Saturday, March 6, 2010

My Perplexing Lemon Butter Emulsion Shrimp Pasta




Perplexing in a way that at the first glance, those ingredients don't go well together. I didn't have a clear idea what the dish should be, just tried to use ingredients available. Flavor was developed along the way.

Ingredients:
  • lemon juice (leftover from making lemon curd)
  • green onions (whole bunch of them for making Chinese scallion pancakes)
  • garlic, sliced
  • asparagus (another item to be used up ASAP)
  • shrimp, peeled and deveined
  • Chinese flat noodles which look like linguine
  • salt, sugar, cooking wine, oil, butter


What happened:
  • Marinated shrimp in salt and cooking wine
  • Green onions + garlic + olive oil + butter in a frying pan, cooked until the green onion flavor mellowed. Seasoned with salt.
  • Shrimp, in the same pan. Removed from the heat as soon as the shrimp was just done
  • Prepared noodles according to the instruction on the package. Drained. Reserve a little liquid for later use.
  • Cooked asparagus (more details below)
  • Used the same pan which cooked the shrimp, added lemon juice and sugar mixture, added butter, gently whisked until uh...it looked good
  • Tossed everything in a pot. Served.


The verdict:
Overall the response was quite positive. TripleQ requested less butter next time (again, I was just trying to use up the butter so I did put in a bit more butter than usual).

The what-was-I-doing moments:
  • tasted the shrimp right after it was cooked. I had a bite and realized it was too hot. Just when I said "Hot!" it slipped down my throat. OUCH!
  • instead of blanching asparagus in the pot, I dumped it in the pan which I was planning to prepare the lemon butter sauce. It turned out ok but really didn't plan to do so.

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