January 2, 2013 Dinner-Shrimp Scampi with broccoli and
Casarecce pasta
The Pro’s Ranch Market ad this week advertised a lunch
special of 3 tacquitos for $.99, so I had to go try it, especially since there
was a sale on country style pork ribs for $.97/lb. and 4 avocados for $.99.
I spilled out all the change in my pockets and ordered two
orders of tacquitos to go, then went to shop.
The avocados were over ripe and sold out, but cantaloupes were 3 lb. for
$.99, so I bought one and picked up a few other vegetables and fruits. As I walked by the Seafood Section I noticed
large 16 – 20 count per lb. shrimp on sale for $5.99, so I bought 1 ½ lb. of
shrimp. When I arrived at the meat
department, I grabbed the last flat of ribs, a little over7 lbs. for $7.20.
Back at home before leaving for meditation at 6:45 p.m. I
shelled and deveined the shrimp and told Suzette that I was interested in
scampi for dinner. Suzette said we could
do it over pasta, which sounded great, a fresh dinner without any PPI for a
change. Deveining the shrimp means
running a knife blade along the top of the shelled shrimp to a depth of about ½
of the distance between the top and bottom of the shrimp and then removing the
small darkened sac that runs the length of the shrimp near the top of the
shrimp. This removes any impurities and
also opens up the shrimp so that it butterflies when it cooks, which I find
aesthetically more interesting.
When I returned home around 8:30 p.m. the pasta water was
heating and Suzette was ready to cook and asked me to dice up ½ of a red bell
pepper, which I did and then went to the basement to grab a bottle of
wine. I chose a bottle of 2003 Seigneurs
de Bergerac that was chilled. I keep a
selection of whites and rosé wines and beers in a fridge in the basement.
Bergerac is a wine growing region in the Dordogne River
Valley in Southwest France. The Dordogne
is famous for its foie gras, truffles and caves that runs from east to west and
pours into the Gironde near Bordeaux. We
visited the region in 2005 when we went to visit the Cave de Gaume, a cave
decorated with 19,000 year old images of animals that goes over 250 meters back
into the mountain.
Font-de-Gaume is a cave near
Les Eyzies-de-Tayac-Sireuil in the Dordogne départment of south-west France. The cave
contains prehistoric polychrome cave
paintings and
engravings.
The paintings
were discovered by Denis Peyrony, a local schoolmaster, on 12 September 1902.
The cave had been known to the general public before this, but the significance
of the paintings had not been recognised.[1] Four days
previously Peyrony had visited the cave at Les
Combarelles, a short
distance away, with the archaeologist Henri
Breuil, where he saw
its prehistoric engravings. The paintings in the cave at Font-de-Gaume were the
first to be discovered in the Périgord province.[2]
Prehistoric
people living in the Dordogne Valley first
settled in the mouth of Font-de-Gaume around 25,000 BC. The cave mouth was
inhabited at least sporadically for the next several thousand years. However,
after the original prehistoric inhabitants left, the cave was forgotten until
the nineteenth century when local people again began to visit the cave. The
paintings date from around 17000 BC, during the Magdalénien
period. Many of the
cave's paintings have been discovered in recent decades. The cave's most famous
painting, a frieze of five bison was discovered accidentally in 1966 while
scientists were cleaning the cave.
Bergerac wine is typically not as concentrated as that of
more prominent wine regions and does not have the character of its neighboring,
Bordeaux or Burgundy regions, but I have always found its light delicate reds
and whites to be very pleasing to drink.
When I returned to the kitchen with the bottle of white Bergerac
sec, Suzette, Why don’t you pick the pasta?” So I went to the pantry and chose
a cellophane 500 milligram bag of Casarecce macaroni from Italy that we bought
at Costco that looks like two ropes twisted together and put the contents of
about ½ of the bag (250 milligrams) into the boiling pasta water.
Suzette then cut up garlic and onion and sautéed in a large
sauté pan with heated butter and olive oil and the diced red bell pepper. After a few minutes of cooking she added the
shrimp and when they began to turn pink, she added a generous splash of the
white wine and cooked for a few more minutes and then added a large splash of
chicken broth and cooked the shrimp mixture for a few more minutes into a
slightly reduced liquid sauce, while I cut a large head of broccoli into
flowerets and threw them into the boiling pasta water to cook with the pasta
and then shopped up the sprig of parsley I had picked from the garden and
shredded a small pile of Pecorino Romano cheese.
Suzette said what about bread, so I cut a couple of PPI
whole wheat dinner rolls (Pastian’s Bakery) into halves and toasted them in the
toaster and set the table and poured the wine.
In a couple more minutes everything was ready, so we drained
the pasta and broccoli and took pasta bowls and each served ourselves the pasta
and broccoli and heaped shrimp and sauce on the pasta and garnished the dish
with a handful of shredded cheese and a dab of parsley. The dish was wonderfully colorful and the
large shrimp were plump and chewy and I loved the ease of preparation of the
broccoli with the pasta.
Bon Appètit
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