Garlic Shrimp Ravioli

You might have noticed that we eat alot of ravioli. Every week actually. Hell, they're fresh, handmade and will turn you off all other pasta for all time. So what's not to like, especially when you add delicious stuff to them like garlic butter shrimp.

For this particular recipe I can take no credit. This was all my girlfriends doing. So here is what she did. First she melted a good bit of butter in a pan with alot of crushed garlic...we seem to love the stuff...maybe even unhealthily. Once the butter was all nice and garlicky, she plopped in some shrimp, added thyme and oregano. She cooked the ravioli in the meantime, saving a tablespoon or so of the pasta water to add to the butter and then served it all topped with a good heaping mound of grated parmesan cheese.

Beat that Red Lobster!

Shrimp and Shiso Wraps

Based on our success with summer rolls (http://stonespoon.blogspot.com/2007/06/crab-pizza-pockets-summer-rolls.html) and our growing love for asian food, we decided we'd throw some ingredients together in a wrap, make the sweet and spicy sauce for dipping and call ourselves geniuses. It was a couragous attempt. But we came a bit short.

Given that we had a big bag of shiso sitting in the fridge, I though we'd go all asian and buy some various asian produce at the farmer's market. We found some nice knobbly organic daikon radishes, some earthy beets, organic purple shelled Italian beans (delicious raw even though they're obviously not asian), and enoki mushrooms, beans sprouts, chopped peanuts, vermicelli rice noodles and shrimp from the supermarket.

We then simply wetted some rice papers (careful, they're fragile), places all of the ingredients on them with the shiso placed so that it would show through the rice paper, and rolled. Though good, these rolls weren't great. The shiso was a bit overpowering. But most of all, the rolls just didn't have any wow factor. At least they were healthy.

Panko Shrimp with Pineapple Cream Sauce

My girlfriend loves shrimp. She also loves them breaded with coconut and dipped in a sweet sauce. Plus this gave me a great excuse to buy some panko bread crumbs that I found at my neighbourhood natural food store. You know you've heard of this stuff. All the chef's on TV are always yapping on about panko this and panko that. They're basically Japanese style bread crumbs made with no crust. They're crustless. And delicious when used for frying.

We basically just created a breading station (flour, eggwash, panko breadcrumbs) and then fried the shrimp till curly and crispy. The restaurants where I've eaten this have used coconut flakes for the breading. It would work. Would probably be better even. Especially considering the ingredients of the dipping sauce.

For the sauce, we tried thickening cream with orange juice but it doesn't work as well as lemon juice (the lemon reacts with the cream to thicken it). Anyways, we added crushed pineapples and a bit of sugar to the unthickened cream. It made a nice, relatively light dipping sauce for the hot and crispy shrimp. Not the healthiest stuff but better than any meal-in-a-box. Maple Leaf Listeria monocytogenes contaminated food anybody?

Pork and Noodle Broth with Prawns

To start, let me put you into the context of my Asian food exposure. I grew up in an isolated lumbering town where everyone was snow white except 1 African-Canadian family who was a doctor and 2 Asian families who owned the Chinese restaurants. No Greeks or Ukrainians or Mexicans or Arabs where I'm from. The first time I saw a black person speak French - which is basically the primary language all over Africa - I was amazed. Shows how much I knew.

Long story short, food was basically limited to the usual Canadian and French Canadian fare. So you can say that I was pleasantly surprised when I made this soup and found that my chopsticks smelled like authentic Asian food. Not to mention that I actually found Kaffir lime leaves at my local Asian food market. I mean, for all of you big city folks living on the American west coast or anyone in a larger city of the world, finding these ingredients might be as common as finding carrots. But when I tasted this soup I got an appreciation for the delicious, not too overwhelming flavours of Asia. This particular soup is supposedly of Vietnamese origin.

Like a good spaghetti sauce, I find soup is always better the day after when it's reheated. The flavours have come together and things are all beautiful and stuff. And your chopsticks can be sniffed for hours afterwards.

Finally, I find following a recipe to the T is not any fun. This one calls for 12 ounces of pork. Do you think I really went out there and measured 12 ounces of pork? No. I cut up the pork tenderloin and stuffed it into the soup. Recipes are made to be altered. But I found that when I was starting to cook that it was better to stick to the recipe. So, rule of thumb, you can depend less and less on recipes as you practice more and more. Like anything, really.

Pork and Noddle Broth with Prawns

350g / 12oz pork tenderloin

225g / 8oz raw shrimp tails

5oz thin egg noodles

1 tbsp vegetable oil

2 tsp sesame oil

4 shallots or 1 medium onion, sliced

1 tbsp finely sliced fresh root ginger

1 garlic clove, crushed

1 tsp sugar

6 1/4 cups chicken stock

2 kaffir lime leaves

3 tbsp Thai fish sauce

juice of 1/2 lime

4 sprigs of fresh cilantro and 2 green onions (scallions) chopped for garnish

1. Remove fat of tenderloin and slice as thinly as possible. A good trick is to put the thawed pork in the freezer for 30 minutes to firm the flesh up. It's then easier to slice thinly.

2. If using raw prawn tails, peel and devein the prawns.

3. Bring a large pan of salted water to the boil and simmer the egg noodles until softened, or according to the instructions on the packet. Drain and refresh under cold running water. Set the noodles to one side.

4. Pre-heat a wok. Add the vegetables and sesame oils and heat through. When the oil is hot, add the shallots or onion and stir-fry for 3-4 minutes, until evenly browned. Remove from the wok and set aside.

5. Add the ginger, garlic, sugar and chicken stock to the wok and bring to a simmer. Add the lime leaves, fish sauce and lime juice. Add the pork, then simmer for 15 minutes.

6. Add the prawns and noodles and simmer for 3-4 minutes, or longer if using raw prawns to ensure that they are cooked. Add the shallots or onion.

7. Serve garnished with cilantro and the green onions.

Definitely a 4 out of 5.

P.S. Sorry the pork looks purple in the photo. My camera sucks. I do not like green eggs and purple pork. I do not like them Sam I...um...Fork?

Weekend by the Beach

This is the view I woke up to in my tent this morning...the only thing better than this would be if the same view was from my bed in my own beachside house through my floor to ceiling windows. But that will come later. Much later.

Food-wise, this weekend was also fantastic. We started off with a simple but delicious breakfast. We fried an egg (making sure to keep the yoke runny), and sandwiched it between an English muffin, bacon and a slice of processed cheese. It's like an Egg McMuffin but homemade which always equals better. With this breakfast sandwich I made some home fries, frying the boiled potatoes in the bacon fat and throwing sausage meat, onions, garlic, lemon, and paprika in with them. Complete with a tall glass of orange juice, the day was off to a great start.

We then went to the market where I found goat farmer who agreed to sell me some goat milk if I go get it myself (I want to make some cajeta - Mexican caramel - soon and goat's milk is a must). We also ended up buying a jug of apple cider and a pound of some whole shrimp that had been caught and cooked on the boat that morning.

Finally, we made supper tonight out of these shrimp and some clams I picked on the beach. I cooked the clams with one onion, some garlic, two tomatoes, a bit of celery, olive oil, a bottle of pale ale (leftover from last night's beach bonfire), fresh parsley, thyme, and oregano. Though I did rinse the clams properly, there was still some grit. They were good nonetheless. Especially considering that I picked them myself.