The Philosophy of Food, Issue #021: Greek Shrimp

First, a bit of (much needed?) house cleaning.  With graduate school behind me and gainful employment a goal ever appearing nearer on the horizon, I find myself in a temporary limbo.  It is my intent to use this as an opportunity to resume my culinary adventures in full and post at least twice a week.  If I don't keep the schedule, you have my permission to nag me.  To begin with I shall showcase a recipe which I have enjoyed many times while visiting my mother and stepfather, but never produced myself: Greek Shrimp.

What is Greek Shrimp?  Well, it is a recipe featured on page 195 of La Bonne Cuisine: Cooking New Orleans Style.  New Orleans: The Women of All Saints' Episcopal Church, 1980.  A better description might characterize it as a medley of rice, shrimp, kalamata olives, feta cheese, and tomatoes not unlike jambalaya in consistency, if a bit more Mediterranean in pedigree.  At its essence, however, it is delicious.

A bit of forewarning: shelling and cleaning shrimp puts me in a somewhat morbid state of mind.

The Ingredients
The recipe calls for
-1 1/3 cups chopped celery
-1 1/3 cups chopped onion
-1/3 cup margarine (I used Bummle and Brown butter substitute, mainly because it's what's available and my folk's place.  In my own space, I'd probably just use butter)
-2 pounds raw shrimp, peeled
-4 cups cooked rice
-1 1/2 teaspoons Cavender's Greek seasoning
-1/2 pound Feta cheese, crumbled
-3/4 cup Greek olives
 -2 (16 oz) cans tomato wedges (used chopped tomatoes; unsure if I've ever had it with wedges)

The Process
Saute the onions and celery in the margarine, butter substitute, or butter until they go limp (how would you like it if someone sauted you until you went limp, huh?).  Then toss in the rest of the ingredients, stir them up, and put your skillet in the oven (preheated to 350 F) and bake for 25 minutes.

This is probably some sort of metaphor for the economy.

So, I was shelling the shrimp and pulled off the outside of the head of one of them without pulling off the insides.  My immediate thought was 'well, vertebrates don't have this problem.'  My next thought was something along the lines of, 'but, it would be problematic to be in the position to think at least you can't remove my skull without removing the stuff inside.'  Like I said.  Morbid.

The shrimp were fairly massive, so they get a bit of choppity to make them bite size.  Another situation it would be problematic to find oneself on the opposite end of.

Fortunately, I feel no empathy for vegetables.

I find raw shrimp far less appetizing then raw beef.  Not to say that shrimp isn't delicious.  In fact, shrimp is delicious.

Both my hands are in this picture. . . clearly, I am psychic.  Or, you know, I had help getting the pictures.  Thanks mom!

RICE!

TOMATOES!

OLIVES!

FEEEEEEEEEEEEE-

-EEEEEEEETAAAAA CHEESE!

By our powers combined. . .

. . .and with SHRIMP! . . .

We are Scrumptious Ethnic Cuisine!

Om nom nom nom!

The Results
If I could go back and do it differently, what would I change?  I might cut the celery smaller.  Maybe.  And maybe spend less time imagining unpleasant role reversals.  And maybe I wouldn't almost forget the shrimp.  Otherwise?  Delicious!  But I already knew the recipe was delicious, which begs the question: is that cheating?  If the point was to demonstrate empirically that I could reproduce the delicious, than I suppose note.  Because I did, and I can.  If the point was to try something completely new and see how it turned out (such as my endeavors with stoofvlees of so long ago), then sure.  I cheated.  But I cheated deliciously.

Special thanks to my mother and stepfather for hosting me in this time of limbo, and for showing me their (different and equally correct) methods of shelling shrimp!

I'll try and have something new up by the end of the weekend.

The Philosophy of Food, Issue #020: Chateaubriand Mishap

Behold.  This is what happens when you skim recipe books for the inclusion of ingredients (in this case, beef and red wine) without stopping to research what you're actually making.  This particular culinary monster was born from Talk About Good!: Le Livre de la Cuisine de Lafayette's recipe for Chateaubriand.  This cookbook in particular is full of bare bones recipes, and lacks pictures.

My fundamental mistake was in how I cut my beef, a folly born out of habit.  If you actually want to make Chateaubriand (or something that resembles it) the key is to cut your meat into thin steaks rather than stew cubes.

The other major change I made to the book's recipe, made before my 'oh shit' moment, emerges from the recipe's use of Pickapepper sauce in its seasoning.  Not having such sauce, I substituted by mixing an equal amount of A1 and Worcestershire sauce, adding a few globs of local honey to sweeten it up.  To this I added the recommended amount of pepper and salt to complete the seasoning.

For meat I used a 2.4ish pound shoulder roast purchased from the local farmer's market.

Another alteration I made to the original recipe was the use of Irish Mist whiskey liqueur rather than rum or cognac, since I lacked both.  At this point, though, I had realized that I had screwed up, so it was mostly a futile gesture.

Basically, I turned the dish into a full out stew as a way to salvage.  Basically, I mixed in two handfuls of bread flour  to thicken it up and served it with the sauce.

This may have been a blessing in disguise.  The resulting dish was fantastic.  I served it with a couple thick slices of the Italian bread I made yesterday.  Happy birthday to me indeed.

What might I do differently in the future?  I might straight up turn this into a wine-based variant of stoofvlees, starting with a bacongrease-onion-brown-sugar roux to which I add a little beef stock and a lot of red wine in with the meat and mushrooms.  I'm not sure how I'd go on to season my meat.  I might opt for a similar improvisational seasoning, or do something with creole seasoning and that local honey.

Anyhow, that's that.  Enjoy.