Two Great Dinners in Bordeaux

For our two days in Bordeaux after our recent cruise, we had, weeks earlier, scanned the city’s restaurant websites, searching for one local specialty we hadn’t tasted for 40 years: lamprey à la bordelaise. It’s an ancient dish of the region, impossible to get in the USA and available almost nowhere else even in France. We finally found it listed at Brasserie Bordelaise, which appeared to be a handsome update on traditional French eating places of centuries past.
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The restaurant’s entire online menu looked so interesting, I immediately made dinner reservations for both of our evenings in the city. It was a very good decision.

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On the first evening we were given a nice little window table, located almost at the viewpoint of the photo above. Tom and I could speak enough French to be taken as serious clients, and our waiter could speak enough English to make everything comfortable. Both languages were helpful when the bottle of Château Lafon-Rochet Saint-Estèphe we’d ordered turned out to be corked. (Tom’s blog has that story.) No matter, we wound up with a fine bottle of Domaine de la Solitude Pessac-Léognan, with relief and good will all around.

To start, we shared a generous plate of charcuterie, with five kinds of cured meats, local butter, good bread, and wicked little hot peppers. The peppers surprised us: The French don’t often go in for hot spices. But their flavor worked very well with the essentially rustic flavors of the charcuterie.
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For our main course – naturellement – we both ordered the lamproie à la bordelaise. Lamprey is not food for the faint-hearted. It is an ugly, eel-shaped, boneless, parasitic fish, which migrates from the sea into the Garonne and Dordogne rivers to spawn. Our only previous encounter with the dish was in 1981, in the city of Saint-Emilion. In my notes on that dinner I called it “astonishing and wonderful. A whole different form of protein, not like eel at all and not like anything else. It came with logs of leek in a dense, dark sauce of red wine.”

Now at last, 40 years later, we had it again. It came with a similar wine-rich sauce (thickened with blood, as we learned), the traditional garnish of chunks of leek, and slices of toasted country bread. The lamprey itself was just amazingly good, and still a unique flavor for us. It came with a salad of several lettuces and excellent mashed potatoes.
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This was a truly sumptuous meal. We crowned it by sharing a small dessert, all we had room for: a sort of deconstructed profiterole.
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Our second day’s dinner at Brasserie Bordelaise wasn’t quite as significant an occasion as the first, there being no other long-looked-for, rare regional specialty on the menu. But we ate very well that evening too. Evidently we’d become clients, because we were presented with complimentary glasses of champagne when we arrived.

This time we decided to forgo a starter, to save our appetites for a selection from the good-looking cheese cart we’d noticed at the side of the room. I chose a main course of roasted chicken: a large, succulent breast-and-wing quarter au jus, with crisp browned skin and a square of stuffing. With it were fried potatoes and the same good salad as yesterday’s.
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Tom’s main course was, like the lamprey, listed on the “local dishes” section of the menu: joue de bœuf confite au vin de Bordeaux. Normally, calling a food confit means it has been preserved for storage by lengthy cooking submerged in fat. This beef cheek was preserved by cooking in the red wine of the region – for hours, apparently, until it was meltingly tender. It was served with roasted carrots and mashed potatoes.
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It was another remarkable dish. The cheek’s flavor was an immediately pleasing blend of meat sweetness and slight gaminess. Both elements merged beautifully with the wine-rich sauce, which cried out to be sopped up with mashed potatoes and country bread. I knew at once that I’d have to try making it at home. Fortunately, beef cheek is not as impossible to find in New York as lamprey, and I already have a cheek in my freezer, waiting for a suitable day.

The fine Château de Pez Saint-Estèphe we’d been enjoying with our main courses ratcheted itself up another level as we moved on to a plate of cheeses: brie, chèvre, tomme de savoie, and cantal.
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This was a splendid final meal in Bordeaux, and after glasses of old Armagnac and fond farewells to the restaurant staff, two very happy people strolled back to their hotel for a peaceful night’s sleep, with blissful memories of that fabulous lamprey dish.
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Salad of White Beans and Shrimp

Even with the mercy of air conditioning, this summer’s heat wave has strongly curbed my enthusiasm for spending very much time at the stove and oven. Still, the appetite needs to be piqued and the animal needs to be fed. So: “light, simple, and tasty” is my current mantra.

