One of the things I will never order at a restaurant is Alfredo anything. Alfredo sauce is so easy to make that I refuse to pay $15 for butter and cream.
Another stupidly easy recipe is Shrimp Scampi. If you ask the waiter for this, you’re wasting your money and the chef’s time.
The first thing you’re gonna need is a 12″ stainless skillet. Do not use a Teflon or a non-stick pan, as you WANT some stickiness.
Invest in a good-quality stainless skillet. You don’t need this, but this will work just fine.
Grab this stuff:
- 3 tbsp of olive oil
- 2 tbsp unsalted butter
- 1 tbsp salt
- 1 tbsp black pepper
- 1 diced shallot
- 5 smashed garlic cloves
- 1 tsp red pepper flakes
- 1 lb fresh shrimp, (not the pre-cooked pink ones, get the white, uncooked buggers)
- 1/2 of a fresh lemon
- 1/2 cup white wine
- 1/2 cup chopped fresh parsley
- linguine pasta for four
How to dice your shallot? Watch this:
Put the oven on 300. Don’t ask why, just do it.
Start boiling salted water for the linguine.
Peel and de-vein the shrimp. Place them in a ziplock bag. Add salt and pepper to the bag, shake to coat the shrimp, set the bag aside.
(Most recipes will have you toss the shrimp in a bowl , but I only have two stainless mixing bowls, and I’d rather throw away a Ziplock bag than clean my bowls over and over. You wanna use a mixing bowl, go right ahead.)
Heat your pan to medium-low — on my oven, medium-low is “3″ on the dial-scale of 2-4-6-8-Hi — and add olive oil until the bottom of the pan is barely filled, approximately 2 tbsp. Remember that the boiling point of olive oil is 572 degrees Fahrenheit, so don’t put your burner on Nuclear, ‘k Mario? If your oil is boiling, it’s WAY too hot.
Add the pasta to rapidly boiling, salted water. The typical cook time is 8 minutes, so we want to get our shrimp cooked in that time.
Add 1 tbsp of unsalted butter to the heated olive oil and allow to it to melt.
Add the garlic, shallot, and red pepper flakes. Cook for 1 minute, inhaling the entire time. Smell that stuff, let it entrance you.
Add the shrimp, spreading them out so the entire side of every shrimp is being cooked. Stacked shrimp is the devil.
When the shrimp tails turn pink — approximately 2-3 minutes — turn the shrimp one at a time so the other sides are cooked. You don’t want raw seafood but you don’t want rubber, either.
Cook the shrimp another 2-3 minutes, then remove them from the pan individually onto another plate. Lift them out with tongs; don’t pour them out and end up losing the liquid in the pan.
Add the wine and use a wooden spatula to scrape the bottom of the pan. Scrape up the brown bits and stir it all together. This is called deglazing the pan, and is what makes the brown (not black!) bits taste so freakin’ great.
(Black bits are burnt and attempting to deglaze them will give you crap in a pan.)
Add the juice from the 1/2 of a fresh lemon, allow the sauce to come to a boil.
Add 1 tbsp of olive oil and 1 tbsp of unsalted butter.
When the butter has melted, add the shrimp back into the sauce.
The pasta should be done at this time. Drain it and add to the shrimp in the skillet.
Put your plates in the oven!! They won’t need to stay in there more than 60 seconds.
Stir the linguine into the sauce with the shrimp.
Add the fresh chopped parsley, stir it all together, and serve immediately on your warmed plates.
WARMED PLATES, DANG IT!. There’s nothing worse then spending time and energy to make a hot dinner and serving it on cold plates. Seriously.
BRK (I’m sorry, you will forever be BRK, even if you stop playing again after you finish testing Cata!), do you offer cooking lessons for other guys? I’m sorely tempted to ship my sweetie off to Florida for a week or two. More men need to cook like this!
