Camacho Watcho

What comes after Pizza Friday? That’s right – Seafood Saturday! Kyle and I were headed to the theater on Saturday night, so I thought it would be fun to make a few of the seafood dishes an appetizer-type meal that night. As always, the best laid plans always fail and I didn’t leave enough time to cook. We made all this beautiful food and then had about five minutes to enjoy it before needing to walk to the Guthrie. But no worries…nothing went to waste – even though Kyle was eating crab cakes while he was doing the dishes. I suppose things could have been worse.

But back to the food – we made Mini Crab Cakes, Salt-Roasted Shrimp with Scampi Dip and Seared Sea Scallops on Sauteed Spinach with Hoisin Butter Sauce. And let me tell you – all three recipes were very, very good.

Although my crab cakes got a little too browned, these were light and had a really nice texture, which sometimes can be an issue with crab cakes. I did stray from the recipe with one thing – the crab meat. It called for lump crab meat, which was double the price of claw crab meat. Instead of going elsewhere (I really wanted to get everything at Coastal), I decided to just change it up. I thought it was still really good – and for half the price!

The next recipe was for shrimp. I don’t know much about salt-roasting so I’m not quite sure what that did for the flavor (if anything), but they tasted good. We did have some issues peeling the shrimp after, but that probably had nothing to do with the recipe. The scampi sauce was A-MAZ-ING. Of course – it is mainly butter, so that probably doesn’t come as a surprise. This will definitely be made again and I’m also thinking of playing with the recipe a bit…maybe grill the shrimp and baste with the sauce and perhaps even make it with tequila (instead of wine) and cilantro (instead of parsley)…mmmm….

The last recipe, which was an Asian scallops dish was also absolutely delicious. So much so, in fact, that I made it again last night. I know – I have all these recipes to finish and I actually made a recipe again before the month is over…am I crazy? The answer, as you are probably aware, is yes. But, the scallops are just so tender and the sauce and spinach are so flavorful – ginger, garlic, serrano chile…so good! The second version was even better, as they caramelized better (I used only olive oil instead of the olive oil/butter mix the recipe called for).

All in all, our seafood fest was a success. These recipes will definitely make it into my rotation again soon.

Tags: challenge, Food, seafood

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 30th, 2009 at 4:59 pm and is filed under Food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.