I found an appealing recipe for a Tuscan dish of white beans and shrimp in Faith Willinger’s cookbook Red, White & Greens. All it calls for, in addition to the two named items, are tomatoes, basil, olive oil, salt, and pepper. Praising it highly when made with the freshest ingredients, Willinger says it can also work with canned beans and frozen shrimp, for convenience.

Tempting as that was, I couldn’t bring myself to take the entirely easiest route: I like to cook dried beans myself. However, the only white beans I had in the pantry – marrow beans, which I really love – were getting pretty old, and I feared they’d have lost too much flavor to shine in so simple a preparation.

So I chopped a little carrot, onion, and parsley, and softened the mixture in olive oil. As soon as the beans had finished boiling, I drained them, folded them into that vegetable soffrito, and left it all to insaporate for a few hours. (That’s not an English word, I know. The Italian word insaporire is such an apt description of how flavors blend, I’ve taken it as my own.)
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The rest of the preparation was of the simplest. I washed a handful of cherry tomatoes, from my Greenmarket, and a few basil leaves, from the herb planter I keep on my building’s roof. I briefly boiled a quarter pound of shrimp – from my freezer, as permitted.
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I chopped the tomatoes and basil, cut up the shrimp, and tossed them together with the beans, olive oil, salt, and pepper. It always surprises me how well white beans partner with seafood – not just shrimp, as here, but also in the Tuscan classic bean-and-tuna combination and even, as I’ve written about once – in a stew with clams.
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This hearty salad was excellent as a first course for our dinner and would have made a very nice lunch on its own. We ate it at room temperature, but we could see it would be equally good with both shrimp and beans still warm.

I was sorry that my marrow beans were past their best. The insaporation did help them, but I discarded the ones still left in my pantry. When I make this again I’ll be sure to use newer beans and the freshest shrimps I can lay my hands on. Exactly because the dish is so “light, simple, and tasty,” it really deserves the best components. It almost – almost – made me appreciate the heat wave.

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Two Lovely Seafood Lunches in Normandy

I haven’t yet resumed ambitious cooking after returning from my recent trip to France, because both Tom and I almost immediately came down with breakthrough Covid. Mild cases, but fatiguing. So, instead of a cooking tale for this post, I’ll write about two seafood lunches we enjoyed while on the latter part of the trip.

After our three days in Paris, we had a week’s cruise on the Seine, meandering through bucolic Normandy to the river’s estuary at Honfleur and back, on the MS Seine Princess.

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It was a very pleasant trip, but like previous river cruises we’ve taken with the Croisieurope line – on the Loire and Rhône – the dining was not a particular highlight for us. Only one menu is ever served for each three-course lunch and four-course dinner, and the style is international hotel standard, with few nods to seasonal or regional dishes.

Tom and I are not fond of large meals in midday, so when the ship spent two days docked in the charming town of Honfleur, we took the opportunity to skip the set lunches and check out the many little seafood eateries right at the port. Promptly at noon, we settled ourselves at the enclosed porch of La Grenouille.
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First Lunch

The enticing menu had a wealth of shellfish choices. This sumptuous assiette de fruits de mer – oysters, scallops, shrimps, whelks, periwinkles, and dog cockles – made Tom a very happy man.
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I’d been told by friends that, in Honfleur, you absolutely have to try moules frites, the local specialty of mussels marinière with French fries. I did, and received a huge pot of them and some of the best fried potatoes I’ve ever eaten. The mussels were smaller than those we usually get at home, with a different sort of salt-spiciness. Very nice.
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With this light but satisfying lunch we drank half a bottle of a crisp, fresh Muscadet – plus one extra glass, just for the pleasure of it.
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And then strolled back to our ship for a post-prandial nap.  It’s very stressful, being a tourist.

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Second Lunch

Our second day’s objective at La Grenouille was oysters. We’ve always considered American oysters much better than European varieties, and here was a perfect chance to give that preference another test. We ordered the plateau d’huîtres, which has six each of three kinds of oysters: Claire, Isigny, and St. Vaast.
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All very large, they looked similar, but our waiter carefully explained the arrangement on the plate. (Interesting that they were served opened, but the top shells still attached.) Almost sparkling with freshness, they were the best we’d ever had on the eastern side of the Atlantic.

Least pleasing were the St. Vaasts – a little too sharply salt-watery for our taste. It was hard to choose between the other two, the Isignys more strongly flavored – not brinier, but more shellfishy than the more elegant Claires. All three kinds were enhanced by mignonette sauce, which we don’t like at all on American oysters, and excellent brown bread and butter.

