Until yesterday I hadn’t really put much effort into cooking anything since I came home. I think scrambled eggs and sauteed scallops and fish represented the pinnacle of what was happening in the kitchen. One obvious benefit of gastric bypass surgery is being able to satisfy your hunger with a very small amount of food, so naturally my goal has been to begin experimenting with “perfect bites” once I felt up to it. Yesterday was finally the day…..during a trip to the Chinatown Market in KCMO’s River Market I picked up some really beautiful head-on 10-count shrimp. Since the hot weather has let up quite a bit, I thought that grilling these big boys would be the best way to go. First I rinsed them, split them down the back and deveined them……THEN I put a small chunk of herbed butter in the cuts and put them all back in the fridge so the butter could firm up. They took to the grill just fine, with some minor flare-ups as the butter melted. I could only eat about three of them for dinner, but that’s cool because I’ll probably get two more meals out of them. Great smokey, herbal flavors, but not overpowering due to the size of the shrimp. I don’t know when I’ll be ready for any red meat, but the market had such a great price on shortribs that I bought some to put in the freezer.
My basil plants have become really overgrown in the past couple of months. The same thing happened last year, and I waited too long to process them and the first frost basically destroyed what could have been a couple of quarts of pesto. Not wanting to make the same mistake this year, I got out there this morning and picked about 20 cups of leaves. I’ll get to the store later to buy the rest of the ingredients and whip up several batches of good pesto tonight or tomorrow morning. Fresh pesto is always a hit with the family, and I think it was Alton Brown who got me started on freezing it in ice cube trays.
Back to watching some HowardTV, a huge guilty pleasure of mine, and then off to the park to walk the Forrest Gump of cocker spaniels……
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