Garlic shrimps

I hope everyone had a great weekend. Mine was filled with grocery shopping and watching movies. With the snow and all I’m not really in the mood to do anything else. But today it started to rain. I never thought I would be so happy to see rain. The snow just melted away. Having 2 weeks of winter with snow and scrapping my car windows is more than plenty for me. Please let the spring start soon.

On Saturday I bought a bag of frozen, peeled and deveined shrimps. Talk about shortcuts. Normally I buy them with shell, so this was a nice change. I always try to have a bag of frozen shrimp in the freezer. Never know when I need them.

I don’t know if I should call this post garlic shrimps or shrimp garlic given the amount of garlic I marinated them with. I know my boss will not be too happy tomorrow at work. Somehow he always knows when I had garlic. But that doesn’t stop me from eating it. I just love garlic!

For these super simple garlic shrimps I used:

-       About 25 pieces of peeled and deveined shrimps

-       4 cloves of garlic

-       1 teaspoon of salt

-       Fresh ground pepper

-       Some slivers of fresh chili

-       1 teaspoon of garlic powder

-       Dash of olive oil

I started with mincing the garlic and sliced some slivers of chili. I don’t like it too hot so just a couple would do.

To this I added the salt, the pepper, the garlic powder and the olive oil.

Then I butter flied the shrimp, making sure I didn’t cut them all in half and mixed them with the garlic mixture. I let it marinate for a day, but if you are in a hurry you can use it after a couple of minutes also.

In a hot wok I added a bit of olive oil and one teaspoon of butter. The moment the butter melted in the oil I added the shrimp.

Shrimp cooks so fast, so the whole process took no longer then 2-3 minutes. There is no doing anything else while the shrimp is cooking so you’ll have to be there and keep an eye on them. When one side was done I turned them around and after everything turned pink it was time to serve it.

We ate it with some toasted bread, but it was good just like that also; a great, fast and simple snack before dinner.

PS: try these shrimps on top of a salad!

Cod with rosemary potatoes

I think cod is one of the easiest fish to eat. It doesn’t have the strong fish smell and the bones are big and easily removed. And you can do pretty much everything you want with cod. I normally wrap it with some smoked bacon and bake it in the oven, but this time I wanted to try something else.

I put some olive oil on a piece of foil and put the fish on top. I seasoned it with some salt, pepper and garlic powder.

Then I added some slices of purple onion for some color and flavor.

I wrapped it into a nice package. To keep the heat inside I made sure I wrapped the fish in the shiny part of the foil. So if you ever wonder why foil has two different parts (shiny and non shiny) it’s just because one should be on the inside holding the heat.

One kind of potato I particular like is called Roseval. It is an oval shaped red/pink skinned potato. You can do pretty much everything with them. I chopped them in even pieces and boiled them for 5 minutes first. Then I mixed them with some olive oil, pepper, salt, some fresh garlic gloves, some fresh rosemary (out of my garden) and garlic powder and popped them in the oven on 160 degrees for 45 minutes. The last 30 minutes I added the fish packages.

I just love baked garlic gloves. They are soft and sweet and have a mild garlic flavor. Just delicious.

The cod came out very juicy and flakey. Unfortunately the onion has turn from deep purple to blue, which make it look less appealing. But the flavor was good. Next time I will not use the purple onion, but make a mix from tomatoes and bell peppers. That is something for another blog post.