A Play on Food

A twist on two cuisines from the barest of raw materials = delicious food humour

Taste & See: I haven't been grocery shopping since I cooked that big Thai meal a few weeks ago, which means I'm down to doing things like tossing a can of chili & a can-opener in my bag for lunch. It also means, incidentally, that the other night when it came time to eat dinner- frozen burritos and cans of chili already used up- I got to play my favorite game: turn the remnants of passable food from my fridge and make it into an edible mean. Well, who am I kidding: I wouldn't be happy with something merely edible. When I clean out the fridge, I shoot for greatness. Which made the other night's challenge more of a challenge than usual, given the meager contents of my fridge.

The other night my raw ingredients consisted of:
- half a lime
- whole dried red chili peppers
- half a can of bamboo shoots
- 1.5 onions
- half a can of coconut milk/cream
- some cloves of garlic
- a bag of frozen shrimp found hidden in the back of the freezer
- spaghetti noodles [who doesn't have that hidden in the cupboard somewhere?]

When I found the shrimp I perked up. Shrimp, garlic, & onion are a time-honored combination; surely I could do something with that . . . I browsed through a few cookbooks for shrimp recipes for inspiration, hoping for a nice light white-wine cream sauce recipe to go over the spaghetti. I was initially a bit frustrated, as I kept running into Asian-inspired shrimp-based recipes but nothing calling for my general ingredients. Then genius struck; why not make a play on food? I envisioned a dish that would trick you into taking it for a simple Italian pasta, but with flavors that would tease with hints of something unusual; food humour, if you will. Aha! Now to execute!

After briefing myself on a few techniques with the Joy of Cooking in an effort to boost my technical skills I began with the familiar, stir-frying the garlic and onions on high in a big pan with a touch of Lime Riesling oil from the same company that made the oil I used in Dinner in 5 Minutes or Less, Redux.

An old housekeeping tip: "always have garlic & onion frying up when your man comes home from work." That way, you can entice him into thinking dinner is on its way, when in reality perhaps it is still in a box waiting to 'just add water', when the man is out of the way with his feet up watching TV. While one hopes times have changed just a bit, the smell is still enticing, and can certainly fool dinner guests into thinking you're truly almost ready [and whipping up something truly wonderful] when in fact you don't even know yourself what comes next. I didn't have dinner guests coming, but garlic & onions are still a great way to reassure yourself dinner is going somewhere.


Meanwhile, per the Joy of Cooking I popped my frozen shrimp in boiling water for a few minutes, counting from when the water began to boil, then removed them and set them aside. Using the same water, I boiled a few whole chilies momentarily to soften them up & allow the flavor to better be absorbed into the sauce. I then added a little over a half cup of wine from a bottle brought back to New York from Food & Wine week- I used a crisp but not too dry Chenin Blanc from Snoqualmie Winery, but any white wine that isn't too sweet will do.


I then added the chilies to the onions, which added a nice splash of colour to the otherwise overwhelmingly whitish dish.


When the wine was mostly absorbed, I added coconut milk & bamboo shoots and turned the heat down a little. The coconut milk left in the can wasn't quite enough so I added a bit of 2%-- though I'd have used more coconut milk or half and half if I had it.


Finally, I added a pinch of salt & ground pepper and about a tablespoon of lime juice to the sauce before tasting it. It was surprisingly un-sweet; I associate coconut milk with a sweet flavor and it tasted odd not to have it here. This dish isn't intended to be as complex [or as sweet] as, say, a coconut milk-based curry- but I added a dollop of palm sugar [you could use brown] that brought the flavor up to a nice full balance.



I poured the sauce over the noodles & shrimp and finished off with a bit of grated lime rind for colour- though what I would have done for some green onions to really add a punch. But making do with what you have is the whole point for these things, notwithstanding changes I'd have made with a few more raw materials. Think of it as a typical shrimp-garlic-onion cream sauce livened up by using coconut milk instead of cream, if you like. Or is it a modification of the shrimp-coconut-chili recipes into a parallel of a typical white wine cream sauce? Not quite Asian, not quite Italian, but the final dish didn't turn out half bad.