You say it’s incredibly easy but proceed to write a blog post of this length and detail with cautions and I have to buy a SPECIFIC pan type for it? If you’re good at and like cooking I’m sure this is simplicity itself. For the rest of us, it’s like telling you that installing Active Directory and Exchange is easy. For us systems engineers it is. For average Joes? Maybe not so much.
The problem with describing “simplicity” is exactly what you say; what is simple to one is not simple to another. If I wrote this same recipe for someone familiar with the kitchen, I could just say to saute the shrimp and *not* have to go into a detailed description of the pan. I could say to add diced shallots and not have to link to a movie of how its done. Heck, I could’ve linked to the wikipedia for shallots for the people who haven’t a clue what one is.
Breaking it down into easy to understand steps does make for a lengthy instruction manual, but keeping the cooking instructions at a level most engineers can understand is the key.
I think I need to make my husband read your blog again. Especially if you’ll put up some more easy recipes and talk about how a guy can do it and enjoy it! My husband’s idea of making me dinner is signing the receipt and tipping well. That’s nice, but since I really hate to cook every day too – we eat out way too much.
moar cooking posts, please. i love shrimp scampi, and your recipe reads like DELICIOUS.
Moar plzkthx.
Holy Jebus! That knife, aside from having a beautiful pattern-welded (AKA Damascus) blade must be amazingly sharp…
I highly recommend that a future post is all about how easy Béchamel sauce is. I made it for the first time last week. I can’t believe I hadn’t done that before.
I just want the shun knife from the video… ahhh does that make me a cooking geek?
Completely agree, there are many things I simply wont order in a restaurant given how easy it is to make at home. Good cookware is also an excellent investment, second the Cuisinart and am personally fond of the Calphalon Try-Ply stainless. Both are around 40-60% cheaper than the All-Clad. With both of these brands (or other knock offs) make sure you know what you are buying as they also sell lines directed at college students and terrible cooks. You want to avoid anything that has a huge disc on the bottom and very thin sides (stockpots being the exception). Beyond that, when considering skillets/omelet pans go to a store and see how the handle feels and that the slope/flare on the sides is similar to the more expensive pans (I actually prefer the Calphalon for both of these reasons)
I really need to replace my knives next (another must have)… if you are curious about kitchen essentials, Alton Brown has a book that provides a good overview. Get it from the library and take notes, will save you money for more kitchen gear.
Adding some roughly-chopped fresh spinach with the parsley adds both flavor and nutrition.
nutrition ?!?!?!?
I scoff in your general direction
Be still my beating heart, a man that enjoys cooking.
This recipe looks really great, I’ll have to try it… if the price of Gulf shrimp doesn’t skyrocket out of my budget AND is safe to eat. (I refuse to buy shrimp from anywhere else when in theory I should be able to get it from < 90 minutes away, fresh.)
Any chance we could see your recipe for Alfredo next?
Yum.
I am not a fancy cook, but I recognize good cooking, for two reasons:
I spent part of my youth in Belgium. Americans think France is the gourmet place, they are good, but Belgian cooking is better.
My Mom is the best cook ever, no really, the best.
Me, I am lazy, a bowl of oatmeal is often my dinner. But I loves the good food.
You sir have taught me how to PROPERLY dice :p
The best overall tip in there isn’t the cooking. It’s the warming of the plates. I cook all the time for my family, and I always warm the plates either in the oven, or under hot water. I mean SERIOUSLY, if you go to the trouble of cooking it, why serve it cold? You can’t wolf down a meal fast enough to prevent eating cold food if you don’t heat the plates first!
Dinner is supposed to be a nice relaxing event where you take your time. Not an even where you see how different the food tastes from when it was hot to when it is cold.
In the UK scampi most often refers to breaded and deep fried fish (supposed to be shrimp as in the USA) so I read this method thinking ‘huh’
Lovely recipie, very easy to make. Only problem I have now is how to top it next sunday;)
Ok, so when I first saw the embedded video I was thinking “Good, he is going to show us how to de-vein shrimp”. I can muddle my way through onion dicing but I haven’t tried de-pooping shrimp.