These are two of the easiest dishes to put together except–they are same day, or if you want to stretch it, next day dishes because of the seafood. You could also buy frozen shrimp I guess, but you have to trust the sourcing. Clams you definitely need to lay eyes on before you buy. Easy to gather the rest of the ingredients and execute the recipes, but same day shopping kind of limits when you can schedule them during the week. No sweat on the weekend if, like me, that’s when you do most of your grocery shopping. I find myself doing both of these dishes at some point during football season, either after a long day of tailgating on campus and then coming home to the chair and my own personal facilities and big screen, or as a pre-game meal for away games. You can probably find everything you need to throw together the shrimp tacos at Rouse’s, I haven’t actually checked to see if that’s so, but everywhere else has pieces of what you need. The main thing that has made this easier in the last few years is the willingness of so many groceries to offer house made pico de gallo for sale in small containers. Once you take the chopping out, preparation is a breeze. I guess the main thing with shrimp tacos is zeroing in on your favorite pico, your favorite tortillas, and your favorite taco seasoning (if you want to use a package). I like Rouse’s for buying peeled shrimp because they offer a lot of sizes in clear, one pound plastic cotainers, and they do great volume so you really don’t have to worry that much about the freshness of the product. You can see how much liquid is at the bottom of each container and the shrimp themselves are easy to review. Sometimes, if you buy from a place that has trays of shrimp in the display cooler, they will have overstocked and you could get burned with some old, borderline shrimp. But once you have everything together, it’s simple. Melt a little butter, throw the shrimp in the pan with some seasoning, heat the tortillas, dress them with sour cream and pico, and stir the shrimp until they pink and curl. Enjoy!
So the shrimp are actually a difficult dish compared to steamed clams. You can always find littlenecks at Whole Foods, and while the clams there are two for a dollar, they are selects, which means the fishmonger examines each one to make sure it is undamaged and still closed (alive). The image above shows the recipe graphically. Wine, butter, clams. Covered pot, about ten minutes on high for the two dozen pictured. When I was at the Famous Enterprise Fish Company in Santa Monica, all the exhibition cooks got a free shift meal, and we would sometimes combine those into a huge pot of steamers with sourdough bread to dip in the juice. This was probably second best to pooling our meals and talking Ylda into making her chicken enchiladas. So good. But, that was then. You can pick up a loaf of sourdough (sliced or unsliced) at Whole Foods, or olive bread, or a rosemary and sea salt loaf, or whole grain baguettes–I’m sure you get the point. And if you have some leftover slider buns hanging around, that will work as well.
Calandro’s is the place for wine splits (they’ve got peeled shrimp as well) since they’ve got a big basket display and you can buy singles if you just need something to cook with rather than drink. Calandro’s also has an excellent selection of full sized bottles of wine if you would rather drink and let someone else cook your food.
