So, I am sort of over my disappointment at not being chosen as a finalist in my last cooking contest attempt. It's cool, man. Really. Since I have moved on, I have decided to get more creative with my own cooking at home (trying to keep it as much in check as I possibly can so my kids will actually eat the food) and I have found a couple of other recipe contests to enter as well. So, to the creative cooking side of things, I present: Thai-inspired coconut shrimp pasta!
I started this dish in a completely different region of the world: Brazil. How do Brazilian and Thai cuisine intersect, you may ask? Well, in my head, of course! Last semester, one of my classes was International Cuisine and we were each assigned a former colony of the Portuguese empire. (Confused yet? I know this is convoluted, but stick with me, here.) In any case, one of the regions was Brazil and my classmate found an amazing shrimp soup called, Shrimp Moqueca. It is such a simple soup, yet so amazingly full of flavor that all of us fell in love with it immediately. It starts with a base of onions, bell peppers, garlic, tomatoes and chilies and is finished with coconut milk. The shrimp are simmered in this deletable concoction and the soup is served and finished with cilantro. Seriously - it is lightly sweet with a hidden spice that is not only surprising, but is also an incredibly delicious way to cut through the richness of the coconut milk. Yum.
Ok, so I considered making this soup because my kids LOVE shrimp and because I LOVE this soup. Then, I started thinking - they don't like spicy things and I don't like using full fat coconut milk. What to do? I definitely wanted to have a tomato, garlic, bell pepper base (mostly because I had a bell pepper that I needed to use), spiked with a teeny amount of spice and laden with light coconut milk. So, then that got me thinking about other coconut milk-based sauces and I remembered a Thai green curry recipe that I found on The Best Life website (www.thebestlife.com). That recipe called for (duh) Thai green curry, which I did not have and did not want to purchase. (Have you looked at the sodium levels on that stuff? Atrocious.) Anyway, what I came up with was a bit of a hybrid between these two recipes, as odd as the Brazilian-Thai combination might sound.
I started by caramelizing a small red onion in about a tablespoon of olive oil, with about a teaspoon of granulated sugar (to facilitate the caramelization). Once those were nicely browned, I added diced green bell pepper and sauteed the two together for about five minutes. I added a smidge of chili-garlic sauce and heated that with the vegetables, briefly. I then added a can of fire roasted diced tomatoes with garlic and allowed the liquid to reduce for a couple of minutes. All the while, I had a pot of boiling water going on the back of the stove, to which I added a couple of strips of lime zest. Once the water was nicely perfumed, I removed the lime zest and added a box of whole wheat linguine (standing in for Thai rice noodles). When the sauce reduced to the consistency I was looking for, I added about a tablespoon of Thai fish sauce, squeezed a whole lime into it and then added about a cup of organic, lite coconut milk. Immediately, the sauce bloomed into this gorgeous dusky rose, with peaks (pun intended) of bright, verdant green and deep, brick-red bubbling around in my pan. I am not sure there is anything better than a tomato cream sauce and this coconut one was no exception. I added the (previously frozen, peeled and de-veined) shrimp to the mix and let it simmer in the fragrant, sunset-colored liquid. By this time, the lime infused linguine was just about al dente, so I drained that and, as the shrimp began to turn opaque, threw it into the pot to finish cooking. I sprinkled the top with chopped cilantro and Thai basil (from our garden), mixed and served it.
The taste....well, the taste was pretty amazing, if I do say so myself. It was everything Thai food should be - lightly spicy, barely sweet, slightly tart and oh, so savory. The anise flavor of the basil and the herbal pungency of the cilantro set off all of the other flavors, which rather than fight each other to assert themselves individually, married together in a lovely fashion to create what I now realize was true fusion food. I mean, I started in Brazil, jumped over to Thailand and managed to bring in a little of Italy as well. How crazy is that? Wait. I think I mean, how crazy delicious is that?!?
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