Shrimp and pineapple curry

This Thai-style curry is really easy to make — and delicious — if you can get the ingredients. Those are: shrimp, pineapple, curry paste, coconut milk, lime juice, Thai or Vietnamese fish sauce, bell peppers, onion, and garlic. Kaffir lime leaves are good but optional. I can find curry paste, fish sauce, and coconut milk at both our supermarkets out here in the French countryside these days. Five or six years ago, buying those products meant spending half a day driving up to Blois or over to Tours and back. Things have really changed here in Saint-Aignan.

    Slice and sauté the onion and garlic. Add the curry paste to the pan and heat it up to develop its flavor. Pour in
coconut milk and add enough water to give the sauce the consistency you want. Squeeze in a little bit of lime juice.

   
Drop the shrimp, cubes of pineapple, and slices of red or green bell pepper into the sauce and let everything cook at a simmer for about five minutes. Serve over rice or noodles with a few more drops of fresh lime juice.

Here's a recipe.

Of paella and shrimp

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's
hard 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 making
a 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.

New Year's black-eyes, duck, and sausages

Yesterday I cooked my January 1 black-eyed peas in the slow-cooker for 10 hours. Also in the pot were a carrot,
a long stalk of celery with leaves attached, two big bay leaves, a large shallot, a garlic clove,
three dark-green leek tops, a generous amount of black pepper,
and a tablespoon of crushed hot red pepper.

   
I bought the duck confit (cuisses de canard confites) at the supermarket in sous-vide packaging (vacuum-packed).
Four duck legs cost 10 €. The saucisses de Toulouse were raw, so first I poached them in water.
Then I put the duck legs and sausages on a baking sheet and browned them in a hot oven.

When the beans were cooked, I took out the carrot, shallot, and celery, chopped those up, the put them back in the pot
with the beans. I also put in a handful of cooked green beans cut into 1-inch pieces. For lunch, we each ate
one duck leg-and-thigh piece, half a Toulouse sausage, and a good portion of the black-eyes as described.
We had a nice red Chinon wine (Cabernet Franc) with that.
Some duck fat went into the beans.

    Personally, I really enjoy black-eyed peas. I've eaten them since I was a child. Let me say, though, that I love all beans.
Black, red kidney, white, baby limas, butter, Soissons (giant limas), French flageolets, yellow wax, purple wax,
green beans, haricots verts, lingots blancs, haricots tarbais, cranberry, chickpeas (garbanzos), navy,
crowder peas, field peas, cowpeas, lentils, pink, pinto... which ones have I forgotten?
I'm glad I don't have to choose to eat just one variety of bean to like.
And I eat black-eyed peas year-round, not just on New Year's Day.
I guess I qualify as a lucky guy.

La paella à ma façon

Don't you hate it when you get up the next morning and realize that you forgot to put one of the main ingredients in the recipe you made for yesterday's dinner? That happened to me this morning. I forgot to put the green beans in our paella, and they were beans we had grown in last summer's garden. I remembered the green peas, the chorizo, the artichoke hearts, the peppers, and the tomato though. Since I posted a recipe yesterday, I'll just post pictures today, in chronological order.

1    2

3    4

5    6

Happy New Year et Bonne Année to you.