Yesterday we had the leftovers of our New Year's Eve seafood paella for lunch. There was fish left along with some mussels, cockles, and shrimp. I added the green beans that I forgot two days earlier, plus some more green peas and some spicy chorizo sausage. Heated up on top of the stove on an induction burner set to low temperature for a couple of hours,it was almost as good the second time as the first. One thing I like about the induction cooktop is that you can set
the temperature so low that you don't have to worry about over-cooking foods like rice.
In France, shrimp are sold cooked, with their head still on. For somebody who grew up in coastal North Carolina, that'shard to get used too. About the only thing I know to do with the heads, besides just dicarding them, is to make broth. Heading the shrimp at the table when you eat them is kind of awkward, but that's what people do. Yesterday
we had these as an appetizer with a sriracha mayonnaise dip. They were good. Pass the finger bowls, please.
Twice in the past week, in our two local supermarkets, I've found frozen queues de crevettes décortiquées — raw shrimp that are headed, peeled, and deveined. I like them that way. Often, even frozen, cleaned shrimp are pre-cooked here in France. I'd rather cook them myself. A few days ago, on an impulse, I bought a fresh pineapple. I thought about makinga pineapple pound cake, but then in our recipe database I found a better idea: a Thai curry made with
shrimp, pineapple, and coconut milk. That'll be lunch today with the shrimp.
I stumbled upon this photo in my archives the other day and want to post it. It's a gigantic pan of paella that was being sold at the outdoor market in Amboise one Sunday morning in 2006. I imagine a lot of people enjoyed seafood paella
as their Sunday dinner that day.
L’Art d’accommoder les restes!
ReplyDeleteOoh, I really like sauces with coconut milk in them. I bet this was good.
ReplyDeleteI feel like I wouldn't know how to approach that shrimp with the head on. I know that I always see them that way in France, but I guess I've never eaten shrimp while there.
We can buy frozen shrimp "tails" without heads at Asian groceries in Blois or Tours, but with the pandemic restrictions we haven't been to either place for about two years now. That's the way I like to buy shrimp.
DeleteI love shrimp but prefer it ready to eat. I don’t want to remove head and shell at the table.
ReplyDeleteAmen.
DeleteI like cooking with raw shrimp in the shell. I sort of like seeing the shrimp's eyes which remind me of seeing them jump around in the marshes when we lived near the GA coast. We'd get a few in our crab traps.
ReplyDeleteThe whole shrimp are pretty. Still... I don't remember ever catching any shrimp in our crab traps. We did a lot of crabbing when I was growing up. Then in 1990, Walt and I went to Morehead to spend a week with MA. I told him we'd go crabbing and have crabs for dinner one night. He just laughed. He didn't believe me. But we sure did enjoy that dinner of crabs we caught that day.
DeleteHere they seem to be now sold in bags frozen, cooked and cleaned with no head. Growing up we often had whole shrimp, as they were cheap, cooked with a bag of crab boil spices (Zatarain's). Easy to remove shell at that point. Your leftovers look very tasty as does that last bowl of paella!
ReplyDeleteFresh shrimp were so cheap on the Carolina coast that we bought bags of them to use as bait to catch small fish in the sounds. We would have done better just to eat the shrimp, but fishing was fun for us kids. I had a friend who was born in Florida in the 1930s. He said when he, his siblings, and their parents went to town on Saturdays, they would buy jars of boiled shrimp and eat them like candy on their way home in the car.
DeleteThe economics of modern business have been hard on the watermen, because people will buy cheap farmed shrimp (and salmon in other places), rather than pay the premium for wild-caught, which are better all around.
DeleteThe shrimp I bought were labeled as sauvages — wild-caught.
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