Bottom line: We still like our own oysters better – they’re more richly flavored and far more varied – but (in Michelin’s terms) these Norman bivalves certainly vaut un détour, if not an entire voyage.

Our gastronomic researches were lubricated by a full bottle of the same classic Muscadet we’d had the day before. It tasted even better with the oysters. Then we needed something small and sweet to round out the meal. Tom declared his floating island, with pistachio cream, the best he’d ever had, and I loved my pretty apple tart.

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There’s much about Honfleur I’ll remember with pleasure: its 15th century all-wooden church, the largest one in France; its cobbled streets of colorful half-timbered houses around the old port; its huge ferris wheel and old-time carousel; its short, flat car bridge that swings open like a gate, for boats to pass through the harbor; the small marsh just past the bridge, where we watched lapwings playing (all told, 30 species of birds seen on the trip!). And, by no means least, these two lovely lunches at La Grenouille.

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Shrimp Biryani

I love Indian food, but I don’t make it often. Many dishes that I’ve enjoyed elsewhere, or that look very attractive in cookbooks, need ingredients that I’d rarely use, which wouldn’t stay fresh in my pantry. But I’m always happy to come across Indian recipes I can make from the regular items in my refrigerator and on my spice shelves.

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A good one was this Shrimp Biryani, which I made this week from At Home with Madhur Jaffrey. The recipe requires basmati rice, which is a little exotic for me, but I had some on hand from previous experiments. And I had half a pound of shrimp in the freezer, which was the right quantity for half the recipe.

I’ve finally worked out an easy way to give basmati rice the many rinses recommended for it. I used to pour the rice repeatedly back and forth between a bowl of water and a strainer – always having to chase down and scrape up left-behind rice grains. Now I put the rice in the strainer, lower it into the water, swirl the rice around, lift out the strainer, refill the water bowl, and repeat until the water runs clear.
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While my cup of rice was having its 30-minute soak, still in its strainer, I peeled my defrosted shrimp; halved them, and sprinkled them with ground cumin, turmeric, cayenne, black pepper, salt, and crushed garlic.
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I rubbed all those seasonings into the shrimp, then sauteed them in olive oil for barely two minutes. With a slotted spoon I transferred them to a bowl and stirred in lemon juice and chopped parsley. The herb should have been cilantro, but the recipe allows parsley as an alternative. I’m very fond of cilantro, but the big bunches that I have to buy are hard to use up before they wilt, and unlike parsley, cilantro doesn’t freeze well.
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Back at the stove, I deglazed the shrimp’s cooking pot with 1½ cups of chicken stock; stirred in the drained rice, ½ teaspoon of salt (only a little, since bouillon-cube stock is salty) and 2 whole cardamom pods; brought it to a boil, reduced the heat to very, very low, and covered the pot tightly. After 25 minutes of gentle simmering, the rice had just about absorbed all its liquid. I mixed in the sauteed shrimp, covered the pot again, and continued cooking for just 5 minutes more.
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This turned out to be a huge amount of rice! Basmati is supposed to expand to three times its volume, the same as other kinds of white rice, but mine somehow grew much more. This quantity was to serve two or three persons. After the two of us had happily eaten all we could hold, with only green salad alongside, there was still more than two cups of rice left. (Fortunately, it makes useful leftovers.)

Well, we did start with an appetizer: good Indian fritters. Here’s our plate of five spinach pakoras and four samosas stuffed with potatoes and peas.
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I readily admit that I do not make these myself. I buy them, precooked and frozen, from Kalustyan’s, and reheat them in the oven. This evening we had them with three chutneys – hot mango, sweet mango, and green chili.
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Altogether, a very pleasant dinner. We like to drink Alsace white wines with most Indian dishes, so Tom opened a fine young Riesling: a 2020 Julien Schaal Grand Cru Brand. As he’d hoped, its bright fruit, strong minerality and medium body worked wonderfully with both the fritters and the biryani.
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Florentine Beans and Caviar

If you’re going to start a year with leftovers in your refrigerator, caviar is a mighty nice one to have. For some years, Tom’s and my Christmas gifts to each other have not been those that can be wrapped and put under the Tree to await the magical gift opening time. Mostly, we indulge ourselves collectively with special things to eat – like foie gras and caviar.

