Good Food from Friends: Shrimp with Green Sauce and Zucchini Ribbons

Perhaps this will bit me in the butt later in life, but no matter what the issues with cholesterol, I love shrimp.  I'll eat shrimp any way I can and I'll be happy to cook it.  One of my favorite ladies at my local butcher taught me the easiest way to clean and shell shrimp.  Once I learned how easy it was (essentially take kitchen shears or scissors and snip right up the back of the shrimp; this allows the shell to peel off easily AND cleans out the vein), I was on my way to become a shrimp-cooking fiend.  Shrimp is so easy and it's very versatile.  Yes, I could go on and on like our good friend Benjamin Beauford Blue, or "Bubba", and tell you all the ways you can cook and eat shrimp, but I think I'll move on while I'm ahead.

Charisse, a friend of mine from high school kept in touch with one our close friends, Nicole.  Nicole was the one who introduced me to Charisse and her husband's food blog, foodies @ home.  I thought it was a great blog.  I had just started getting into reading cooking and food blogs and I liked their style.  I also liked the dishes they were making.  I say "we" because they both switch off cooking and writing.  Plus, their photos are great and make their dishes even that much more mouth-watering.  After following them for a few weeks, I decided to try out one of their dishes:  Shrimp with Green Sauce and Zucchini Ribbons.

Like Charisse, I love zucchini.  My mom used to prepare zucchini in the most simplest of ways:  broiled in the oven with Parmesan cheese, pepper and olive oil, and, of course, she used them in frittatas.  I am always up for trying new ways of cooking old favorites and this dish seemed right up our alley.  The recipe was really easy to follow and the end result was delicious.  It was fresh and flavorful and, for a pasta dish, was not too filling at all.  We really enjoyed it here and I'm looking forward to what else Charisse and her husband keep cooking up!

Ya Mon! - Jerk Chicken with Grilled Banana and Onion Salsa

Let's quickly address the rather large pachyderm in the room:  Yes, it has been a while since I last posted.  There, issue addressed; let's move on, shall we?

In the interest of time and preserving my dignity, I will not divulge when this meal was cooked and eaten.  What I will tell you is that it was a delicious meal.  I will, though, apologize for the lack of chicken-prep photos, which were Marshall's responsibility and in the joy of grilling the chicken, he forgot.  We also grilled the chicken a night ahead, due to an even or something.  We have a schedule when we eat.  We are creatures of habit and keeping a "cook Monday and Wednesday; eat leftovers Tuesday and Thursday; figure out something Friday through Sunday" is easy for us to make sure we're eating more at home than coming up short on what to eat and ending up going out.

Anyway, all that aside:  this was exactly how the editors of Cook's Illustrated described this chicken:  easy, as well as being very tasty.  It also wasn't really super spicy, which anything labeled "jerk" tends to be.  The marinade/rub does contain habenero peppers, but they aren't there in the forefront.  What you get is an extremely flavorful and juicy chicken with a very nice warmth, which only suggests the pepper's presence.  What really stands out in this meal is the side dish:  grilled banana and red onion salsa.  We treated this more like a salad, rather than a salsa.  But, it's a great dish and it packs so much flavor and it's a refreshing counterpart to the spicy and warm chicken.  The grilled bananas and red onions are sweet, but not too sticky.  The dressing is minty and with just a spark of rum ties everything together.  Considering I've never been to Jamaica before, I can't say how this stacks up to what you would find on the island, but I can only imagine it holds its own against the authentic birds being fired up on the street.  Is it bad that I wanted to construct my own charcoal grill out of a discarded oil drum and cook my chicken just to get that close to authentic?  :)

Best Grilled Chicken Ever: Thai-Style Chicken with Spicy Sweet and Sour Sauce

I first must apologize for the lack of photos for this entry.  If I remember correctly (which is a horrible thing to say and I should be able to keep up with this thing!), I started preparing this chicken and halfway through realized I needed more limes.  For some odd reason, my local market has been having horrible luck with limes.  They end up being dry and hard as rocks.  I go to use them and I can barely get two drops of juice. This happened while trying to get the spice mixture, which is placed underneath the skin, for the chicken and I ran out of limes to juice.  What was funny, in a sad way, was that Safeway ended up having much better juice-laden limes than my local Italian market.  Anyway, while preparing this chicken, which ended up taking forever due to the marinating time and running out of limes, I said to Marshall, "This better be the best @#!$ing chicken ever, because this is ridiculous!"  Well, my friends, it was.

I wasn't expecting to enjoy this chicken as much as I did.  For one thing, the spice mixture contains a good deal of coriander, which my body does not like.  My stomach actually turns at the smell of coriander.  I can take it in small doses, but anything with a strong coriander flavor or contains whole coriander seeds, I cannot eat without feeling sick.  I never cooked much with coriander before, but I remember my mom went through this kick.  She and my dad found this restaurant down the street from them, which is no longer there, called Asian Fusion.  Essentially, it was a restaurant that infused all sorts of Asian cuisines onto one menu.  They had a little Chinese, a little Vietnamese, a little bit of Indian, all rolled into one.  They had a side dish simply called "Coriander Rice".  It was regular white steamed rice, but they threw in a bunch of whole coriander seeds into the rice cooker.  This infused the rice, so you could have a "scented" rice with your main dish.  My mom was all over this.  She even learned to make it at home.  She served it with everything for a while, it seemed, and I just couldn't stomach it at all.  It wasn't the flavor, but more the aroma which just didn't agree with me.  Luckily, this chicken wasn't very CORIANDER-y, but it had an underlying flavor of that spice.  Most of the coriander was in the spice rub, which was cooked with the chicken in such a way that it could be scraped off.  Now, I don't like admitting when I'm a picky eater, but I just had to do this a few times with my chicken.  This being said, though, it really was some awesome grilled chicken.  Having the breast with the skin and bone-in locked in all the juices and the meat remained tender and extremely juicy.  The rub penetrated the meat, so the flavor went past the surface and into the entire piece of chicken.

The spicy sweet and sour dipping sauce was an excellent addition and added an almost refreshing flavor contrast to the aromatic chicken.  The spicy red pepper flakes were perfect, too, adding just enough heat to compliment all the other flavors in the spice rub.  I took advantage of the side dish recipe, provided with the chicken:  Sesame Noodles with Sweet Peppers and Cucumbers.  I didn't get any pictures of the side dish, quite simply because it wasn't photogenic.  Although it tasted great, it didn't look all that lovely.  I think it was the brown dressing, which made the dish look like a big bowl of chunky peanut butter.  However, the flavors were wonderful and the meal as a whole was delicious.