Zucchini and shrimp on skewers

Skewers or kebabs are brochettes in French. We made brochettes de crevettes and brochettes de courgettes for lunch yesterday. It was a good end-of-July lunch on a hot day.

You know where the zucchini came from — our vegetable garden. Walt picked two more yesterday.

I get the shrimp from one of the area's Asian supermarkets. There's one in Tours, and one in Blois. I like to buy raw, frozen shrimp, heads off, instead of the pre-cooked shrimp the local supermarkets sell.

For these brochettes, I used a yellow Thai curry paste from a jar. I thinned the paste with some water to make it into a marinade, and marinated the zucchini pieces and the shrimp in it for three hours or so before Walt cooked the brochettes on the grill.

We put the zucchini pieces on separate skewers from the shrimp, because the zucchini needed to cook longer than the shrimp did. The accompaniment was steamed rice and the marinade, cooked in the microwave, served as a sauce.

With our lunch, we enjoyed a bottle of Côtes du Rhône red wine that I got at the supermarket. The wine was a two-for-the-price-of-one special and cost us about €2.50 ($3.00) per bottle.