Fork and Gobble It: Don't Lose Your Head

I have a new favorite place to get fresh seafood. A large Korean supermaket, Hmart, is as I have previously reported, a store like I have never seen. Tanks of live fish from which you can choose your dinner, tables of whole and fileted fish of impeccable quality, but what has catching my attention lately is the shrimp counter. Head on and apparently never frozen shrimp for way cheap.

Here in the interior of the NYC suburbs seeing shrimp with their heads on is a bit of a novelty. We have been carefully trained to see our food as... well, food... and not anything that resembles something that was once living. The most often heard comment I can reference is something along the lines of not wanting to look at dinner when it is still apparently looking up at you. This is an attitude that is especially prevalent in the metropolitan areas of this country. Heads, tails, eyes, are not welcome on some peoples' plates. I see it as a kind of anesthesia or sterilization of the mind. Seeing the thing that you are about consume as a whole or close to it should impart the notion of fresh and clean. It's those foodstuffs that are so processed and manipulated that should make you squeamish.

Anyway, I decided that in my house we'll get used to seeing shrimp with their heads on because they're so fresh and so cheap that I'd be a fool not to buy them that way. Plus the real bonus for those in the know is that shrimp head are rich with really tasty fat.

Bonafide fresh shrimp eaters know that sucking that fat out of the head is one of the true great pleasures of life. I picked up two pounds of these beauties and brought them home with the intention of making something instantly filling and yet not heavy since it is still about 90 degrees Fahrenheit for most of the day in the tail end of July.

A green salad with fresh corn and avocado and a pile of these magnificent crustaceans would do just fine. Fresh Jersey corn is coming in just fine now and I had some whole cobs leftover from the weekend that were still just as sweet as when I boiled them. I made a dressing of fresh garlic, dijon mustard, sherry vinegar, and rice wine vinegar, olive oil and sesame oil. Mesclun greens and diced avocado, the leftover corn kernels scraped from the cob, tomato, and cucumber made up the salad. I made up a marinade of lime juice, soy sauce, fresh grated ginger, garlic and chile paste, and olive oil, and tossed the shrimp in it.

I lit the grill because I frequently will saute outside to avoid having to clean up in the kitchen. When the fire was hot enough I place a steel pan on it and let it get screaming hot. In went the shrimp sizzling 'til they were just done.

We piled them up next to the green salad and ate them with gusto. The beverage of choice was a Portuguese white wine called Fado. An Alentejano white, which means it is from the region of Alentejo. The grapes are closely related to the whites of nearby Spain and are bright, citrusy, and light. They match the seafood of the region perfectly and even better, they are very inexpensive.

The meal was cheap, exotically delicious, and easy to prepare and clean up. If the shrimp were looking up at me, they must have been thinking, "Job Well Done."