the dinner bell

SHRIMP AND SCALLOP DISH

This recipe is in my opinion not only the simplest way to cook these two items but yields in my opinion the tastiest of all methods.

Kok and Pum (his wife) visit with me most every Saturday for lunch and of course we speak about business as well after lunch.

Several months ago, I told them I would make a shrimp dish. Pum generally does all of the cooking. She is a fantastic Asian cook. She is from Cambodia near the border of Thailand, so she likes their spicy food and cooks it as well as Cambodian food. Each day in my fridge is a lunch for me. as for the dish I decided to also add scallops. Today I prepared it for the second time. It was a clone of the first effort and just as good. Kok commented that the scallops were the still the best way of cooking them as he knows. He too is a very good primarily Chinese cook since while he is also from Cambodia, he is Chinese.

Some history of this dish.

Several years ago, I had reason to be in Fort Lauderdale, Florida and an old high school friend who lives there took me to a restaurant that is famous for garlic crabs. The restaurant was opened in 1946 if I correctly recall. The crabs, all varieties were cooked in oil laden with garlic. They were good and very messy, they had sinks all of the place.

Several years later I was entertaining a friend and had spotted shrimp from Alaska and wanted to do something with the that was out of the ordinary. So, I opened my copy of the Lundy’s cookbook; Lundy’s was a very famous restaurant located in Sheepshead Bay Brooklyn starting in 1926 and by 1970 or so it closed, but in its day it seated 800 diners and they were the elite of Manhattan who came to it. Anyway, I found this garlic and oil recipe and when I made it, it was the identical taste of the Fort Lauderdale restaurant. That restaurant may have started selling their dish in the late 40’s but they must have eaten at Lundy’s.

Anyway, I added the scallops to the dish not knowing how they would cook. So, now that I have you shrimp and scallops’ lovers chomping at the bit here is the recipe.

Chop up lots of garlic, at least on bulb.

Enough olive oil (I believe the olive oil from California is of the highest grade) to coat the shrimp and scallops you are intent on cooking mixed with the garlic. The shrimp should have the shells on. I have been using the Argentine red shrimp. They are tastier than the gulf shrimp. But not as tasty as the Alaskan spotted shrimp. So, any of my readers located in Alaska let me know if you can get me some.

The scallops I use are the large ocean variety.

There you have it four ingredients.

Brush a baking dish with olive oil and remove the garlic from the shrimp and scallops and add the garlic to the baking dish with the olive oil and heat it in the stove or if a small amount in a toaster oven till it gets very hot but not burning or smokey. Then put the shrimp and scallops on the baking dish flat not piled on each other leaving the temperature where it is at 350 degrees for 5 or 6 minutes.

Now serve them and I suspect you will enjoy them. It is not necessary to add any thing to them. Also, do we do, that is eat the garlic.

The next recipe I will give you in a follow up article I had in a North Miami restaurant I also found years later in the Lundy’s cookbook.

Since so many of us are sequestered and restaurants are not available really, it is time to learn to cook if you have not already been working at it.

Bon Appetite