Did I Tell You About Those Shrimp?

My apologies for my laziness in updating. I've been too busy eating cereal and chips and ice cream in bed and wondering why I can't fit into my jeans anymore.

Finally, I have found a thouroughly satisfying shrimp dish besides my favorite Salt and Pepper Shrimp at Royal Capitol Seafood. A couple weekends ago my folks were in town and Eric took us to PJ's Oyster Bed, a New Orleans-style seafood house here in San Francisco. I was pretty skeptical ,as usual. The sad excuse for "New Orleans" style decor inside the place was so trendy and over the top (in a non-French-Quarter kind of way). And, as usual, I accurately predicted that the food would be mediocre. The gumbo was watery, the barbecue beans syrupy, the roasted mussels puny and the baby back ribs ridiculously lean. Everything was, as I smugly expected, sub-par; that is except for the sizzling skillet of Voo Doo shrimp which my mom immediately zeroed in on when we walked in the door.

These shrimp are roasted whole, shell-on, with cajun spices, cream, garlic, sherry, and worcestershire sauce in an iron skillet just long enough so that the shrimp come to you piping hot, juicy, and succulent. The fire-roasting ingeniously cooks the shrimp at a high, dry heat to keep all the sweet, shrimpy flavor in every savory morsel. Furthermore, the use of high heat ensures that the shrimp can be cooked quickly so that they don't come out overdone and rubbery.

Despite the fact that the shrimp themselves were perfectly done, the sauce they were roasted with was absolutely beautiful. One might think, as I did upon reading the description of the dish, that the shrimp would be covered in this overwhelmingly thick and rich cream sauce. Actually, quite the opposite was true. It seems that the cream, along with the sherry and juices from the shrimp, sort of caramelized as a consequence of the high heat. The product is this light, buttery substance (the fat from the cream) with little browned tidbits of garlic, spice, and the cheesy solids from the cream. Delicious! I know I use the word "nutty" to describe too many foods, but I really can't refrain from using it here because it's the only way to describe the special flavor of those golden crumbs of cream-spice-shrimp encrusting the hot skillet. After I had finished all my shrimp to dab in that wonderful reduction and the busboy tried to take the skillet away I frantically reached out, like some sort of starving, feral monkey, because I wanted to eat the sauce on my corn-on-the-cob and rice pilaf.

It's funny, because I'm usually far too anal-retentive to eat food with my hands, let alone peel the skin off of whole creatures. I hate having grubby hands and smelling like food, but these spicy, buttery, slightly smoky Voo Doo shrimp really put a spell on me. By the end of the meal, I was sucking my fingers clean as passersby stared through the window at the barbaric girl who had gotten butter all over her hands.