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Some of this good American transmontanus caviar was left over from our Christmas Eve indulgence. It would’ve been a sin to let it get stale. Months ago, I’d marked a recipe in Faith Willinger’s Red, White, and Green cookbook for Tuscan-style white beans and caviar. She calls it a terrific combination, declaring that beans are “a far better match for caviar than tasteless white bread toast,” and extra virgin olive oil is “a more sophisticated match than butter.” Really? Here was my chance to find out.

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The white beans I currently have in my pantry are alubia blanca, a small, delicate, creamy variety that I get from Rancho Gordo. I gave half a cup of them an overnight soak in cold water. By morning, they’d swelled to triple their bulk, as usual. Following the recipe, I drained them, put them in a pot with three cups of fresh cold water, and added a sage leaf, a piece of bay leaf, and a tiny clove of unpeeled garlic.

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As they came to a boil, I skimmed the white scum that arose, then covered the pot tightly, simmered it until the beans were tender – only about 40 minutes, because they were so fresh – and moved the pot to the back of the stove.

In the evening I reheated the beans, drained them and tossed them gently with salt, pepper, and a good extra virgin olive oil. There were more of them than we’d be able to eat for an antipasto course, but I knew the extras would keep. I distributed modest portions of beans on two small plates and topped them with all the remaining caviar – a couple of big tablespoons each. Tom opened a small bottle of champagne to go with them, as appropriate for caviar and a new year.
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The combination really was very good! I wouldn’t quite call it a far better match – the white bread I make is definitely not tasteless – but an interesting and different one. The beans and caviar set each other off very nicely, making an intriguing blend of homeliness and elegance. This is a dish that I can see gracing many future holiday meals.

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A Serendipitous Shrimp Dish

I didn’t have high hopes for the recipe I tried this week. We’d be broiling a handsome fillet of John Dory for dinner, and I felt like making something new with shrimp for an appetizer. Looking through the Shellfish volume of the Time-Life Good Cook series, my eye was caught by a recipe called Shrimp Panned with Corn. An odd pairing, I thought: I’ve never regarded shrimp and corn as having much to say to each other.

But the recipe looked easy and quick. My freezer usually holds a small bag or two of shrimp, and in winter it has several bags of kernels cut from four-minutes-boiled ears of corn, fresh enough to use as if raw. The only other ingredients in the recipe were fridge and pantry staples. I’d take a chance on it. At worst, the shrimp and corn could just ignore each other.

The full recipe called for 1½ pounds of shrimp to serve 4, as a main course. I wanted small appetizer portions for 2, using only 10 medium shrimp.
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I had major scaling down to do for the other components. Lest I confuse myself (easily done!), I first penciled in calculated reductions for each ingredient, right on the book’s page, and got to work. In a sauté pan I cooked half a cup of the defrosted corn in a little butter and olive oil, for about two minutes.
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Then I added the peeled, raw shrimp.
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When the shrimp had firmed a bit and turned pink, about another two minutes, I stirred in a small clove of finely chopped garlic and poured on 1½ tablespoons of white wine and 2 teaspoons of lemon juice. This was supposed to cook for “a few moments” until the liquid bubbled up around the shrimp and glazed them. Actually, they didn’t glaze, even after a few further minutes. Fearing that longer cooking might toughen the shrimp, I just sprinkled them with salt, pepper, and two teaspoons of finely chopped parsley, and stirred it all together.
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Well, to my surprise, it had become quite an interesting little dish. The different sweetnesses of corn and shrimp were made very compatible by the blend of wine, lemon juice, garlic, and parsley, producing a sort of umami savoriness. This was truly a serendipitous find.
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Low Country Chicken and Shrimp Pilau

Long-married couples who hope to remain that way have to learn to tolerate each other’s idiosyncrasies, not least those involving food. I loved the new dinner dish I tried a few evenings ago. Tom ate a tiny portion, patiently waited while I finished mine, and made most of his meal on the subsequent cheese course.

When I first suggested trying this Carolina chicken and shrimp pilau from James Villas’ book Country Cooking, Tom was actively interested in the recipe. But it didn’t come out as he’d expected: too heavy on the chicken for him. “Arroz con pollo,” he said, resignedly. I didn’t agree, but even if I had, I also love a good arroz con pollo. (He doesn’t.)

