Shrimp, Shrimp, and More Shrimp

Over the weekend we splurged and bought a pound of jumbo shrimp.

Why you ask? Well, if you have to ask that question, then you just don’t understand how shrimp lovers operate. Our family doesn’t get shrimp that often, due to the expense, but when we have a little money (and the time to properly cook it) we get shrimp. And we get it by the pound.

A pound of jumbo shrimp will net you about 29-33 individual shrimps (shrimps? pieces of shrimp? or is the singular just shrimp?), so we decided to break them down into groups of about 6-7 and cook each group differently to see what results we could get. As a prologue, we ate one batch just like cocktail shrimp, no frying. For the first cooked batch I decided to go old-school, just frying in vegetable oil with a sprinkle of salt and garlic powder. Oh man, was that good. Even the 3-year-old thought so. Note the oil slathered liberally upon the child’s chin in the picture. That is the face of shrimp enjoyment. Eldest Son also tried the shrimp, but I didn’t include his picture because the face he made was…well…let’s just say he’s not a fan.

The second batch we cooked in oil as well, but with salt and yellow curry powder. The oil turned bright yellow and stained the shrimp the same color. It reminded me of a Pakistani restaurant we visited ages ago where everything was cooked in either yellow or red curry. I personally love curry, Zizi likes it but not to excess. The yellow curry gave the shrimp a really unique flavor, like it should have been served over a bed of white rice and maybe roasted carrots or something.

The third batch we fried up in butter instead of oil and added salt and ground-up hot red pepper. It had a kick and to it, and the butter worked perfectly with the shrimp flavor.

Butter is much more bubbly than oil to cook shrimp in, and it tends towards wanting to burn. But with the heat set to Medium-Medium High we managed to avoid that problem. The goal is to heat the butter/oil before adding the seasoning directly to the pan, then you put the shrimp in, and finally get the shrimp to the point of browning a little with slight crispy edges but still to retain a soft center. If it is overcooked, it tends to take on a rubber consistency. The time it takes per side is about 2 minutes.

So we ate and ate. And then the shrimp was gone. :-(

But we had fun. Oh, and after we cooked the shrimp I made hot and sour soup. This soup deserves its own post because of the amount of heartache I’ve gone through to get to this point in my Asian cooking abilities. So I will just leave a pic of the finished soup here and save the story behind it for another day. Cheers!