Recipe of the week, 1/17/11

The topic of conversation that comes up every time I hang out with my friends is our incessant wanting of Summer.

Sun, warmth, the beach, outside activities. Sounds so much better than the slip-and-slide sidewalks I encountered endlessly during my walk to work this morning.

To help with this wanting, I decided to go tropical with my meal this week with a copycat of Red Lobster’s Coconut Shrimp and Pina Colada dipping sauce.

Believe it or not, there are no Red Lobster’s in New England. Or Bob Evans. It’s not a tragedy but it was a funny thing to realize.

Back to the topic at hand, here’s my cast of characters for the sauce:



Just mix and refrigerate so it’s nice and chilled while you prepare the shrimp.

Then onto the main course:



I accidentally cut off my flour in the picture. I also forgot that all I have is wheat flour in my apartment, I didn’t notice a difference though.



I butterfly-cut my shrimp by cutting them from end to tail. This let the whole area of the shrimp be coated. Leaving the tails on. It also gave me a good excuse to use the awesome new knife set I just purchased from Gilt.

Then I prepared my batter stations:



Dip your shrimp (starting left to right) and I would recommend coating all of your shrimp before deep frying.



I had a lot of left over mixture after I dipped all of the shrimp, as you can see



I would recommend cutting the recipe by at least a 1/3rd. I would especially decrease the amount of breadcrumbs, but that’s just because I like more coconut and found that it seemed to have a hard time clinging onto the shrimp.

Once fried, plate with the pina colada dipping sauce

Nothing like a taste of summer while it’s snowing outside.