Ash Wednesday

Ok so now we are at Ash Wednesday. Definitely not a "food" day the way Fat Tuesday is, but if you can only eat a little, then you might as well make it good! There is much confusion over the whole fasting requirement, technically I think you can eat 2 small meals and one normal meal which to me is dumb because that is pretty much what I normally eat. I think it doesn't really matter what you do, as long as it's a bit of a sacrifice to get you in the Lenten mood. So I tried to fast except for one mid afternoon meal and this is what I came up with.

I had bought some shrimp in anticipation of Lenten no meat requirements but I haven't really cooked shrimp that much. I bought the easy peel kind so that wasn't too difficult and then I put them in a bowl with a ton of random stuff from the fridge. Main contents was garlic, ginger, green onions, some soy sauce, some sweet chili sauce, cayenne, some "orange chipotle" spice mix I had, and a bunch of orange juice. (Side note: I always really enjoy "finishing" off things when I'm cooking so that why I dumped in all of the orange juice and if you notice the soy sauce/sweet chilli sauce/green onion combo is basically my salad dressing mix and I had some prepared that I dumped in to get rid of). I put all this in a skillet, let it cook a bit until the shrimp just started getting pink. Then I poured off everything but the shrimp and let those cook up a bit.

Shrimp is a tricky thing and I think these got slightly overdone but they were still ok. After I thought the shrimp were done, I took them out and put the sauce back in. I added a chopped tomato (trying to get rid of it!) and let the whole thing cook for awhile until it was pretty significantly reduced. Then the shrimp were added back in, tossed around to mix everything, and then served over a small mound of mashed potatoes. I shared this little meal with Ruchir and it was decent.  The shrimp as I said were kind of overcooked but the sauce/accompaniment was a hit! Kind of spicy from the cayenne and chili sauce but plenty sweet from the orange juice. It kind of looks like that divine shrimp curry that Mom makes, but it's totally different. And I don't think I would ever be able to recreate that with any sort of success - because that is a work of genius.