Fiesta Prawns! In a Garlic-White Wine-Butter Sauce

We've been trying to cut back a little on going out to eat (San Mateo has so many awesome restaurants such a short walk from us that it's always tempting... some people call it "Date Night" but we call it "Tuesday"...) But the reality is that we like artisan cocktails, so throw in a few of those with your meal, and it adds up quickly. I thought about it and realized that since we're both well-versed in the kitchen, we could easily splurge a little on raw ingredients, invest in some premium liquor (we have one heck of a homemade infused liquor stash already, maybe another post...) - and we can have a restaurant-quality meal at a fraction of the price, complete with al fresco dining in our backyard if we choose.

So I tried to ignore the voices in my head screaming "Sushi!" (which is better than what they're usually screaming...) Fri night as I made my way home from sweltering Palo Alto, and instead thought about the prawns stashed in our freezer. Shrimp/prawns are awesome because they're delicious and you can get a gourmet-style meal that's fast - shrimp cook in ~5 minutes, pretty amazing! Christian suggested using up our CSA haul this week (squash, red onions, garlic, sweet peppers) and we were off!

Somehow we ended up with 12 heads of CSA garlic. We used an entire head in this dish. Peeling was kind of a pain, but I love garlic so it was worth it. (Note to self: learn those clever hints to peel garlic faster - this was actually the most time-consuming part). 

I <3 alliums. Most of this is from our CSA (the rest of our CSA garlic wouldn't fit!)

Cooking this was simple. You could almost certainly do this faster, but I was trying to coordinate the cooking of all these vegetables without overcooking anything so they still remained slightly crispy, so I used lower heat than I usually do (working on my patience here!) which actually worked exceedingly well.

Started with chopping a whole head of garlic and heating it on very low heat in as much oil as I planned on using for the whole dish. I wouldn't even call this "sauteeing" - more like a very gentle heating, allowing the garlic to perfume the olive oil. I think I got this from Mark Bittman. You don't want the garlic to really turn brown at all here, really just perfume everything. This was probably ~10 minutes - during which I chopped everything else, and make sure to keep an eye on it/stir occasionally.

Chopped all the squash/sweet peppers we had. Christian chopped the red onion, added it to the garlic after probably about ~10 minutes, kept the heat on very low. This worked well in the final dish, since the onion was still a little crispy. After a while, threw in the sweet peppers as I worked on peeling the prawns.

Fiesta!

Got distracted and added the squash later than I meant - oops! Would have sped things up a bit. You really want to keep the squash a little crispy here - which is why I was delaying adding them initially - so be mindful to not overcook. Turned up the heat though as we really had a pile of veggies at this point.

Last summer we had a ball slow-roasting tomatoes from the farmers' market (these are amazing!) - we would buy pounds of them, slow-roast them (another post on these to follow?), and use them in all sorts of recipes. The flavor really develops in an amazing way. Faced with the end of the summer, we froze a lot of slow-roasted tomatoes so we could continue to have a taste of summer whenever we wanted. We threw in a healthy dose of them here too.

Tray of slow-roasted tomatoes from last summer

So while the squash seem nowhere near done, throw in the prawns. Added some butter for flavor (~2 tbsp?) and a healthy dose of white wine too (1 cup?) Shrimp cook quickly, so be careful not to overcook them, but also make sure the wine boils down.

The HerbMaster (Christian) chose the herbs to accompany this - tarragon and parsley fresh from our garden.

HerbMaster with his lemon verbena harvest last year

Completed dish:

And dinner is served!

This made an awful lot of food (I love leftovers!), was definitely restaurant-quality (and restaurant shrimp seems to be ~$20/plate, so...), and was the perfect summery gourmet fare for a nice Fri night dinner. :) Really, how can you go wrong with prawns in a garlic-white wine-butter sauce, with CSA veggies and herbs from your garden? You could sub in any veggies you have on hand here. Delicious and easy!

 Veena