In addition to finding new ways to interconnect meals and stretch one main meat component into several different meals, we have been trying a few other ways to save on food costs. Our strategy lately has been to go through our freezer and cabinets to use up forgotten ingredients, as well as picking cheaper lunch materials at the grocery store. This is a bit of a challenge for us, because we like our food to be exciting and full of flavor, so Ramen and frozen dinners aren't our usual choices. We've discovered with a bit of ingenuity and a willingness to try new or unexpected combinations, it isn't all that difficult to make the most ordinary foods into something more extraordinary. Later down the line we'll cover how to make things as simple as hot dogs or even microwave hamburgers into full-fledged awesome entrees, but this week we're covering how to take very basic seafood and make a restaurant style dinner.
Digging through the fridge we came up with a half empty super cheap bottle of white wine, along with some frozen seafood we discovered while cleaning out the freezer. Some time back we had bought a couple of $1 vacuum packed seafood portions (tilapia, salmon, and scallops) to use for random lunches or whatever and promptly forgot about them, and we also had a bag of frozen shrimp leftover from when Jacob worked the Albertsons stand at the wine and food festival. None of these on their own make a great meal, and the $1 fish in particular needed a little something extra to be jazzed up and worth becoming an actual meal. Inspiration struck when I realized we still had a habanero pepper left from our upcoming pepper comparison guide.
Among the spiciest peppers that planet Earth has to offer, the habanero is not to be trifled with, as it packs a serious kick. In small quantities though, this fiery fruit offers a unique flavor and just enough heat to keep things interesting.
To start off with, I decided to do a marinade for the shrimp using this spicy recipe as my starting point. The marinade is started by chopping up green onion, garlic, half a habanero, and a handful of cilantro leaves (we'll cover how to use habaneros in a later blog, but it's worth mentioning here that you absolutely should either use gloves or hold one part of the pepper with a fork while cutting with a knife - do not touch this directly to your skin).
All the chopped ingredients are then placed in a bowl along with 1/2 to 3/4 cup of the white wine. Then we change up the flavors by adding in a variety of fun seasonings: parsley, sage, and thyme. To add some sour notes and complement the cilantro, I also squeezed in a bit of lemon juice.
Here the shrimp are being mixed into the marinade and getting ready to sit in the fridge for awhile to soak in the flavors. Silly me, I accidentally left the tails on and had to remove them later before cooking.
While the shrimp were soaking in all that fantastic spicy/sweet/tart flavor from the marinade, I started working on a sauce for the fish and scallops to use up the other half of the pepper. I found a recipe online from a habanero themed website specifically for seafood, but it absurdly called for TEN habaneros! Seeing as how I enjoy having taste buds, I failed to follow that part of the recipe :)
For my version, I chopped up half an onion, half a yellow banana pepper, half a serrano pepper, half a habanero, one chipotle pepper in adobo sauce (more details on using this fun canned pepper will come in our upcoming blog just on peppers) some garlic, and half a green apple.
Everything is pulsed together in the blender with the rest of the bottle of wine and some apple cider vinegar for a touch of the sweet. The sauce is heated up for a few minutes to fully release all the flavors, then refrigerated.
Once the marinade and sauce were ready, I peeled the tails off the shrimp and got down to the business of cooking. I wrapped the tilapia, salmon, and scallops into separate tin foil pouches and doused them liberally with the habanero-apple sauce. The shrimp were already flavorful enough from the marinade, so they went straight on the sheet and were baked along with the fish.
But how to tie it all together? Just shrimp and fish isn't exactly a meal - which is why it all went over pasta. We split up the fish portions into several pieces so everyone got a bit of everything, and then tossed the scallops and shrimp over spaghetti. All the flavors essentially made their own sauce for the pasta, but for a little added kick I spooned some more of the habanero-apple sauce onto the spaghetti. This would also work great with linguine or fettuccine.
There's lots more coming up on the horizon here at Six-Seven-Eight, so stay tuned for more tips on turning ordinary ingredients into extraordinary fare, how to use a range of different peppers, how to make cheesecake that your friends won't be able to get enough of, and our culinary "world tour!"
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