a small NYE crew to eat my shrimp cocktail
Hello, and welcome to my Shrimp Confessional. I vow to tell the truth, and nothing but.
Confession #1: My one and only excuse to make shrimp cocktail is the fact that this recipe exists in Nothing Fancy. There are no other excuses. Shrimp cocktail has always made my stomach do a tiny flip. I can tolerate shrimp when it’s warm, not when it’s cold.
Confession #2: I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I actually followed some of Molly Baz’s advice instead Alison Roman’s (smh). Alison’s instructions say to “peel, but not devein” the shrimp before boiling. She then tells us we can devein the shrimp if it reallllly grosses us out, but she promises it’s not a big deal. IDK about you, but eating poop is a big deal to me, so I had no choice but to devein the shrimp. But how to go about it? Alison seems to assume that readers already know their way around shrimp.
I received Molly’s “Cook This Book” for Christmas from my younger brother. I went to see if Molly had anything to say about shrimp, and lo and behold, she wrote a shrimp cocktail recipe as well. Reading her recipe sort of felt like cheating, but I truly needed to learn what to do. Molly's recipe includes a QR code that leads to a 45-second video demonstrating how to devein shrimp. It was all I needed to feel confident. (You know those YouTube how-to videos that spend the first few minutes just promoting their channel before they actually get to the part you were hoping to see? Well Molly’s video was not that, and I just want to say, thank you.)
I faced a moral dilemma. Molly says to devein, but not peel the shrimp before cooking. Alison literally says the opposite. What’s a dame to do? As I confessed earlier, I actually went with Molly on this one. To devein, she instructs us to take a sharp pair of kitchen scissors, cut a straight line down the shell on the shrimp’s back, and using a paper towel, pull out the vein from the head-end. After the shrimp is cooked, then you can remove the shells. This method worked well for me.
Molly’s cooking method differs slightly, as well. She says to bring water to a boil, drop the shrimp in, cover the pot with a lid, and turn the heat off. After 4 minutes, the shrimp are ready. And she was right. Alison says to keep the water boiling and cook the shrimp without a lid. I’m sure it’d produce the same result, but if I’m going to cheat, I might as well cheat all the way. I still boiled the shrimp with a quartered onion and peppercorns per Alison’s recipe. I’m told that it added great flavor to the shrimp…
Confession #3: I didn’t taste the shrimp. I truly was not in the mood. Plus, there’s something about removing poop from a creature that removes its appetite appeal. Like I said, though, I’m told that they had a nice flavor, and the cocktail sauce seemed to be a hit, too. I used yuzu kosho as my hot sauce of choice, which prevented the tomato flavor from dominating the sauce. I also went with Alison’s directive to use Heinz ketchup, because why not.
202 recipes cooked, 23 to go.
