was on sale this week, it was a match made in heaven.  We've experimented before with a recipe for pork chops stuffed with apples, hazelnuts and blue cheese, so we made a few tweaks, substituting in walnuts rather than hazelnuts, and rolling it all up into a pork tenderloin.

I got to work chopping up 2 gold rush apples and toasting the walnuts.  We seasoned the pork with salt, pepper, and chopped rosemary.  Then we stuffed it with the apples and walnuts.  Our blue cheese is currently MIA, so we had to forgo the cheese.

 Justin had the pleasure of tressing the pork and making sure all the apples and walnuts stayed up inside the pork.  And since all of the apples didn't fit inside the tenderloin, we just put them in the dish around the pork while it cooked.

For our side dish, we went with a butternut squash polenta gratin.  The bulb of the squash was roasted, while the neck was just peeled and sliced.  While the squash roasted we whipped up the polenta.

The roasted squash was added to the polenta, along with a bunch of parmesan cheese.

I only had a loaf pan, so we made layers of polenta and sliced squash.  This was all topped with more cheese, some black truffle oil, and truffle salt.  Then we popped it into the oven with the pork to cook.  About 30 minutes later, dinner was ready!

The pork was perfectly cooked, the apples added a nice sweetness, and the walnuts had a nice, toasty crunch.  I did miss the tang of the blue cheese though.

With the unseasonably warm weather on the docket for this weekend, we're hoping to fire up the grill, so stay tuned to see what we do with the bison steak and kohlrabi!