With that little domestic contretemps as background, I’ll tell you about making this unusual poultry-and-seafood dish. The recipe gives quantities to serve eight, and I was cutting it down for just two of us. So my protein ingredients were:

• Two chicken thighs, simmered in water with celery and peppercorns, then skinned, boned, and the meat shredded
• Two slices of bacon, crisped in a frying pan and crumbled
• A dozen medium shrimp, shelled and deveined

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After a recent unhappy encounter with mediocre chicken, this time I made sure to use free-range, vegetable-fed chicken thighs. The bones and skin went back into their boiling pot, to cook with the celery and peppercorns long enough to make a light broth. The bacon’s fat I scraped into a heavy casserole for the initial cooking of the rice.

I chopped half an onion and a tiny garlic clove; briefly sauteed them in the bacon fat; added half a cup of long-grain rice and tossed it to coat with the fat. Next in went ¾ cup of the chicken broth, a little chopped tomato, ½ teaspoon of lemon juice, ½ teaspoon of Worcestershire, several gratings of nutmeg, and a speck of cayenne. (Though Worcestershire sauce is in the ingredient list, it never appears in the recipe instructions. I figured this would be the place for it. No salt or pepper requested yet, either. I gave it some anyway.)
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Stirred, covered, and brought to a boil, the casserole went into a 350° oven for 20 minutes. Though I worried that might be too long for my small quantity, it was OK – just. When I took it out, the rice had absorbed all the liquid and was clearly beginning to think about sticking on the bottom. Quickly I stirred in a little more of the chicken broth and added the chicken, shrimp, and bacon, along with more salt and pepper, though the recipe still didn’t ask for any.
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The casserole went back into the oven for 15 minutes. Again, I was concerned about the time: Would 15 minutes toughen the shrimp? No, fortunately, it didn’t. (And here at last the recipe said to correct for salt and pepper, which I no longer needed to do.)
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As I said above, I loved this dish. The chicken was tender and tasty, the shrimp plump and juicy, the rice gently infused with all the aromatic ingredients. The shrimp and chicken hadn’t actually mingled their flavors, but they neighbored surprisingly well on the plate with each other and with the toothsome rice. I was sorry that Tom didn’t think so too, but for me, the pilau was an excellent new discovery.

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P.S.  That yellow hockey puck you see on the plate above is a sweet potato biscuit. I baked a small batch because Villas calls for them as a good accompaniment to the pilau. They didn’t work for me. Made only with flour, baking powder, Crisco, and a boiled sweet potato, the biscuits hardly tasted of anything. Maybe you had to grow up in the South to appreciate these.

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Shrimp Étouffée for Mardi Gras

Mardi Gras snuck up on me this year. It was only one day in advance that I realized it was here. We don’t normally celebrate it any special way, but in this Covid-confined year anything different is welcome. So I draped myself in strings of Carnival beads and changed my dinner plan for the evening.

A shrimp adaptation of a crawfish étouffée recipe in The New Orleans Cookbook by Richard and Rima Collin seemed like just the thing. It was less complicated than other versions of the dish that I’ve seen, and all I’d have to buy for it was one green Bell pepper and some scallions. It turned out to be a very good choice.
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I did the preliminary cooking in the late afternoon. Here are all the prepped ingredients for a two-person portion.
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To the right of the shrimp are butter and flour. To the left, chopped onion, celery, pepper, and garlic. In the back, salt, lemon juice, cayenne, parsley, black pepper, and thinly sliced scallion greens.

The first step, in classic New Orleans style, was to make a light brown roux with the butter and flour.
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The chopped vegetables then went into the pot, to cook over low heat, stirring often, until softened. The recipe said that would take about 20 minutes, but my smaller quantities were ready in 10. Things were beginning to smell good already.
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Next, I stirred in the shrimp, all the condiments, and half a cup of water, which was absorbed immediately.
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The recipe wanted this cooked for 12 minutes. Now, I don’t know anything about crawfish, but I do know that my shrimp would’ve turned into vulcanized rubber if cooked that long. I gave them 5 minutes, still stirring, then turned off the heat, covered the pot, and left it on the back of the stove.

At dinner time, I reheated the shrimp mixture and very slowly added about a cup of hot water, stirring constantly to prevent the developing sauce from lumping. It smoothed out nicely and was ready to eat.
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As soon as the rice to accompany my étouffée was also done, I put everything on a serving platter and added a frivolous decoration of Carnival beads. Laissez les bons temps rouler!
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This was a delightful dish. The shrimp were plump and tender, cooked just right. The fragrant sauce was spicy and sweet, creamy and zingy, vegetal and seafoody, in a way that simply sang of Mardi Gras and New Orleans. In a grungy February in pandemic-restricted New York, these flavors were like a breath of life.

