Saturday, April 12, 2008

It doesn't always work

While I encourage anyone to take cooking "by the horns" as it may, meaning to just sort of jump into it blind and cook "by feel", there are times when I would have been better off following some sort of instructions.

Recently I really wanted some shrimp that gave me a taste of garlic, lemon and lime. Something fresh and light tasting. I bought some shrimp and chopped up a few cloves of garlic, then threw them into a container with the freshly squeezed juice of 3 limes, 1 lemon and 1/2 an orange. I let this all chill together while I made some rice and then I heated up some olive oil and threw the shrimp into it once warmed to the proper temperature (that is a lie, I don't know how hot the oil was).

What happened? Some of the juice from the marinade went into the pan too and immediately lowered the cooking temperature, giving me not a searing on the shrimp, but a kind of boiling instead. When I went to eat them, the texture was all wrong and the taste was very strong of nondescript citrus flavors. I only ate one of them.

Now, at this point I take back that I still wouldn't stand behind my method of ignorant cooking, because through this experience I learned a couple of things NOT to do while cooking shrimp. This I believe, will be highly valuable in the future.

1 comment:

Amy said...

Not that I cook shrimp... ever, but for what you were going for, I would have heated up some olive oil, cooked the shrimp for 2-3 minutes, added minced garlic for the last minute, and then squeezed a lime over it at the very end.

Oh, and since most everything I cook has cilantro, I would have put some chopped cilantro in it, too.

Since chicken has a longer cooking time, your way probably would have worked better with chicken breasts.