Dinner last night with Cid and Eric: salt and pepper shrimp, garlic-tomato brown rice, steamed asparagus, salad, and bread, with an appetizer of homemade potato chips.

The potato "chips" are easy -- thin potato slices fried in hot oil and tossed with lots of salt and pepper. If you vary the thickness of your slices, you'll get some crispy like chips (or "crisps" to you brits), some soft like fries (or "chips").

The rice was based on a recipe I'd come up with the night before, when I had some sausage and was thinking Italian, but didn't want to make pasta. Instead, I made some brown rice (used instant stuff, which is not bad, and much faster than the 80 or so minutes of soaking and cooking dry brown rice takes). Then I made a tomato-garlic sauce by sauteeing diced onion and garlic in some olive oil and adding several diced tomatoes once the onions were well-cooked, flavoring with oregano and garlic pepper. Once everything was pretty saucy, I mixed in the rice and let it simmer a bit. It was pretty good but a little bland, could use some more spice. It didn't quite have the flavor impact of a good pasta sauce.

The shrimp are simple, just toss about a pound of shelled (tail on or off) raw shrimp into some very hot olive oil and keep tossing and sprinkling with salt and pepper (I favor a pepper blend I have called szechuan spicy pepper). The asparagus we just microwave for a few minutes in a pan with some water.

April 7, 2005 01:13 PM
Categories: food
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