Recipes

Shrimp Salad Boats

Shrimp Salad Boats 1

My typical way of serving Shrimp Cocktail (not that I do very often), is to lay tiny cocktail shrimp on a bed of shredded lettuce and top it with a creamy mayonnaise based cocktail sauce enhanced with horseradish and chili sauce. Today, I have departed from my usual style and combined the shrimp and sauce, then served it in hollowed out tomato halves. For either version, frozen cocktail shrimp are best but you can, as I have done here, use the canned variety as a decent substitute… Continue reading “Shrimp Salad Boats” →

Recipes

Scallop Bhaji

Scallop Bhaji 1

A little over years ago, I posted a little appetizer recipe for something I called Scallop Clusters. It was a Japanese inspired dish featuring bits of scallop deep-fried Kakiage style and I like it very much. For today’s post, I have used that appetizer as a starting point and created something along the lines of the Indian style fritter called a ‘Bhaji’. The recipe isn’t an actual Indian recipe but seasonings are definitely Indian in spirit … Continue reading “Scallop Bhaji” →

Recipes

Octopus Stew

Octopus Stew 1

I had in mind to make myself an octopus stew and, in reviewing all sorts of recipes, I saw a remarkable commonality in theme in dishes hailing from Greece, Malta, Spain, Italy and Portugal. The basic dish, is octopus stew in a tomato base, generally with wine. Olives, and sometimes capers, are frequent additions and many incorporate potatoes. Today’s preparation is an amalgam of many dishes I saw… Continue reading “Octopus Stew” →

Recipes

Lemon-Stuffed Olives

Lemon-Stuffed Olives 1

A few months ago, I had an appetizer in a Greek restaurant that featured olives stuffed with a number of different ingredients, one of which was lemon. In following up, with a view to trying something similar at home, I discovered that most recipes for lemon stuffed olives tend to use the zest for the stuffing. The ones I had at the restaurant were quite mild when It came to the lemon flavor and I am not sure whether they used the zest or the flesh. In any event, for today’s recipe, I went with the latter… Continue reading “Lemon-Stuffed Olives” →

Recipes

Octopus Banchan

Octopus Banchan 1

Today, I have used the tentacle tips and other scraps from a recent Octopus Purchase to make a little Korean style Banchan, or side-dish. This style of Banchan involves cooking the main ingredient with the Korean Chili Paste known as Gochujang, and a sweetener, usually a syrup such corn, or rice syrup, or even honey. The presence of the latter allows for such dishes to keep a long time in the fridge.

There is a very similar dish to the one that I am making called Nakji bokkeum in which additional vegetable are added during stir-frying. Typically, the result is served hot, often over rice, but the simple, banchan-style type is served cold… Continue reading “Octopus Banchan” →

Recipes, Restaurants

Scallop Appetizer

Scallop Appetizer 1

Back when I was a kid growing up in Maritime Canada, Clams and Chips were nearly as popular is Fish and Chips and, if you were in a restaurant that served both of these, it was generally a safe bet that you could get Scallops and Chips as well. That dish generally used the larger variety usually of scallop referred to as ‘Sea Scallops’, and even a half-dozen of these, along with chips and cole-slaw, made for a very filling meal. For today’s appetizer version, I am using the smaller ‘Bay Scallops’… as with the old-standby of Scallops and Chips, the scallops are battered but, here, I have jazzed things up a bit … Continue reading “Scallop Appetizer” →

Recipes

Shrimp with Pesto

Shrimp with Pesto 1

This dish is just something I put together using my Pesto Piccante, although you could probably just use a more traditional Pesto Genovese, either home-made or commercially prepared.

Basically, I just sautéed some nice shrimp in butter then deglazed the pan with a little white wine before adding back the shrimp with a generous dollop of pesto. I served them immediately with lightly grilled slices of baguette. The latter could be spread with butter, or drizzled with oil, I suppose, but there was enough sauce under the shrimp that it was nice to just dip the bread in it. I conceived of this as an antipasto sort of dish, but it made for a nice light lunch all by itself….

Recipes

Pasta Ratatouille

Ratatouille Spaghetti

Today’s post is just a little dish I created using some of my home-made Ratatouille. It isn’t a particularly original idea, but the Ratatouille recipe is my own and the combination here works very nicely.

Just cook pasta as you normally would, reserving a little of the pasta water when you drain, and then sauté the pasta with a splash of oil before adding good ‘dollop’ of Ratatouille and a bit of the pasta cooking water. As the water cooks down a bit, you can form a really nice sauce. This version I made was very tasty with some Parmesan cheese added on serving, but a bit more of the Ratatouille would have been better 😊