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Two Simple Shrimp Dishes

It’s always useful to have a few packages of raw shrimp in the freezer. They can lend themselves to any number of quick, easy preparations for a lunch or for a dinner appetizer, as well as combine with other kinds of seafood for more elaborate dishes. I’ve recently added two new shrimp recipes to my repertoire.

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Shrimp in Dill Butter

This recipe from the Grand Central Oyster Bar’s cookbook is so simple it’s almost more of an idea than a recipe: you just sauté shrimp quickly in butter that you’ve flavored with salt, pepper, and dillweed. Never having used dill in combination with shrimp, I thought it would be interesting to try. Preparing two small appetizer portions was the essence of simplicity.
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The result was pleasant enough, as long as you like the taste of dill. Which I do, but the dill and the shrimp didn’t combine to offer the palate anything beyond their individual flavors. It would have been equally pleasant to eat the shrimp simply sauteed in butter. I’d like to try it with a different herb or spice – tarragon, maybe, or toasted cumin.

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Spanish Shrimp Fritters

Penelope Casas’s tortillitas de camarones, from her book The Foods and Wines of Spain, are far more than just pleasant – these little fritters are great! Apparently they’re a very popular tapa in Cadiz, but they were new to me. There isn’t a lot in them, other than the shrimp themselves. But all the flavors combine and complement each other.

The first of these are finely chopped onion and parsley, which are cooked gently in olive oil in a covered pan until the onion is tender. Then they get a dash of pimentón, the intriguing Spanish smoked paprika.
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While the vegetables cook, you mix up a typical fritter batter of flour, baking powder, salt, and water. The raw shrimps then need to be finely chopped, which is a fairly sticky operation. I let my mini food processor do that for me, being careful to process only briefly, to achieve a good mince but not a paste.
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When the shrimp and vegetables are stirred into the batter it’s ready to be turned into fritters, though it can wait several hours if necessary. When ready to cook, put ¼ inch of oil in a sauté pan, get it very hot, and drop in heaping tablespoonsful of batter. When you turn them, flatten them into little pancakes if necessary. As soon as both sides are nicely golden, drain them on paper towels.
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Then eat them right away! They’ll be crisp on the outside, soft on the inside, beautifully shrimp-flavored, and just lightly piquant. Lovely with a glass of white wine. Or two.
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Shrimp Pierre

At the southern tip of New Jersey, between the Atlantic Ocean and Delaware Bay, lies Cape May – famous for migratory birds and seafood. After a few days’ birding there recently (first venture away from home all year), consuming all the shellfish we could hold, we brought back oysters, scallops, clam chowder, and wild jumbo shrimp from the Gulf of Mexico.

While I love shrimp, I’d never done any cooking with jumbos before, so I searched my cookbooks for an uncomplicated recipe that would bring out the best in these oxymoronic crustaceans. I picked Shrimp Pierre, from the 1961 New York Times Cookbook by Craig Claiborne (the name perhaps reflecting his long-time relationship with Pierre Franey). In it, the shrimp are simply to be marinated and broiled.
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At about 15 to the pound, my shrimp weren’t exactly colossal, but big enough that I thought eight of them would do for a main course for two.
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The recipe told me to shell and devein them, but once shelled, the clean white flesh didn’t show a trace of black veins; so not to disfigure the shrimps with the necessary knife slashes, I left them intact.

Then I prepared their marinade, which contained chopped onion, garlic, parsley, and basil, with dry mustard, salt, pepper, lemon juice, and olive oil.
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The shrimps were to sit in the marinade at room temperature for “several hours.” Carelessly, I’d started my preparations late-ish in the afternoon, leaving them only two hours for marinating. I hoped that would be enough.
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The recipe’s first choice was to broil the shrimp over charcoal, for which I don’t have the capacity, so it had to be in the oven. I laid the shrimp on an unoiled baking sheet along with all the marinade components, shuffled the pieces around a little to moisten the pan, and broiled the shrimp four minutes on one side and two minutes on the other.
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The shrimps were very good – tender, sweet, rich in umami, and gently flavored by the marinade vegetables. In their simplicity, among the best shrimp I’ve ever eaten. Along with them on the dinner plates were surprisingly good out-of-season asparagus and excellent German Butterball heirloom potatoes, both of which went especially well with the shrimp.
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I only wish I’d given us more than four shrimp apiece!

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