Recipe test - Honeyed Shrimp and Polenta

I have tried polenta in restaurants several times and have been wanting to have a go at it. Being vaguely cheap and conscious of always buying things and then having them go bad before I use them, I wanted to try cooking polenta directly from cornmeal instead of buying the pre-prepped tubes.

I found this recipe at thekitchn.com, and put it to use. It seemed to do the trick, though the polenta was pretty sticky and I am not sure if that is how it is supposed to be or not. I might consider trying to make it in smaller quantities in the future because this yielded a buttload.

Then I went on to step two, which was to incorporate the polenta into a dish from epicurious.com, Honeyed Prawns and Polenta. I don't like the word prawn, so from now on I will be calling them shrimp, like a good American. On all of the British TV shows I watch they call them prawns and it just sounds icky to me. And it makes me think of the aliens from District 9, which was a fantastic movie. Back to cooking...

I do love shrimp. I like to try almost anything with shrimp, and I like to try to make new things with shrimp. In fact, I tried cooking them directly over the flame of my gas stove on skewers the other day because I was too lazy to bother setting up the grill. A little iffy, but it works!

While the polenta looks like a solid thing here, once you pierce the crusty layer it is all jiggly and soupy. Polenta and shrimp baked and then plated in a pleasing manner with parmesan, parsley and capers because, as blogger The Pioneer Woman says, Martha may be watching.

And then I proceeded to douse it in more parmesan and devour it. The capers were unnecessary, and did not compliment the honey-sweet taste of the dish. Otherwise, pretty delightful. The brown bits of the polenta were the best parts by far. Not such a fan of the soupy part, so baking in a thinner layer would go better in my opinion. The recipe called for currants, which I did not have, and they may have added some more goodness because I can see that they may have been a fruitiness missing that I would have liked. Though I found that the polenta reminded me a bit of corn bread and then I really wanted corn bread and wished I had it instead of the polenta.

I am a bit torn on the shrimp. The tomato paste and honey did work on one level, but I think maybe it could have been thinned and spruced up in some way.

If you love polenta, then this might work out for you. If not, this might not be the best intro.

Spicy Orange Stir Fry Sauce

I have a bit of a condiment and sauce obsession. If I could have a bunch of little bowls of dipping sauces at each meal I would be so very happy. The only problem is that sauces that you buy at the store usually seem to suck. Especially Asian sauces. Unless you are buying something basic like soy sauce, the amount of interpretation is so great from brand to brand that none of them seem right. I have been making stir fry with these sauces forever. I have even tried mixing different sauces and it still sucked.

So today I decided to make my own stir fry sauce. I wanted something sweet and spicy and simple. The base of this sauce is orange juice. I zested and juiced a couple oranges. I bought a zester, and dang it, I am going to use the crap out of it!

I added some orange juice from the bottle too, just because I needed more, and it didn't seem to hurt anything. Then I added a couple tablespoons of soy sauce, a couple tablespoons of sugar and about 1/2 a teaspoon of crushed red pepper flakes. That's it! Then I reduced it by half or more, until it was a little caramelized.

I left it simmering while I worked on the stir fry. I used shrimp and some frozen vegetables (bell peppers, snap peas, onions and edamame), but I am sure you could use whatever you like in your stir fry.

I cooked the shrimp through and warmed the already thawed veggies. Then I just poured on the sauce and cooked until the sauce was the consistency I wanted, and coated everything. Serve over rice, and TA DA!

Magic in a bowl! Those 4 simple things made the best stir fry sauce I have had in a long time. I may just throw out some of the crappy sauces that have been hiding out in the fridge for years. The red pepper flakes weren't overpoweringly hot, and the orange juice was the perfect vehicle for sweet and spicy. Obviously this is not an entirely original flavor, but it was so much better than a bottle. Paul Newman, you can suck it!